Birth of the Federation

Im comfused, I am trying to test mod my game, to maybe realese my own mod on here. I am triying to see if I can get new pics of all the races in the game here what the deal is. For example I copied stbof.res and then use winzip and extracted it to a temp folder I opened my Adobe Photoshop CS3 and went to my temp folder and found the andorian.tga then I found a better andorian pic and saved it over the original andorian.tga, I made sure to save it as tga.

I opened up winzip, opend up stbof.res in the game dir., then added the new andorian.tga to the games stbof.res. Now when I go to play the game and see if it worked the game will still show the original andorian pic??? I don't understand why? When I have winzip open on the games stbof.res file and then open andorian.tga with photoshop, i see my new pic that I added, but it does not show up in the game. and anyone help me here. sometimes the game will crash.

I'm not sure if this applies to all the graphic files in the game or just ship textures, but try registering the graphics with the Ultimate editor.

Download the editor from the downloads section, then load it up (Click on the file called UE.jar). The Ultimate Editor needs Java installed in order to run. When it's loaded, go to file, then open, and open your modified stbof.res file. Next, click on edit, then graphics, and click on register textures. A load of files will flash up on the screen, and then a message will appear saying it is complete. Click on file, then save. Saving is considerably slower than registering the graphical files, so you'll have to wait a while. Once that's done, try loading up the game again.

Good luck.

save all tga files at 16bpp uncompressed

Don't use winzip, the newer versions currupt stbof.res, you can use winrar to do the job.

Registering textures is only for gif files. If your photo editing tool doesn't support 16-bit tga, you can try UE's tool to convert the image. Look under Util ->Graphics

When the game crashes check the crash.log file and post it if you're not sure what the problem is. I'm sure someone will try to help.

If you have problems adding files you can also use UE to do it, but don't add too many files (for instance installing large mods) or UE will run out of virtual memory.