You can ask PawelS or TurboBeholder to do this. PawelS told me a few days ago that he is writing a program that will allow you to assign abilities yourself easy.

So yes, it is possible but you might have to be patient.

Yes, I'm working on a program that will allow you to assign 'modified' abilities to units, but not heroes, leaders or items (at least in the first version).

Will modification of Leader stats be available in the future? Units aren't really that crucial for me, since I can copy and paste either the Saint or Cardinal as the base (Noldorin Lord and Lady of the Havens respectively).

What do you mean by leader? (Hero or wizard, presumably?)

Sorry, I mean wizards (leaders were in AoW1).

Actually I was asking awegust, and hadn't noticed that you had put it too. I was just a little confused by awegust's question, as my impression was that you could already edit hero and wizard stats

You can edit hero/wizard stats, but you can't give them Healing II/III or other "modified" abilities.

Roger, I was using PawelS's terminology. By Leader I mean Wizard, though I've changed the term Wizard to Leader in my mod.

So where is the program to assign heal 2 etc?

I don't see such listed on http://www.pawels.neostrada.pl/download.htm

Its obviously possible since angels were assigned heal 2 at gold in 1.4. How was it done?

When making the patch, I used StructLook to modify the abilities, but now I have a program that can be used to do it. You can download a beta version of here:

http://www.pawels.neostrada.pl/unitedit2.zip

There is no documentation or help in this version, so you have to figure out how to use it yourself (or ask a question here).

Pawels,

thank you! This is a great tool, and pretty easy to use, it seems.

Pawels,

I have a question or two or three....

I want to create an Invoke Death type ability, but want it to be usesable only once. I used Strangle at level 30, which did huge damage and had a high attack, but often it would only do 4/5 damage and, of course, it could be used over and over again. Would it be possible to use the dominate ability with a strangle outcome key? So, the ability can only be used once? And is it possible to set a minimum damage value?

Secondly, is it possible to downgrade abilities using your utility? That is, in patch 1.4, the Satyr gets a low attack version of Dominate, but I can't see how to do that with the untility, as it doesn't allow attack values to be set only levels, and Dominate begins at level one (which is the usual 15 attack, I assume)...I had wanted to give the Hafling Gardener (Peasant) a lower attack version of taunt.

Lastly, do you plan on making a utility for items and heroes? I ask only because this one for units is great, and makes it easy for mod makers like me to change abilities. So, it's quite appreciated

Cheers,

bj

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I don't think it would work but you're free to experiment.

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No.

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Just set the level to 0 or a negative value. ATT changes by 2 per level, so level 0 is ATT -2, level -1 is ATT -4, and so on. For damaging abilities, DAM changes by 1 per level. Level 0 abilities don't work as medal upgrades, negative levels work normally.

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Maybe.

Is it possible to give a unit a heal or heal 2 etc that has more then one use a turn?

Quoted from PawelS:

Thanks, i did not stumbled upon this idea.

Quoted from PawelS:

Ah. .Level property is inherited from TAbility, so if somewhere it's interpreted as signed byte, for universal methods it's still unsigned, right ?.. And "greater" unsigned value prevails. Even "-1" (0xFF) is more than "-2" (0xFE), though anything >0. Interesting. I'll try this.

Quoted from TruePurple:

IMO - no. Ability Classes with "(Used)" (as opposed to "N/3") uses to mark this state bool flag (as opposed to counter). Multiple abilities with the same AbilityID are masked, as you know.
Healing with another ClassID, like BreathAttack (3/3) ?.. Will it heal or cause damage ? Dubious, but needs testing.

[This message has been edited by Turbo Beholder (edited 03-13-2006 @ 05:24 AM).]

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So what about abilties such as Strangle or Sabotage, which have both ATT and a DAM value? Will it give it +2 ATT and +1 DAM per level?

Yes.

