CoH Modder

[_NOPE_]

2 hours ago, CrankyOldMage said:

What?

Your post made no sense to me. If you're referring to the Modder tool, you DON'T have to register anything, I NEVER send out emails, and I have no idea why the program may not be starting, as you've provided no error messages.

 

Basically, my response was to my inability to comprehend the meaning of your post in any way.

[CrankyOldMage]

34 minutes ago, The Philotic Knight said:

Your post made no sense to me. If you're referring to the Modder tool, you DON'T have to register anything, I NEVER send out emails, and I have no idea why the program may not be starting, as you've provided no error messages.

 

Basically, my response was to my inability to comprehend the meaning of your post in any way.

Well I downloaded the modder program. I click on it and nothing happens. 

[_NOPE_]

1 hour ago, CrankyOldMage said:

Well I downloaded the modder program. I click on it and nothing happens. 

1. What is your Operating System?
2. What is your system architecture?  (x86 or x64)?
3. Are you running any anti-virus or internet security programs? If so, they could be silently stopping the program without notification. Try disabling them temporally, and then trying again.
4. If you're running Windows, please send me a few screenshots of ALL of the currently running processes from Task Manager IMMEDIATELY after trying to start the program.

 

We can go from there. 

[Greenmantle]

On 8/6/2020 at 11:15 AM, The Philotic Knight said:

Here's the first one - VidiotMaps I23 Map Pack

 

When I click on this link I get "Oops! That page can’t be found."

[_NOPE_]

9 hours ago, Greenmantle said:

 

When I click on this link I get "Oops! That page can’t be found."

Thanks for notifying me. I've removed the link from 10 months ago. You can install the map pack through the main program's interface, no external files needed:

 

http://www.cityofplayers.com/coh-modder/

 

[Greenmantle]

Thanks and awesome job!  Having updated maps are a huge quality of life upgrade in game.

[Sofiel]

When I launch COH Modder I get several errors. 

   

Any ideas as to what I've done wrong? Is this something that has happened before?

[WanderingAries]

5 hours ago, Sofiel said:

When I launch COH Modder I get several errors. 

"Extended Passive Mode"   

Any ideas as to what I've done wrong? Is this something that has happened before?

 

Sounds like something server side, but that's a loose guess. If you haven't already, I'd try to relaunch it or redownload it.

[BearWolfJester]

On 7/13/2021 at 10:51 PM, WanderingAries said:

 

Sounds like something server side, but that's a loose guess. If you haven't already, I'd try to relaunch it or redownload it.

Good evening, I came here for this same issue. I have closed and relaunched multiple times, and I even tried downloading and reinstalling again. Still get the exact same errors.

 

It looks like a server side issue, but I'm not sure who to contact to look into that.

[_NOPE_]

1 hour ago, BearWolfJester said:

It looks like a server side issue, but I'm not sure who to contact to look into that.

Yeah, I know right? I mean what moron made this stupid thing???

[_NOPE_]

On 7/13/2021 at 5:05 PM, Sofiel said:

When I launch COH Modder I get several errors. 

   

Any ideas as to what I've done wrong? Is this something that has happened before?

Here, LMGTFY...

 

Have you checked the mentioned ports "59591" and "59581" on your local network and firewall to make sure that they are open ports? Because it appears that they are being blocked, sir or ma'am.

 

I just tested it on my system, installing a brand new mod onto a brand new install... and it appeared to work fine, from what I can see.

[WanderingAries]

4 hours ago, The Philotic Knight said:

Yeah, I know right? I mean what moron made this stupid thing???

 

[Crystal Dragon]

Hey PK? Thanks for the modder tool this really helps.

[DarkWings]

Been playing for a while but I'm starting to enter the mod scene. I installed some mods just fine, so I search for some mods on the forum and came across this one:

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/23701-titanman-animation-sprite-ui-texture-mod-tutorial/?tab=comments#comment-285551

But I can't install it. I used the browse for mod to install, choose the mod I just downloaded above (Login screen UI Mod) but when I go back to CoH Modder, it says "Unable to locate mod." Prehaps it's not formatted for the program? This is on Windows 10

 

Edited July 31, 2021 by DarkWings

[_NOPE_]

Yeah @DarkWings I think in the next version I'll just tale that Load Mod option out, it's been more trouble than its worth. I kind of expected people to make mod files that they'd save and share, but I suppose with also adding in my centralized repository for mod downloading, I kind of killed the need for that functionality. 

 

That mod isn't setup for CoH Modder. Maybe I'll convert it when I have more time.

[Herotu]

On 6/5/2021 at 1:02 AM, CrankyOldMage said:

Well I downloaded the modder program. I click on it and nothing happens. 

