Re: What Filetype do MOD's use
I've been looking into this, and this is what I dug up so far...
The basics is, you go to your Documents folder, open the "CnCRemastered" folder in there, go to "Mods", and pick your game ("Tiberian_Dawn" or "Red_Alert")
In the correct folder, make a folder for your mod, and name it something identifiable, like, say, "BuildableAnts"
Now, under that you'll need 2 things: a "ccmod.json" file, and a "data" folder.
The "ccmod.json" file is plain text. Note that Windows hides file extensions by default, so if that is true on your system, and you just right click to create a "new text file", the file will have a hidden ".txt" at the end of the name that won't be shown to you, meaning the real name of the file will be "ccmod.json.txt", and then the mod won't work. Look up online how to enable file extensions, and you can trim off that extra part to ensure the name of the file is really "ccmod.json".
This is what is expected inside it:
{
"name": "My Mod Name",
"description": "This does mod stuff.",
"author": "Me",
"load_order": 2,
"version_high": 1,
"version_low": 0,
"game_type": "RA"
}
In that, edit the name, description, and author. For "game_type", you need "TD" for C&C1, and "RA" for Red Alert. The "version_high" and "version_low" create the version number of your mod; the example settings above would create version number "1.0". So you can increase that if you update the mod.
The "load_order" is a bit special; normally this is put on 1 for mods that change the core DLL (more on that later), and 2 for mods that only change assets. This basically means core engine changes take precedence over asset mods, since you can obviously only have one core gameplay engine dll file. Asset mods can be stacked on that.
Note, "rules.ini" mods are a bit of an odd case here; they change core behaviour but are not a dll. Likewise , there are GlyphX xml files that apply global data, like the lists of objects it has graphics for. If any of these are modified , I'd advise putting the "load_order" to 1.
The "data" folder is where all your mod assets will be put. For replacing existing assets, and for seeing how the internal assets are structured, I advise you to download OS Big Editor:
https://www.ppmsite.com/osbigeditorinfo/
This program can open all the .meg files in the "data" sub-folder in the game's install folder. Once you open a file there, you will see all assets internally are in directory trees that start with a "data" folder. Well, this is the same "data" root you made in your mod folder. So just build on that, as indicated in the .meg files. If you extract multiple assets from OS Big Editor (select them in the tree, then go to Edit -> Extract), and select the root folder of your mod (not the "data" one, the one below that) you'll see OS Big Editor will create the entire folders tree for you, which is really handy.
You don't need to create .meg files in your mod folder, by the way. Just use the same directory structure as the one inside the .meg files, and the game will find the assets.
The graphical assets in the .meg files use two formats... well, three, actually, if you distinguish internal types.
The first is 32-bit .tga files, used for all structures and units, and icons too I think. I haven't really looked into that yet. Editors like Gimp should have no problems with opening and writing that format.
The second type is .dds; DirectDraw Surface files. These are actually scalable textures, which save smaller versions of themselves internally inside one file for very quick texture scaling, or, in the remaster's case, zooming. There are two types of dds files; the 32-bit type with transparency, used for terrain decorations like trees, and the 24-bit type, without transparency, used for terrain tiles.
I found a Gimp plugin for handling DDS files, but when I tried the files created by it, they were not readable by the game. Maybe I just did something wrong, I dunno, but in the end, I stumbled on this Nvidia toolset that did the trick:
https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworksdownload#?dn=dds-utilities-8-31
They're command line tools, but they do the job well. I just saved my edited tiles as png, and then used this command to convert them to usable Remaster tiles:
nvDXT.exe -24 dxt1c -quality_production -file *.png
Note that .dds files, as mentioned, contain smaller resized versions of themselves. For this conversion, however, you should completely ignore that; you only need the full-sized frame saved as png, and the above command will convert it to a correctly working terrain tile. It generates the smaller internal versions automatically.
