Privateer Hex edit

Rodney

Spaceman
Hello,

I am trying to figure out how to change the level of Engine upgrade that you are allowed to buy, in Privateer and Rightous fire. I have looked everywhere and I give up.

I am NOT interested in hacking my Cenurian to have a level 6 engine upgrade. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt and subscribed to the magazine. It was fun.

I want to change the game so that I can purchase a better engine, shield or whatever upgrade. For example, my Rightouse Fire Centurian can purchase a level four, I want to change that so I can buy a level 6, at the ship yard. I would like to have the option to purchase at least one level of engine higher than the highest level shields, etc.

In short, when you go to the ship yard, what part of the game controls what you can buy for each type of ship, I have been unable to determine this. It doesn't seem to be in the area of the *.tre files that determines everything else about the individual ship types. I have also had zero luck with the *.exe files. HELP!

Thanks,
 
I don't think anybody ever did any serious ship editing for Privateer. However, I would assume that it _has_ to be somewhere in the ship files. It just wouldn't make sense to keep this information elsewhere, because it would make adding new ships a real pain - and apart from WC1, all WC games seem to be designed with maximum expandability in mind.

Come to think of it, you might want to check the cockpit files. This might sound strange, but... well, only player-flyable ships need this sort of information, so...
 
Originally posted by Quarto
I don't think anybody ever did any serious ship editing for Privateer.
Perhaps because it's a bit of a hassle to try to hack through all the contents of a 90MB TRE file. Probably explains why most editors for Privateer handle only the save game file - it's small and apparently easy.
 
Yeah, Priv's savegame is one of the smallest savegame formats I've ever seen :). However, I don't think Priv itself is beyond editing. The main problem is not so much the size of the TRE files, as the fact that there has never been a TRE-building tool available for Priv (you can de-TRE everything, edit it as much as you like, and then... well, nothing).
This is a lot easier to solve for the floppy version (which I suppose you don't have :)) where there is more TRE files, and where the game is willing to accept files outside of TRE files, as I recall.
 
I had the impression that the CD version was easy to add external TRE files too - apparently all one had to do was add a reference to the TRE file in PRIV.CFG
 
Yes, it's very easy to add external TREs to Priv in any version. The problem lies in building TREs. We've got a TRE builder for WCP, but not for Priv. Mario has in the past built TREs for Priv, but he did it manually.
 
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