pretenders .2h file specification

[Herode]

Ha, here is a screen of the mystery pretender editor.


Unfortunately, I can't find what are the missing dlls for you, Ich...

[lch]

Ah, so it is a different program, but has the same functionality like the catgod program, plus editing and saving your pretender god. This is the first time I ever saw anything about this, though. It seems to me like you're the only person knowing it.

I guess there are a number of people that would be interested in a tool like this. To edit pretender gods is really a feature that the game is missing. Fun trivia: did you know that there's code inside the game to load and edit pretender gods that you already made? It's just not active. Maybe it's from Dom:PPP days and never got included again?

[QXel]

Hum ...

Made some tests ...

Apologies: catgod works perfectly, even with 3.17, at the only condition you use it as it must be used.
In others words: don't be AS DUMB AS ME and DON'T try to view 2h files in another directory than ...\savedgames\newlords, AS IT IS SAID!

In fact, I'll try to view pretenders files in a running game subdirectory, and THEN I have something completly different as output, like KJHKHG00000fdh etc. as name, no scale and insane magic: Fire 127 Water 159 and so!!!

Well, to bad: my intentionnaly main use of it was to view my unsaved-just-for-this-game created pretenders ...

Seems that file formats are differents.

Herode: this program looks cool. What its name exactly and where have you find it (i.e. the exact thread: I've made a research on the mod forum, but since the research function isn't very 'aware', I didn't find anything ...)?

QXel

[Evil Dave]

QXel said:
In fact, I'll try to view pretenders files in a running game subdirectory, and THEN I have something completly different as output, like KJHKHG00000fdh etc. as name, no scale and insane magic: Fire 127 Water 159 and so!!!

Well, to bad: my intentionnaly main use of it was to view my unsaved-just-for-this-game created pretenders ...

Seems that file formats are differents.

Different file format for temporary pretenders? Well, now that's interesting. Thanks for finding this, QXel! [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon09.gif[/img]

In case anybody's curious, I think I'll have time to update catgod for Dom3.17 this weekend. Ich found and fixed some bugs, so I need to do a little more work than usual for a new version. I gotta merge in Ich's changes and check to see if there's anything else I missed.

[lch]

Evil Dave said:
Different file format for temporary pretenders? Well, now that's interesting. Thanks for finding this, QXel! [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon09.gif[/img]

He's talking about *.2h / *.trn files after the games have started. Then catgod attempts to read the files, but can't find the stuff because the pretender data is stored elsewhere.

[lch]

Herode said:
Unfortunately, I can't find what are the missing dlls for you, Ich...

Okay, I took another stab at this. It turned out that the problem wasn't missing DLL files. That thing is just throwing around exceptions like crazy. And there is no failure recovery in it at all. I ran the program in Microsoft's CLR Debugger and the first thing I saw was that it tried to open the directory "\Program Files\Dominions3\savedgames\newlords". Since I don't have that directory, the execution failed. Since I didn't feel like renaming / moving my Dom3 installation folder, I hex-edited the program to point to my real game folder instead. Then I could use the program successfully. Another solution would have been to create the directory structure with empty dirs, then launch and try to use the "Change Dir" button to go to the real game dir. But that is restricted to your (localized) Program Files folder and if you abort, it crashes again. Hah! Not very user-friendly, that program.

First of all, this is no God Editor. Maybe it meant to become one, but this has only display functionality. It even is titled "Dom3 Pretender Viewer". The up/down buttons are non-functional, and from decompiling the MSIL code I could see that there is no code in it to save files. And the code to load files is kind of funny, too. Very... inventive.

Other things I learned: The programmer is named Tom, and his girlfriend is probably named Kel. Or those are siblings.

Still, this program doesn't have much more than what catgod has, besides the pretender cost calculation, and since it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore, you better use Evil Dave's catgod instead, which is still being updated (soon).

[Frostmourne27]

lch said:
Fun trivia: did you know that there's code inside the game to load and edit pretender gods that you already made? It's just not active. Maybe it's from Dom:PPP days and never got included again?

Well, since Dom3 has pretender saving and loading, if you use the pretender creator in game tools, I suspect that it probably isn't just latent code. Unless it pertains to editing pretenders mid-game, or something. But since the newlords files aren't checked after a game starts, that would seems pointless.

[JimMorrison]

Frostmourne27 said:

Well, since Dom3 has pretender saving and loading, if you use the pretender creator in game tools, I suspect that it probably isn't just latent code. Unless it pertains to editing pretenders mid-game, or something. But since the newlords files aren't checked after a game starts, that would seems pointless.

Except that the Pretender Creator Tool only saves, you cannot load and modify a pretender file that you previously made through the tool.

I'd really like if you could modify saved pretenders..... Testing one and then finding you want to make ONE change, it's frustrating.

[lch]

JimMorrison said:
Except that the Pretender Creator Tool only saves, you cannot load and modify a pretender file that you previously made through the tool.

I'd really like if you could modify saved pretenders..... Testing one and then finding you want to make ONE change, it's frustrating.

As I wrote before: The functionality is already in there in the game. But the GUI offers no way of accessing it that way.

[Tifone]

May I resurrect the thread to ask where to find Herode's so nice program??