Any one know how to edit locdata.md?

[Damask15]

First off, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who's been posting here with tips and tutorials. Thanks to your posts, I've been able to extract the game files and start making my own mods. But now I've run into something that I'm not sure what to do with.

Basically, if you unpack l100.pack from the install directory, there's a file inside called locdata.md. This contains things like in-game text and city names. After opening it in a txt editor, I can read everything, but there's a lot of "garbage" at the top of the file, so I'm pretty sure that I can't make any changes without messing things up.

Anyone know the proper way to edit and save this file?

 

[unmerged(15561)]

First off, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who's been posting here with tips and tutorials. Thanks to your posts, I've been able to extract the game files and start making my own mods. But now I've run into something that I'm not sure what to do with.

Basically, if you unpack l100.pack from the install directory, there's a file inside called locdata.md. This contains things like in-game text and city names. After opening it in a txt editor, I can read everything, but there's a lot of "garbage" at the top of the file, so I'm pretty sure that I can't make any changes without messing things up.

Anyone know the proper way to edit and save this file?

Which text editor? Notepad?

 

[Damask15]

Yup, it's notepad that seems to mangle the file when you try to open it.

 

[unmerged(15561)]

Yup, it's notepad that seems to mangle the file when you try to open it.

Try wordpad or some other editor capable of editing rich text.

 

[Damask15]

Alas, wordpad doesn't work either. It gives the same garbage at the top and bottom of the file. I'm thinking that you need some kind of specific reader that's configured for Warlock to open this file. If anyone knows, definitely let me know--I was going to try adding more city names to prevent the bug in long games where all newly founded cities start having the same name by default. My theory is that this happens because the 50 default city names for each race are used up, usually because the AI builds cities and then has them destroyed by the dremer. So I figured that adding more names might fix it. It's not a big deal, though.

 

[mbrx]

I can confirm that the file is definitly not just a text file and/or a text file in rich textformat. Rather, if you look at it in a hex editor you can see that the first megabyte or so (roughly byte position 0x117b70) consists of purely binary data. After this data comes what looks like a long list of NULL terminated strings.

00117b30  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ff ff ff ff 00 00 00 00  |................|
00117b40  00 00 00 00 ff ff ff ff  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00117b50  ff ff ff ff 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 ff ff ff ff  |................|
00117b60  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ff ff ff ff 6f 88 05 00  |............o...|
00117b70  00 00 0c 00 00 23 53 57  4f 52 44 5f 4b 4e 49 47  |.....#SWORD_KNIG|
00117b80  48 54 00 4b 6e 69 67 68  74 20 53 77 6f 72 64 00  |HT.Knight Sword.|
00117b90  23 53 57 4f 52 44 5f 50  4f 49 53 4f 4e 00 50 6f  |#SWORD_POISON.Po|
00117ba0  69 73 6f 6e 65 64 20 73  77 6f 72 64 00 23 42 4c  |isoned sword.#BL|
00117bb0  41 43 4b 53 4d 49 54 48  00 42 6c 61 63 6b 73 6d  |ACKSMITH.Blacksm|
00117bc0  69 74 68 00 23 42 4c 41  43 4b 53 4d 49 54 48 5f  |ith.#BLACKSMITH_|
00117bd0  44 45 53 43 00 44 65 73  63 72 69 70 74 69 6f 6e  |DESC.Description|
00117be0  20 42 6c 61 63 6b 73 6d  69 74 68 00 23 57 41 52  | Blacksmith.#WAR|
00117bf0  48 4f 55 53 45 00 57 61  72 68 6f 75 73 65 00 23  |HOUSE.Warhouse.#|
00117c00  57 41 52 48 4f 55 53 45  5f 44 45 53 43 00 44 65  |WARHOUSE_DESC.De|
00117c10  73 63 72 69 70 74 69 6f  6e 20 57 61 72 68 6f 75  |scription Warhou|
00117c20  73 65 00 23 53 55 50 45  52 42 4c 41 43 4b 53 4d  |se.#SUPERBLACKSM|
00117c30  49 54 48 00 53 75 70 65  72 20 42 6c 61 63 6b 73  |ITH.Super Blacks|

The strings seem to be in pairs that translate a given 'tag' into a textual description.
I believe that you can edit the strings and even make them longer/shorter as long as you make sure that each string is null terminated. (There must be a character whose byte value is ZERO after each string). It may be interesting if someone tries to (a) edit the string while keeping their total lenght exactly the same and (b) to edit the file and add length into one of the strings (thus shifting the positions of the following strings). If (b) does not work then it might be that the binary part is providing an index into the string positions and it would be much harder to edit things. For that we might need to look at different version of locdata.md that is given from different patch version of the game. (Does anyone have such files around?)

 

[exploder1531]

Any progress on editing this file? I really wanted to translate the DLC and updates into Polish, but all my attempts to edit this file made ​​the game to crash on startup.

For that we might need to look at different version of locdata.md that is given from different patch version of the game. (Does anyone have such files around?)

I could ask a friend, he did not use Steam for a long time and (I'm almost sure that) he has Warlock installed.