Hi,
I wanted to add healing 2 to some units, but when I try to open the unitedit2 zip file, Winzip tells me the file is corrupted. Should I be using a different zip utility to do this?
Also,I installed the 1.4 patch, but did not see healing 2 on the saint/angel units. Does anyone know if this is normal? When I switch to the dwiggs 1.4 ruleset, those units have healing 2/3.

Any help would be appreciated!

The patch works fine as unlike in Dwiggs, the healing abilities are granted at levels.

http://aow2.heavengames.com/aowsm/Patchproject_14/UPatch.html#archon

What OS are you using? XP?

Im using windows '98. Didn't think that would matter though.
But what do I know!!

[This message has been edited by Dr_Effluvia (edited 10-02-2006 @ 00:06 AM).]

Try to download the file again. Sometimes IE doesn't download files properly. The unitedit2.zip file size should be 404 166 bytes.

Also, it's possible that the file can't be unpacked if you use a very old version of WinZip.

[This message has been edited by PawelS (edited 10-05-2006 @ 05:57 PM).]

Got it now thanks. The file was only 80K. Must have been the IE problem.
Nice tool BTW!

You can give items healing two or three trough hex editing. That way you can give heroes and wizards these abilities, but they can' learn it. I'm not sure how it worked anymore though. There is a topic about the subject somewhere around here.

I'm not going to hex edit-- with everything else I've got to do w/ the map and mod (not to mention IRL), I do not have the time to learn.

[This message has been edited by awegust (edited 10-05-2006 @ 11:19 AM).]

Is Elrond a hero or a wizard in your mod? Assigning "special" abilities to heroes is much easier than to wizards.

Hey PawelS.

Elrond is a wizard. If it's reallly hard to give a wizard special abilities, then I might make Healing III a property of Vilya, which he's supposed to wear.

There are, however, other heroes that need special things assigned. Aragorn needs Healing II, and I expect Leadership IV. Gandalf ought to have Leadership IV, as well. Need to give Legolas Marksmanship V (maybe even VI, if it works).

But still, I recall the thread that talks about Hex Editing. I can't make heads or tails of it-- Am I supposed to open the HeroRES file as a .txt document and start rooting around in there? Very alarming stuff.

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No, you need a hex editor, like this one. The hero and item libraries can be edited without problems, but the PFS files have CRC checksums, which must be updated after editing.

After all it's not that hard to give special abilities to wizards. I thought about editing the map files (which is hard because they are compressed), but there is an easier way - editing the WIZARDS.PFS file.

I can edit the abilities for you, just send me your HEROES.PFS (not HERORES unless you want to edit a starting ability of a hero race/class), WIZARDS.PFS and ITEMS.PFS files, and tell me which abilities to edit. Your project looks very interesting, so I'd be happy to help.

PawelS:

I'm so glad that you'll do that for me. This is a map (and certainly a whole MOD) that needs that sort of thing. Elrond is just the type of unit to show up on the battlefield and restore 28 hit points to a vitally damaged unit. ;-) He is the greatest healer of the Third Age, after all.

It'll take a little bit before I've got all the terrain totally settled as I like it, and I've still got some new decorative tiles to create. Many ruins, as well as some... interesting things for the player to see when they choose they're wizard.

I will send you the files closer to the date of release-- Kirky is hard at work creating animated unit ILBs for us, I'm hard at work acquiring terrain images for us. I expect it'll be the best LotR map/mod ever made for this game (and many others to boot).'

ps. I'll probably ask you to alter the hero library information. Orophin, Rumil, and Haldir all need Marksmanship V (and Galadriel might need Marksmanship V, too, just because she's the greatest Elf left in all the mortal world). Thranduil (Legolas's dad, the king of Mirkwood), might be the one guy who gets Marksmanship VI. Although who knows what I ask you to give the Balrog... I'll be in touch for sure. Thank you muchly.

[This message has been edited by awegust (edited 10-05-2006 @ 09:19 PM).]

