Help some dummies to create a mod, or the journey of a true noob trying to mod

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Kairos le voyageur
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri, 7. Dec 18, 22:29
x4

Help some dummies to create a mod, or the journey of a true noob trying to mod

Post by Kairos le voyageur » Thu, 15. Aug 19, 21:49

Hello, actually, I'm trying to collect the maximum information to create mods, actually my skills are pretty much low. The idea of this thread is to understand how modding work in general / then in X4-Foundations

Actually, even if my English is pretty average I'll deal with it... I found myself with the issue that every-game I played until now did not 100% fitted on what I was wondering. By playing X-4 more than 200hours. I maked the decision to start "Moding" the game on my free time then release the mods for the community. Because of the lack of skills and an average English (I wasn't good at school to be honest), I often found myself lock somewhere in the process of learning something so far away of what i do in real life.

My actual skills were :

( Coding : none), (Photoshop:Basic), (Experience in space games : Hi)

With this I started to look, for the easyiest coding language to learn wich I found to be Python... once a few tutorials to write hello world, a cookie generator, a simple calculator then a 2D game that sended me in a ton of tutorial... that's how I found my self trying to figure out how to code a game on a 3D engine named Godot to be honest it wasn't fun at all, because had to read tons of stuffs wich means nothing for me, saw a lot of videos of people doing great stuffs but going to fast, some bugs because of some packages/windows bugs... actually I have some "free time" and for me the idea of "free time" is doing stuff I like... anyway i stoped.

Then after 10 days without touching my computer I came back home then i downloaded X4 witch I unistalled because to be honest it was ugly to my eyes ( even if I respect the work done by egosoft until now ), then I tried to list everything wich maked me stop the game... even if as said I played more than 200hours. I tryed to target something witch looks simple to me, I remeber the first thing that litteraly made tears out of my eyes it's this texture of ... to be honest I don't know what it is maybe glass, maybe ugly blue laser wall, or... some random generic asset taken from a 1999 game x) i'm talking about this :

Image

The idea was to replace this texture or model by something more ... shiny especialy because i Have a Big graphical card... and i'd like to truly enjoy it... anyway, then i started to look if they were some existing mods for this witch was not existing. ok. then I started to look here : viewtopic.php?t=402452

Then I found a little extracting tool named : XRCatToolGUI, witch I found Here : https://www.egosoft.com/download/x_rebi ... wnload=589

But in the How to create a mod I found nothing about replacing a model, then I started to extract all the (.cat) files in the folder directory of X4_Foundation folder In a diferent folder where I can start dig in the games files ( donno maybe I thought some genius light will come to my eyes and tells me how to easily do everything I wanted... that's how I found my self with this :

Image

Then I tryed to search something called textures or assets :

Image

then later by trying to open folders I found this :

Image

Remember I don't Know what my item is, maybe it's a fence, maybe it's a glass... then while I was diging I found a lot of extentions there Is a list of them :

.XSM = Maybe animation don't know how to use it
.XPM = generaly used by emotes in games files but i dont know how to open it too
.XAC = ?
.GZ = 7Zip extractor ? It seems that a lot of textures finish with this
.XMF = ?
_Data = ?
_Macro = ?
.Sig = Don't know what is this because they are a lot of .sig and generaly I can find many files with the same name without the .sig
.Ogg = Opened by VLC or any audio reader with the right codecs
.Xml = Opened by text editor or notepad ++
.Bgf = ?
.Bsg = ?
.dae = ?
.AMW = ?
.ogl = ?

As you can see They are a lot of extension names witch i suppose are opened by different application witch I don't know. for what I want to do ( change a texture in game ) I try to find the .gz then open it with 7z ... and actually I don't know how to go further this step because I find my self with a file with no extention name :

Image

So maybe if some experimented modders can help me, I'll try to continue feeding this post with everything I learn about how to mod. I think It maybe usefull for people like me who don't know where to start modding. i trully believe if we can mod this game and make a great community around this, it can be fun for everyone

thanks per advance for your help.

teleportationwars
Posts: 158
Joined: Fri, 12. Jul 19, 14:03

Re: Help some dummies to create a mod, or the journey of a true noob trying to mod

Post by teleportationwars » Thu, 15. Aug 19, 22:50

You need an editor to look through the insides of the files in you extraction. The file name is referenced in material_library.xml. You will have to use xpath to replace it. The xml extensions for vscode will usually create acceptable xpath for you.

h2odragon3
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue, 9. Apr 19, 15:43
x4

Re: Help some dummies to create a mod, or the journey of a true noob trying to mod

Post by h2odragon3 » Thu, 15. Aug 19, 23:00

Once you've started finding your feet in the filesystem, you might find some useful info at https://github.com/h2odragon/x4f-notes

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