Are there batteries in your mouse? Are they flat?

[ChronicSpaceman]

Hollo! I'm a modder for Star Wars JFO, KOTOR and a few other games, specifically character models. I've been a fan of CoH since its release and have recently learned to mod. I'm here to basically find out if there's ANY possible way I can get involved in helping to mod and add extra costume options to the game. I am a HUGE fan for this game and want to contribute to its success any way that I can. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

-ChronicSpaceMan-

[_NOPE_]

1 hour ago, ChronicSpaceman said:

Hollo! I'm a modder for Star Wars JFO, KOTOR and a few other games, specifically character models. I've been a fan of CoH since its release and have recently learned to mod. I'm here to basically find out if there's ANY possible way I can get involved in helping to mod and add extra costume options to the game. I am a HUGE fan for this game and want to contribute to its success any way that I can. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

-ChronicSpaceMan-

 

Hello @ChronicSpaceman, and welcome (I hope!) to the CoH Modding community! I myself am not really much of a modder, as I don't have any kind of artistic skills. I'm a code monkey, so I spend my time looking at 1s and 0s and trying to figure out how to make them work for people. My CoH Modder Tool (http://www.cityofplayers.com/coh-modder/) is merely a platform for easy mod installation and distribution. It doesn't actually help anyone CREATE mods, just package them and send them out into the world where others can make use of them.

 

Here's my long overall summary of how CoH Modding works. There's two main types of modding - server modding, and client modding. To do server modding, well... you have to learn how to run your own server. I can't help you at all there, except point you over to the fine people at Ourodev, who are in the (perpetual it seems) process of figuring out the ancient spaghetti code of how Cryptic's CoH engine works.

 

What I've been working on so far have all been client mods, mods that affect how you see and hear the game world. And any mod that you make to your client only affects your client, and nobody else's (unless they've made the same mod to their system). The primary method to create such mods is by replacing in-game assets with your own customized assets. The original CoH game developers did that (perhaps by accident, perhaps by design) by opening up the /data subdirectory. If you dig through the game code, you can find all of the references to graphics and sounds... eventually. But, as I said earlier, it's spaghetti code, and the challenge is trying to figure out WHICH assets to replace, and WHERE to put them in you local /data directory to make any specific change to what you see and hear in the game world. And that knowledge is all "hidden" within the game's source code (which you can find on Ourodev's site... somewhere).

 

I have tried to make this as simple as possible by writing a couple of text parsing programs that sift through the game's code and ".def" files (where most of those asset references are stored - think of it like an "Access" database, a collection of files that store the resource link data) and try to centralize that information as much as possible. From my efforts, I created the Rosetta Stone for sound references, and the Visual Rosetta Stone for graphics references. Now the big caveat with these Excel files is that they are the result of a "snapshot in time" of the game's files as of the moment of Leandro's original release of the game code. And most of those references are fine, and will work... except for anything added into the system by the Homecoming team.

 

Why's that? Because nobody's yet created a single consistent way to extract client side data from their original formats into the final original source files. The closest to have come to this that I've seen so far is @therealtitanman who made a pretty good guide on how to create mods for powers' particle effects. Here's the basic steps that you have to perform to successfully make a client side mod of the game:

 

1. Extract the pigg files in your game's client directory. I believe for CoH Homecoming the default is "C:\Games\Homecoming\assets\" and all of it's subdirectories. I believe the most current and up to date tool for doing this is Ourodev's Piglet, which you have to sign up for an account with them to access the code to compile your own copy. Or, if you want to trust me, here's a link to a compiled version of the 64 bit binary and required libraries.
2. Poke around all of those dePigged directories and subdirectories and try to figure out where the asset you want to change is located at. You can use my Rosetta Stones listed above if you wish to try to help narrow down your search, but really it's kind of trial, error, and a whole lot of digging and guessing to try to figure out which assets to replace. For sounds, everything will be under the "..\Data\sound\ogg\" folder. For graphics... well, honestly, they could be anywhere in there. There's different locations for different kinds of graphics files. "..\Data\texture_library\" is a big one though to get you started.
3. If you want to modify or change a sound in the game, you can stop here. It's as simple as finding the sound file that you want to modify, modify it, and then place it in your client's /data directory in the SAME RELATIVE PATH that you found the sound file in for testing. By default, that's "C:\Games\Homecoming\data\". So, for one example, to replace the "glowie" sound of a mission objective with something else, put your modified .ogg file at this location (by default): "C:\Games\Homecoming\Data\sound\ogg\FrontEnd\Objective_loop.ogg". When you run the game the next time, the game will find this asset, and use it to replace the default asset for this sound.
4. HOWEVER, if it's graphics you want to replace, there's a few extra steps. Graphics (mostly) come in the form of ".texture" files, which are basically metadata files that contain some header information only useful to programmers, along with the actual binary code of the source image file itself embedded inside the texture file. To assist with that part, I created the DeTexturizer program to let people "DeTexturize" (think "UnZip" like WinZip), and "ReTexturize" a texture file. This should export the file to its original source file into the same directory as the .texture file. From there, you can then modify it (as @therealtitanman shows in his guide), save the modified file, then "ReTexturize" the file and place it in the appropriate place in your /data directory. For one example, to replace the Tier 3 "Rage" inspiration with your own modified one, you'd find the dePigged file "texture_library\GUI\Icons\Inspirations\Inspiration_Damage_Lvl_3.texture", you'd DeTexturize it, modify the file in your favorite graphics program, save it, ReTexturize it, then save the resulting file to the (by default) "C:\Games\Homecoming\data\texture_library\GUI\Icons\Inspirations\Inspiration_Damage_Lvl_3.texture" location.