Hi Pawels,

I was wondering if you will someday upgrade the Unit editor to edit wizards, heroes and items? There are many people like Awegust and me making a mod in which that editor would be... perfect, awesome, godly, sexy.... and so on

Learning (or hearing about, for that matter) hex editing make me wanna give up making my mod altogether... (and cry too) I'm not a programemr at all and even if someone could help out with hex, when modding it's better to implement ideas right away, instead of annoying someone else do that hex editing all the time.

I can convince my genius brother to help co-develop, but with his few spare time and no AoW experience, chances of him doing it alone, even with the source code you generously offered, are very slim.

If I could get a head start to tell him, what would be necessary to add heroes, wizard and items to the Unit editor? They are the same type of file, .pfs right? What else? I'll pass info to my brother so you can talk complex stuff that I wouldn't understand if you wanna do it privately you know my e-mail.

thanks!

I agree that an upgraded version of my Unit Editor would be extremely useful. It's one of the possible projects that I can undertake after finishing my currect "secret" project.

But if you want it faster, here is some info for your brother:

All AoW files have the same basic structure, so it's not very hard to add heroes/items/wizards to my program. An "item resource", for example, is different than a "unit resource", but one of its properties, the "ability list" should look the same. So, to add item editing, you should analyze the structure of an item file (ITEMS.PFS or an item library), and find a property in the "properties index" of an item that points to the ability list. The list can be edited in the same way as the unit ability list, so you don't have to change that part of my program (except for displaying unit race and name, which makes no sense for things like items).

All PFS files have CRC checksums, calculated in the same way as in UNITRES.PFS. Hero and item libaries have (afaik) exactly the same structure as HEROES.PFS and ITEMS.PFS, except that they don't have CRC checksums.

[This message has been edited by PawelS (edited 11-02-2006 @ 05:14 AM).]

"secret" project sounds cool Campaign Editor?

And yes, your Unit editor upgraded means the game could be modded as far as it can go, the rest is basically hard coded.

Sorry if you already gave me this info, but what program did you use to make the unit editor? I know my brother do his stuff with Visual Basic and other 2 or so other programs (which I'll have to ask) recently.

How are CRC checksums recalculated? Is this AoW related or something my brother would figure on his own?

About the actual abilities, I have an abilities.txt that probably came with you unit editor. Each ability has 4 numbers before it, so this would be the 'fields' my brother would have to loook for on those .pfs files?

If upgrading the editor can be done reasonably fast, I will try to coerce my brother into doing it starting holidays we have here. Any extra info post here.

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You are partially right...

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I'm using Borland C++ Builder.

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The program calculates the CRC when saving the changes to units, so a procedure that does it is in the source code.

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The numbers in ability.txt are the ability IDs. An ability "record" starts with a 4-byte ability type (class ID, the possible types are in ability_types.txt), then there is a "property index" (that looks like any other index in AoW files). Usually there are 2 properties: ability ID (4 bytes) and level (1 byte). The Walking ability has no ability ID (if a property is missing it's assumed to be 0, so the ability ID of Walking is 0). The enchantment abilities have some extra properties, they can be ignored by the program (there is no need to change them).

The most important thing in any AoW file structure is what I call an "index". Indexes can be nested, i.e. entries in an index can contain other indexes, and so on. So the ITEMS.PFS file structure looks like this:

* The main index is a list of items
* Every item has an index of its properties
* One of the properties is an ability list, which is an index of abilities
* Every ability in the list has an index of its properties (described above).

The structure of an index is as follows (maybe I already gave you this info, I don't remember):

Header (usually the class ID of the object)
N1 [1 byte] - number of 1-byte entries*
optionally: N2 [4 bytes] - number of 4-byte entries
repeated N1 times:
  ID [1 byte]
  OF [1 byte]
repeated N2 times:
  ID [4 bytes]
  OF [4 bytes]
data (N1+N2 entries)

*If N1 is >= 80h, the actual number of 1-byte entries is N1-80h, and N2 is used; otherwise N2 is not used.

ID is the entry ID.
OF is the offset to the entry (starting from the beginning of the data section).