Desperately want to remove motion dots for AP

[Citizen Brakensiek]

I have found a mod that supposedly removes the little white motion dots but the download link is dead. Really would appreciate it if someone can link me to a mod that removes the motion dots. Thanks.

[-XeNoN-]

I think you can edit them yourself in TBackgrounds.pck if im not mistaken.

[Citizen Brakensiek]

Unfortunately I don't have such a file in my installation folder and even if I did I wouldn't know what to do.

Am I supposed to ad the file myself?

[builder680]

You will need X3 Editor 2 to extract .pck files from .cat files. Extraction unpacks the .pck file into a .txt file.

Once you have the .txt file, any text editor will allow you to edit it, but of course you'd need to know what to change. Be aware that .cat files have a directory structure and you can move up and down within them, and make sure you are editing/extracting the one you need for your version of the game (\types for TC, \addon\types for AP). This caused me some grief with Tships a couple days ago, because I didn't notice it immediately. I wound up feeling pretty foolish about that... be certain you're playing with the right files.

You could also edit the file directly inside the .cat, but I find it easier to extract first, and edit the extracted file. This is so any mistakes are easily reverted (see below). Once you have made your desired changes, leave it as .txt in the \types folder for TC or the \addon\types folder for AP. You'll have to create that folder if you don't have one already. The game looks at files in \types before it begins to load cats, so any versions of files you leave there will be loaded instead of files in a cat.

I've never looked at the backgrounds file so I'm not sure what changes you'd make. You can experiment by changing numbers and loading the game.

If you don't like your changes, you can continue editing until you do... and if you find you just can't figure it out (as often happens to me) you can delete/remove the .txt file from types. The game will revert to loading the version from the highest numbered cat it's included in.

[Citizen Brakensiek]

Thank you! I looked that the TBackgrounds.pck file in T File Editor and didn't take me long at all to figure out what to edit. It is 'number of particles' that controls the amount of motion particles. After unpacking the .pck I opened the .txt file up and changed all values from 100 to 0, and just like that, no more motion particles. That was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Thanks again!

[builder680]

Glad you got it working as you wanted. Grats on your first mod.


Also, a small note for the future. Be aware that if you ever use another mod with its own TBackgrounds, you'll need to modify it in a similar way and get rid of your own (or the other mod's TBackgrounds won't work).