User talk:Gwyrgyn

Welcome
Hi, welcome to ! Thanks for your edit to the File:IconHRFrostDam.jpg page.

Please leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! Triskelli (talk) 18:47, April 8, 2014 (UTC)

Hi i have been reading the AoW3 thread you have been posting in and it seems that you have found how to unpack the data files? Since Gerblyn said "The data is essentially already in your hands, so we don't mind." can you please tell us the method you manage to get the files and or upload/link the tools we need? there are a few of us at AoWHeaven that are interested in modding and would be happy if you gave us the tools.

162.156.21.136 20:51, April 8, 2014 (UTC)

Unfortuantely there are a bunch of different types of data files and I haven't figured out how to parse the most important ones. But there are two fairly obvious ones:

- The language pack files. They are in .8ld format, which was the same used in Overlord. I wrote a C# app to decrypt them and write them out to various formats (including the wikimedia format). I could provide the app but I'm still working on it constantly so it might not be too helpful by itself.

- The interface files are all stored as .swf, simple Shockwave Flash. There are a bunch of tools to extract data from these, although I have yet to find one that is particularly good and not painful to batch extract from.

That leaves a few more files formats I haven't managed to break into yet. *.rpk and .clb files seem to be where most of the game data is stored, including unit definitions, most of the game's art assets, and so on. The data inside of them is frequently in plain text, appearing to be pointers and the like. But there are also places where it seems obvious that the data is either encrypted or compressed. For example, looking in SkillsWaterIcons.clb is it quite obvious that there is a .dds file inside, but the header appears to be missing or changed.

I've been looking at the .rpk and .clb files for a while now, but cracking datafiles isn't really a thing I do a lot of, so I'm sort of at a loss as to how to continue at the moment. I've been attempting to, instead, attach to the .exe process and extract the data after it has been loaded, but I'm getting very limited results thus far.

Gwyrgyn (talk) 01:06, April 9, 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for explain where you have gotten the info. On the subject of the .rpk files someone on the offical AoW3 forums has made a python script that parse the unit data. Its very raw as an application right now but he left it as .py files so you can read the source code and has some comments on how the data is structured in the .rpk files. http://ageofwonders.com/forums/topic/modding-mad-statter/

162.156.21.136 05:15, April 10, 2014 (UTC)