Mods

[whukid]

Hello Friends from Steel Fury and Achtung Panzer!

Today, I was introduced to Steel Armor; Blaze of War for the first time. My love for Steel Fury and Battlefield 3 has been surpassed, to say the least.

The scenario's are amazing, however I found them to be alittle dull compared to some Modern day Armored battles. Has anyone come across a Mission Editor or Map Editor? Maybe I've jumped the gun alittle, but I'm ready for some "Golan Heights" scenarios using the tanks already in the game, such as the M-60 and Centurion.

[whukid]

I take everyone's silence as a No

I've been poking around the game files abit, and it seems everything's been encoded and "Flattened". Not to fear though! Steel Armor came with a Data unpacker! It's alot like the Steel Fury version, just without JSMGE and it's a bit more tedious. After you unpack the files, you need to convert them using the "atf2dds" file. This is how it works;

STEP 1:
go to Steel Armor/docs


STEP 2
Open the "Modworks Folder"


STEP 3
Open "Flatwork" folder and select the "unflat.cmd" file


STEP 4
Once opened, a Dialogue box will appear. Go to Steel Armor/Data/mtc80/shared/packed_files and pick a file to open


STEP 5
Once unloaded, they'll look kind've like this. Now you're good to open the folders and poke around abit. As you'll notice, none of the files are useable. Unloading these will be covered in the next topic. It's not hard

[whukid]

Unlocking Texture and Mesh files
now that we've unlocked the folders, its time to face the actual files we want to edit. This will cover opening the ".texture" files and turning them to a ".dds" file. For Mesh files, just use the "model_view.cmd" file in the "asets" folder and open the files marked ".MESH" in the "go[something]" folders. JUST FOR POINTERS: I recommend unpacking ALL of the folders and copying them to another location as a backup! DO NOT OVERWRITE THE ORIGINAL GAME FILES UNLESS YOU'VE CREATED A BACKUP!!!!

STEP 1
Now that you've unpacked the folders, its time to take the plunge and look around inside. NOTE*** I tried opening these with GIMP before using the unpacker tool, so that's why you see the GIMP icon appear in the thumbnail. Don't do the same it'll be much easier to find the files you've converted



STEP 2
Open a separate "My computer" explorer dialogue and find the "Steel Armor/docs/modworks" folder. Last time, you used the "Flatwork" folder to decompress the files in the Data folder. Now we're going to convert them so they're Editable.


STEP 3
open the "atf2dds.cmd" file. At first, I thought it would be the "tex_changer" thing, but it doesn't seem to have a purpose. 


STEP 4
As you can see, a Dialogue box appears. Go to the Steel Armor/data/mtc80/shared/packed_data and to a "Tex" folder of your choice. For the purpose of the tutorial, I'll be opening the Tex_misc folder and converting the Unit Insignia's. If you want to edit skins, open the "tex_techn" folder.


STEP 5
Open the file desired. Just for a point of reference, the "Bump" files aren't the ones you want to open. Use the "reg" or "trans" files to edit things like vehicles or insignia's.


STEP 6
Remember when I told you to open a separate "my computer" dialogue? This is where it comes in handy. Open the original "My computer" and go to the folder with the files we just converted. Because I already tried to open the ".Texture" files with GIMP, they're marked with the icon. Since you followed a tutorial, you probably didn't make the same mistake and can easily identify the files. Either way, they'll be identifiable by the ".dds" on the end. I just used the Search function to easily locate them

[andrey12345]

That's all there is and even more in the manual

Manual "how to work with mod utils" in English:
http://files.mail.ru/OV7VU8

Editor of polygons (in terms of SF) is not present in the game bundle and in the near future will not be. His campaign on an existing landscape can create, but the truth is not very convenient.

[Flashburn]

How do you set up the mission/campaign editor?  All the defaults are for operation star.  So far I have not been able to get it to open any of the blaze of war maps. 

[andrey12345]

How do you set up the mission/campaign editor?  All the defaults are for operation star.  So far I have not been able to get it to open any of the blaze of war maps. 

Yes, I'm sorry, I forgot about it. In the configuration file when creating a project <camp name>.engcfg2 in a polygon[ s ] = ... and camp_area[a] = ... need to specify the area.

polygon: camp_area
polygons\H_Helmand\H_Helmand.cfgpack 1, 2, 6, 4
polygons\S_Susangerd\S_Susangerd.cfgpack 1, 2, 6, 4
polygons\C_Cuanavale\C_Cuanavale.cfgpack 2, 1, 4, 6

May be wait for patch? After its release, we will try to translate the manual. And then there are still many things that will be needed. And here I looked, that there is in English translators incorrectly translated blanks template for the operation.

[Flashburn]

Ok, I guess ill put my waiting hat on