Before explaining what it is, it was only possible because Mario "Hcl" had posted a really good breakdown of the compressed INI file format. Thanks to him for his work. And also keep in mind that this software hasn't been tested beyond my own very basic unit testing. I've used it to export my freelander data directory to text format, modified values, then used it to convert all of the modified files back into the freelancer directory in binary format. It worked, the game loaded for me, but there could be bugs that my simple testing haven't uncovered.

With that said, my utility takes Hcl's conversion utility and goes a bit further. It can both read and write binary or text INI files. It can convert whole directories to->from text and binary, either direction, can operate recursively, etc...

I've used it like this: First thing first, I made a backup of all of the files under my Freelancer\Data folder. After that was done, I used the flini tool to extract all of the binary INI files from the Freelancer\Data folder to the c:\flmod folder.

The command line was:

flini /i:"c:\program files\microsoft games\Freelancer\Data" /o:c:\flmod /v /r

That reads all of the INI files under the Data directory and saves them in text format (the default output format is text) to c:\flmod. /v specifies verbose output so you can see the progress, and /r specifies to do all directories recursively. Also note the use of the quotes around the freelander directory. If your install path is in a directory with spaces, you'll have to enclose it in quotes.

Next, I edited some values, then ran:

flini /i:c:\flmod /o:"c:\program files\microsoft games\Freelancer\data" /b /v /r

That reads from my flmod directory, and writes the files back to the freelancer directory as binary (the /b argument).

This utility is written in C#, so it's going to require the .NET Runtime. You can install it by following one of the methods listed here. After that, go download the utility here. Extract it to whatever directory you like and that should be it.

I've already applied to set this up as a sourceforge project and hopefully add some developers to the project if it takes off. This ini converter is just one of the tools that I plan to integrate with a modding IDE that will also be housed under the same sourceforge project. I'll be sure to pass out the URL / project specifics when they approve the project.

If anyone has any comments, feedback, bugs, or ideas for this tool please let me know.
-Jon


Edited by - PumpkinEscobar on 11-03-2003 20:52:09

Edited by - PumpkinEscobar on 13-03-2003 06:18:25