For the trees and bibs and such, it needs alpha blending, so you'll need to use -32 rather than -24. The full command line becomes this:
nvDXT.exe -32 dxt5 -quality_production -file *.png
This is about as far as I got. Some useful hints for further modding:
Any legacy items are read from a "ccdata" folder directly under the mod folder (so in the same folder that "ccmod.json" and the "data" folder are in). This includes "rules.ini", so that allows easy oldskool rules modding. Note that the legacy assets in the Remaster's own installed files are under a "cncdata" folder. This mod folder is "ccdata", not "cncdata"; don't confuse the two. (An easy way to remember is that mods have "ccmod.json" and a "ccdata" folder. So the pattern is consistent.)
Items in this folder obey the same rules as modding did in the original games. This means that most graphics assets you add here will need to be in an sc*.mix file for the game to read them. For Red Alert, you might need to include an entire edited copy of "expand2.mix" to override certain assets, since sadly the sc*.mix files don't override RA's expansion archives.
To actually add entirely new art assets, they need to be defined in the game's xml definition files. Those control the GlyphX user interface part, which acts independently from the old game core, and needs information to display everything concerning all units and structures. I don't know where those are located in the .meg files, but I know that under "data" they end up in an "xml" folder. The main data definitions file is "GameObjectFiles.xml", and it will tell you that one of the loaded files is "Objects\Units\RABuildables.xml". I believe that is the file which you would need to edit to add filenames for the build icons for the ants, but the folder in which those assets need to be put should follow the pattern used by the game's other assets, as seen in the .meg files.
You can add a "ModText.csv" in the mod's "data" folder to define custom text to be used in the user interface. Text in the Remaster is defined for all languages at once. I don't know if there are any examples of the format to be found in the game internally. The data is basic comma separated file format, but you need to make sure the file is saved in the text encoding "UTF-16-LE", with BOM (byte order mark).
The first line defines the columns:
"TEXT ID","AUDIO TAG","CHARACTER","ENGLISH","UNITED_KINGDOM","GERMAN","FRENCH","SPANISH","ITALIAN","JAPANESE","KOREAN","CHINESE","RUSSIAN","POLISH","THAI","CZECH","TURKISH","PORTUGUESE","HUNGARIAN","DUTCH_NL","ARABIC","ROMANIAN","CHINESE_TAIWAN"
As you see, that's basically the text ID, some internal data you probably don't need, and then a list of languages. There seem to be more in there than the Remaster officially supports... not sure what's up with that.
Anyway, every comma in a CSV will define a column end. A build description for the ant could look like this:
"TEXT_UNIT_ANT1_DESC",,,"The Warrior Ant has a strong corrosive bite that makes short work of heavy armor.","","","","","","","","","","","","","","","","","","",""
This example defines the text for English only (4th column). If you want to be nice to other-language users, but don't know the language, at least copy the same thing over into all other columns so it's not just empty.
The first column, "TEXT_UNIT_ANT1_DESC", needs to be added under the ANT1 entry in the aforementioned "RABuildables.XML" to be used. You'll see when you open the file and look around a bit.
To edit the original text IDs, here is a dump I made of all the original text in the game:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ek447p8zcyt4ooy/CnCRemastered-alltext.txt/file
If you want to dig into deeper modding than what rules.ini can offer, you can edit the game's actual program core using the source code released by EA. You can find that here:
https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Remastered_Collection/
I'm not going to give any help on that here; some guides are already out, so, check those:
https://ppmforums.com/topic-48415/step-by-step-on-how-to-create-petroglyphs-nuke-tank-td/
When you compile the project, you will end up with a "RedAlert.dll" file. This file is simply put into the "data" folder under your mod folder.
Welp. That's all, folks!
I linked to ppmsite before in this guide, well; there's a whole modding forum there. So if you need more in-depth info on any of that, I'd say look around there a bit:
https://ppmforums.com/forum-1073/cc-remastered-collection-editing-forums/
