n00b help required re: meshes/textures and BRFEdit

[AngusH]

Firstly, I apologise in advance, as this will likely not be the last you all hear from me, as I attempt to get my head around modding M&B... 

Just as a test before I take a stab at making my own, I wanted to try and insert some custom resources in to a mod. I made a copy of the Native directory, placed the resource file in the newly created 'Test Mod' directory in the '\Resource\' directory. I then tried opening the resource brf file using BRFEdit. This particular file has both meshes and textures (as all would, I imagine?). Now, when I open this file up from within the subdirectory of my new mod, none of the textures display for any of the meshes - they are all black. When I open the file up from the subdirectory of the Mod I borrowed the file from, it displays correctly. This leads me to believe that BRFEdit is reading the module.ini? So I added the 'load_mod_resource = copiedresource' to the ini file, but still nothing? I placed the line after the "load_resource = material_face_gen", as that seemed to be where it was positioned in another mod on my PC. This didn't fix the problem?

No doubt related, but when I added a custom item to my mod using a mesh from the file, it didn't build.

Help?

 

[MartinF]

I know they're hard to find sometimes, but try looking at a few of the tutorials on the general topic. I think Ruthven's thread on 'you want to make your own mod' has some of them in, it should still be on the front page just below.

So.. BrfEdit does load module.ini. Normally it automatically selects the proper mod based on the path from which you opened the brf file, sometimes it doesn't. So look at the options menu to make sure it's loading the right one.

Also, even though the brf file has the link to the texture/material in it, doesn't mean it also has the whole dds in it. So you'll have to look at the dds file that the mesh uses and copy that to the proper folder as well. I think normal native items should just use the ones from the MNB directory (the texture, resources and materials folders are all empty for native) but it might be that it just uses an absolute path or something.. I'm no expert.

Try that and see if it fixes your problem. I also find that you need to restart Brfedit every now and again when you change something, for me it doesn't always update 100% accurately and doesn't show some stuff till after a restart.

 

[AngusH]

*slaps head*

TEXTURES directory. ...groan... Believe it or not, I actually did read the tutorial. That, and many others. Information overload me thinks.

Thanks!

 

[janlulhannes]

* slaps him again *