So I've been getting my feet wet with the hopes of potentially modding this great game, which mostly consists of reading scattered tutorials in no particular order and with no particular goal in mind; just poking around in the files and getting familiar with the various folders and files. I actually modded in a new PC voice set and picture by altering the various files under /data/sound/speech/pcvoice and the pcvoice.mes file, etc. (minor question, what does ".mes" stand for?) I noticed that in my GoG copy of ToEE there is almost nothing under the /data folder, but in the Co8 modded version it is pretty full. After some searching thru the forums I cam across this in a tutorial: "I assume you now have the program TOEEextract.exe? you will need to open a command window (dos box) to run this. put the file in your main toee directory and from the command window type: toeextract toee3.dat toee3dat this will extract toee3.dat into its component files and directories and put them all in the directory toee3dat (in a subdirectory called toee3)." I am assuming that those files that I modded were at one point in time sealed up in one of the ToEE1.dat - ToEE4.dat files and couldn't be edited until they got extracted and put under /data. OK, so here is my question, and any additional added clarification would be appreciated (feel free to ramble, lol, I'm starving for knowledge): How does the ToEE.exe program know whether to get it's data from one of the ToEE1.dat files or from the /data folder?
Excellent, Thank you. So just to clarify, the program will get what it can from /data, and then what it couldn't find there it will gather the rest from the .dat files? So the /data folders don't need to be complete?
I have a followup question similar to my original question, if someone could be so kind. I'm trying to wrap my head around the "big picture" of how the main files all interact. What is the relationship between /modules/ToEE/* and /modules/ToEE.dat ? Is it the same as with /data and the files ToEE1.dat - ToEE4.dat, where the program will look in /modules/ToEE firsst and then look in ToEE.dat for anything that is missing? Thanks for the help...
I believe the MES file is a data base index system the TOEE engine Parses via python scripting and hard coded parsing. the mes files contain an index of every component of the game, including : scripts, sounds, models, game rules, and maps. these index entries could contain a messege or script of NPC subtiles, or game menus text, all the to indexing file paths to game components such as model paths and their respectable files for texture's, in addition to maps and there file paths inside the TOEE dat files or their comparable over-ride file paths.
