Quick Empire: TW question

[nikimcbee]

Is it possible to add songs to the rotation? I have some great drum and fife music (actual civil war drum/fife/ bugle calls) I also have some 18th century Russian army music. :hmmm:

[Arclight]

At first glance, I would have to say no it isn't, not easily anyway. It's all packaged in archives. If you can find a way to extract what's in there and repackage with your own files it should work.

[Dowly]

There's a tool found from the modding forums that allow you to extract the .pack files. Just see in which pack the music files are, extract it to the (to the same folder as the .pack files) and move or rename the .pack file you extracted. Then just replace the music you want (no need to repack anything, just keep the original .pack renamed so the game doesnt load that instead of the extracted files).

[Arclight]

Dug up some links:

About unpacking the files, but it relates to the demo version. Shouldn't be different for the full release;

http://etw.heavengames.com/articles/modding/misc/unpacking-etw-pack-files/

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.pack extractor;

http://int0thegame.blogspot.com/2007/05/medieval-2-total-war-pack-extractor-v10.html

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Probably most promising; a .pack file manager:


I've created a tool for managing ETW pack files. Like some existing tools, it allows you to unpack and repack files, but it goes beyond that. You can create new pack files, replace files within the pack with files from hard disk (which is a lot more convenient than unpacking and then repacking everything!), and change pack types (boot/release/patch/movie).


http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=234546

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Explanation on the ETW modding system;

http://blogs.sega.com/totalwar/2009/03/19/empire-total-war-modding-system/

Better to keep the files packed IMO;


First of all, the ETW data is meant to stay packed. The pack file system and the virtual file system that it builds internally within the game are central to the patching and modding systems, so please don’t ask users to unpack their data in order to run with your mods.

So how should you mod the game? Well, it works like this. Empire loads files of type .pack in the data directory in a certain order determined by the pack’s type. There are three basic types - release, patch and mod. The fifth byte in the pack file header is an numerical id which tells the game what a pack is, boot packs are 0, release packs are 1, patch packs are 2, mod packs are 3. The game then loads release packs first, then patch packs, then mod packs.