Heavy DB Editing

[Aecian]

I'm new to the game, having purchased it just recently. I want to thank TM first and foremost for the game that they've provided. It's a wonderful game that I love to lose my time in.

I looked over much of the editor files and noticed that none of the data/db files were accessable. I went to work on those...

Disclaimer: I don't assume to say that this is accepted by TM. Nor do I promise that anything here will assume game stability. I've tested many of these to a point and they seem to be working just fine.

First and foremost... never worry about prestige or shortcomings on workers again. If you can find a place for 255 priests, you're a better COTN player than I am.

Unzip and place file in data/db folder.

I'll try to have some more things in the near future. Until then, happy... scribing and priesting and overlording.

[Agamemnus]

How do we unpack it? (the DB to text and back again) T'would be useful for all.

[Keith]

There are utils floating around out there that will extract the date from many types of game files. Searching the net for tools that work with the type of file extension you want to examine can turn something up.

The DDS files for the graphics in CotN can be read by a utility tool in Photoshop or you can get a program like DDSCoverter, the one I used for making my Red Temple files, and then edit the extracted TGA/BMP files with any graphics editor, then convert them back to DDS files.

Sometimes the files are simple zip files that have been renamed. The data pak files for the Call of Duty 2 demo are zip files that have been renamed. I used WinZip to extract the music files from the demo file.

[Azeem]

A fascinating modification.

[Keith]

Yes, those sorts of mods would be considered a cheat by purists. I still don't understand the to cheat in CotN. It's not that difficult to play.

Ah, Azeem, you edited that out of your reply while I was typing mine.

[Aecian]

Don't try to unpack it. It's manually hex edited. I don't have a utility or anything like that.

And, for the purists, I figure that you all have had years to play the game in the purest of states. Now we get to not worry about running out of stuff.

I'll do my best to get birth rates taken care of today.

[Keith]

The only problem with allowing people to have larger amounts of everything is that the game will soon get very laggy and will tend to crash. So it's almost not worth while. I pushed the Akhetaten mission pretty hard and it got to a point where the people were bearly moving on my P4 3Ghz system. The cpu just couldn't keep up after a while and the game tended to crash easily.

[Nakia]

Out of curiosity I downloaded the file, saved a copy of the db file and then installed the new file.

You can now have 255 elite workers right from the beginning. I have some training in various aspects of computers and so have a little knowledge of how much work goes into creating something like this.

However, I must say that I think it a bit overkill. Where is the challenge of building up prestige which is an important part of the game? I think it might be more useful if the increased numbers didn't kick in until the player had reached 200 prestige.

Also, Keith has a good point about the lagging.