Now, some files are more complicated, like "geo" files that affect the world's geometry itself... I haven't gone that road to figure that one out. If you go down that route, you're on your own, you'll be a trailblazer!

 

Anyways, once you're happy with your game mod, you can then use my CoH Modder program to package it up into a mod file and put it on my server, where anyone else that uses CoH Modder can get at it and install it into their CoH installation!

 

That's the most concise summary I can give right now of the entire CoH Modding scene, for you and anyone else reading that might be interested in getting into modding.

 

[DarkWings]

On 8/5/2021 at 11:49 AM, The Philotic Knight said:

Extract the pigg files in your game's client directory. I believe for CoH Homecoming the default is "C:\Games\Homecoming\assets\" and all of it's subdirectories. I believe the most current and up to date tool for doing this is Ourodev's Piglet, which you have to sign up for an account with them to access the code to compile your own copy. Or, if you want to trust me, here's a link to a compiled version of the 64 bit binary and required libraries.

I'm grateful for this post but just so you know your compiled version doesn't work, I got three warnings, something about three .dll files missing.

Edited August 6, 2021 by DarkWings

[_NOPE_]

@DarkWings can you please drop into this thread a screenshot of the three errors?

 

I suspect that it's missing external C++ libraries that are required. And if you don't have those libraries, the program wouldn't run whether you tried to run my compile, or if you compiled it yourself.

 

As a programmer, I probably already have virtually EVERY standard library installed on my system, which may explain why I didn't get the errors.

Edited August 6, 2021 by The Philotic Knight

[WanderingAries]

On 8/5/2021 at 5:25 AM, ChronicSpaceman said:

Hollo! I'm a modder for Star Wars JFO, KOTOR and a few other games, specifically character models. I've been a fan of CoH since its release and have recently learned to mod. I'm here to basically find out if there's ANY possible way I can get involved in helping to mod and add extra costume options to the game. I am a HUGE fan for this game and want to contribute to its success any way that I can. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

-ChronicSpaceMan-

 

IDK the names of the threads off-hand, but there are Definitely some here on the boards that discuss how to contribute to the game's actual assets as well (as opposed to just manual mods).

[DarkWings]

22 hours ago, The Philotic Knight said:

@DarkWings can you please drop into this thread a screenshot of the three errors?

 

I suspect that it's missing external C++ libraries that are required. And if you don't have those libraries, the program wouldn't run whether you tried to run my compile, or if you compiled it yourself.

 

As a programmer, I probably already have virtually EVERY standard library installed on my system, which may explain why I didn't get the errors.

 

 

 

[_NOPE_]

@DarkWings just as I suspected. 

 

Install this, and Piglet should start working for you:

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145

 

[DarkWings]

21 hours ago, The Philotic Knight said:

@DarkWings just as I suspected. 

 

Install this, and Piglet should start working for you:

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145

 

I actually have a similar version installed but it's the 2015-2019 version, I can't install the one you linked to as it says there is another version of the product installed. I downloaded the 2012 one instead but I still get the same errors. Gonna try uninstalling both and using the one you linked.

 

EDIT: I uninstalled both and installed the one you linked but that didn't work either, so I reverted back to the 2015-2019 version. Perhaps I'm missing Visual Studio 2019, it's a prerequisite in that Ourodev link.

Edited August 8, 2021 by DarkWings

[Zed]

Hello

 

@The Philotic Knight, is there a way to check for mods updates without uninstalling and deleting them first ? That would be great.
This may or may not have changed in between i got CoH Modder, think i got it the first time you mentioned it here and never updated since.

Thank you 😃