AS - Localization

[Thaq]

Hello to all, this is my first post

 

Still playing my first game of Aftershock and noticed that some labs (like Basic Implants Lab) seemed to run out of things to research. Since I didn't know if they would get more researchable projects I couldn't demolish them all while they were sitting there idle, eating my resources.

 

So I headed to the modding forums, unpacked gamedata with vfstool and wrote a perl script that generates a web page with all laboratories and technologies available to them. (Can be seen here).

 

However, the names for labs and technologies seem to differ from my (english) version of the game. I think this is because those data files contain unlocalized strings. I extracted LocalizationPack.vfs and it has pack.txt which I think contains the correct strings. However, it seems to be binary format.

 

Does anyone know how to convert it to readable (ASCII or UTF-8) format?

 

// Thaq

[Slaughter]

Hmm, maybe the official Aftermath modding tools has something for this? You can find them here. Nice site you got there by the way, maybe we could add it to StrategyCore at some point?

[Thaq]

Sure you can host it if you think it's worth it.

 

I'll see if I can get something out of pack.txt with those tools.

 

// Thaq

[Kret]

I didn't know if they would get more researchable projects I couldn't demolish them all while they were sitting there idle, eating my resources.

 

In the Demo, the labs seemed only to drain resources when actually researching something, so if they stand idle they only used up base space, no resources.

[uly]

However, the names for labs and technologies seem to differ from my (english) version of the game. I think this is because those data files contain unlocalized strings. I extracted LocalizationPack.vfs and it has pack.txt which I think contains the correct strings. However, it seems to be binary format.

That's strange. My pack.txt extracted as normal ascii, I had no problem editting it. Something wrong with the extractor maybe?

[deimios]

Well I usually binary check the files. It seems pack.txt has 2 bytes per character so that would be Unicode. No matter what it is it can be edited with any basic text editor. I used notepad.exe from winXP but it works well with other editors such as openoffice.org or MS office. Be mindful that using word processors on the file you might not be getting compatible files. One example is openoffice converting the " character to some other that looks the same but has a different code and as such is not parsed correctly by the game engine. I say look at the hex always before doing anything with the file.

 

If you manage to mod the pack.txt and the game will use it can you please detail everything you did? I haven't been able to get the game to accept my modded pack.txt.

[Thaq]

Well I usually binary check the files. It seems pack.txt has 2 bytes per character so that would be Unicode. No matter what it is it can be edited with any basic text editor.

 

Ah. I extracted the vfs files to my linux share and wrote the perl script in linux. When checking the file with less it complains about binary format and when I tried to check the filetype with 'file'-command it said "pack.txt: MPEG ADTS, layer I, v1, 128 kBits, Stereo"

 

Now that I opened it with notepad.exe from Windows, it shows normal text. I'll have to see if perl can read unicode and somehow convert it to iso8859-15, to show it on the web page.

 

If you manage to mod the pack.txt and the game will use it can you please detail everything you did? I haven't been able to get the game to accept my modded pack.txt.

 

Well, I'm not trying to modify the pack.txt, I just want to map the tech names to match the ones shown in game.

 

// Thaq

[deimios]

I see. Happy to have other linux users out there.

 

iconv --from-code=UTF-8 --to-code=ISO-8859-15 ./pack.txt > ./fixedpack.txt

 

Penguins should help eachother out right?

 

Cheers!