Hairfarmer wrote: "There are a bunch of symbols and squares and crap I'm not familler with."
I'm just awake and haven't even had my morning coffee, so I might be totally misunderstanding you, but it seems to me that you are looking into compressed ini-files.
You have to uncompress them, and you need
BiniQDU v1.1 to uncompress them. You can download it on the editting download page* of this web site.
*Because the script of this forum apparently sucks, it's not possible to eneter a url, so copy and paste this into theaddress bar of your browser:
http://lancersreactor.com/t/editing/download
The good thing is: you don't have to recompress the file! Freelancer can handle the uncompressed ini (it will probably take a few nanoseconds longer but who cares)
Of course it is smart to edit a copy, not the original file
In FLMM, you can make a new folder "MyMod" and create subfolders in the same way the folders of FL are structured (e.g. "MyMod\DATA\EQUIPMENT" ); on activating this mod, FLMM will copy it to the FL folder (and, if necesaary, backup the original FL files)
When you open an ini-file in BiniQDU v1.1, it already writes an uncompressed version of the file, with the extension .ini.txt to the folder, even if you don't edit anything.
Now you can edit the ini-file with BiniQDU - make sure to save it the right way ("save as *.ini" ). But you can aslo delete the original ini-file, change the extension ini.txt of the uncompressed file into .ini and edit it with notepad or wordpad.
Note that BiniQDU leaves a file "bini.exe" in each directory you use it in; you can delete this.
Well, my apologies if this is not at all an answer to what you were asking. I'm going to get my coffee now.
"We are a way of the Cosmos to know itself"
-- Carl Sagan
Edited by - hans olo on 31-05-2003 10:56:19