Wing Commander 4 modding

Lork

Spaceman
Has anybody done any work to expose the file formats used by WC4?

It seems like they did go to the trouble of making an actual video game here, only it's all rendered pointless by this ridiculous missile meta. I feel like if I could just tweak the damage values of those missiles a bit, I'd be left with a game just as good as if not better than WC3. I find the game to be no fun at all as is, so it seems like such a waste...
 
Hi - Alot of the work that's gone into reverse engineering the WC file formats is covered in the WC toolbox thread (here). I'm not 100% sure about the damage values, but I think you should be able to take a look and see if it meets your needs. Of course you're always welcome to pop on over to the modding chat on the Discord site as well. Alot of us are available there more frequently than on the forums. Finally, since you're specifically targeting WC4, you should check out www.wcrespace.com for ongoing updates on the remaster work we're doing (shameless plug, I know).

Welcome to the WC modding community, glad to have you!
 
Your quickest path is probably to extract the files with wctoolbox, edit the missile iff and then repackage making all files uncompressed.
Don't take that as gospel though, I've never modded WC4, I've mostly come at it from wanting to read the formats and not alter them.

HCl has explained the XTRE format here
As far as I know you'd have to write an XTRE packager yourself based on this.

You can probably ignore the compression but incase you're interested the compression formats are LZW and REFPAK
(Seems the sims community is better at documenting than us!)

To change the missile damage values you'd want to tweak their IFF files.
There's a tool called VIFF on one of the development CDs which you can use to view but not edit
IFFs are basically an old school FourCC encoded format.
To change the damage for the missiles you'd want to seek:

REAL -> OBJT -> MISL -> DATA
The damage value is the 20-24th bytes in the DATA chunk

Good news is that the remake obeys the original files, so if you get values you like they will work when the remake is ready.


Sidenote: We should be better at putting our knowledge together, it's been so frustrating redoing work that I know HCl and others have done but hasn't been shared publicly. I'm just as bad; if anyone wants to put a modding wiki together I'd hapilly outline what I know just so long as someone else maintains it, I don't have the time.
 
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Thanks for the warm welcome! Unfortunately, as soon as we get here:
HCl has explained the XTRE format here
As far as I know you'd have to write an XTRE packager yourself based on this.
We've gone way out of my depth. I was kinda hoping somebody had made an editor, or at least that the format was friendly to manual editing. This one seems downright hostile though. Sorry if I gave off the impression that I had more expertise than I do.

I did try trawling through the contents of Objects.tre a bit, but I wasn't able to find anything specific to the missiles. I found "REAL -> OBJT -> MISL -> DATA" entries in some files, but they all seemed to be defining the loadouts for various ships. Not that I'd be be able to package them back up afterwards anyway.

Finally, since you're specifically targeting WC4, you should check out www.wcrespace.com for ongoing updates on the remaster work we're doing (shameless plug, I know).
I had seen chatter about that, but didn't look too deeply into it since it's not done yet and I was looking for a quick fix.

To be honest, calling it a remake or remaster is kind of selling it short in my eyes. There's always a million "remakes" "in development" for any given classic game, but when I saw that you're using the original files, it begins to look more like a source port, which imo is infinitely more valuable. Looks impressive, regardless.
 
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Closest thing to a source port of Wing Commander would be libRealspace. WCRespace is a very very cool engine upgrade/remake project.
 
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