March 23, 2009

3rd Party Tools

Since there are a few WAR related "tools" i use, i figured its worth an extra post. Because these are external programs, use any info provided here at your own risk. While it works for me, don't make me responsible if your dog puppy dies.

As Mythic screwed up the super-screenshot feature and the standard jpg screenshots look really wretched, I'm toying around with 3rd party tools to take the screenshots in WAR. At the moment i switched to FRAPS and take them as HQ .tga pictures since you can't adjust the jpg quality there either. I have to convert them later on as they take quite much space, but i just run a batch processing from IrfanView or Photoshop with high quality settings.

Here is another wallpaper i created while testing the different settings, shows the demon from the chaos camp in High Pass:

You can download the large files containing 1920x1200 and 1600x1200 versions here (choose free user).

Another small tool i started to use is the nomovie patch from kuntz. I was running the patched beta client to play WAR, so i never had any intro movies or long logo displays to deal with while starting the game. But with patch 1.2 my startup also showed a looong chain of all the logos etc. Especially when your game crashes and you want to get back in as fast as possible, its annoying. Kuntz created a small program that patches the original WAR files. You run it once and all the startup stuff is gone, its great! There has been some discussion on the forums that this violates the WAR Eula, so he removed the program from his website, but tbh if Mythic wants to ban me because i get rid of the movies... i need to find another home anyway. I found an uploaded archive of the latest NoMovie v1.2 here. He even provides the source code for it to let people check it does not alter anything else. I use it, it works great... when you start WAR, you get nearly immediately to the login screen.

One more tool i want to tell you about is EasyMyp, which is a file explorer for Mythic's .myp files. Be aware tho, this tool i suggest only to the advanced computer user and there is not much of a manual yet. They have a forum, but the program is still in the early development. Since EasyMyp will allow you to open and expand .myp archives this might especially be useful for addon developers to check out some lua code or if you need icons/textures from the game to pimp your website. And NO, you can't view any WAR models or other 3D stuff with this tool, its just a file explorer that will let you extract files out of the archives. I was searching for a few things from the Mythic files for a project I'm working on, thats how i found EasyMyp and thought some of you might find this interesting.

Like i said, some of this stuff I'm not sure how Mythic feels about it and i doubt they really approve, maybe tolerate it. So use at your own risk.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Thulf the latest NoMovie v1.2 Works fine.

Anonymous said...

Awesome. I had forgotten about using the nomovie patch. I think mine broke back at 1.1.1

Much thanks!

Zzzzzrd said...

Lol the movie still comes and theres no option to remove it? >_> Thats kinda funny but in a very wrong way. :/ Btw thanks THulf for telling me about the RAF program EU version coming.

Anonymous said...

It removes for me only few "adv signs" in the begginig. Fly paths no removing ;(

Thulf said...

The flight path animation can't be removed as its not a "movie" but rendered from the game engine.