Navigation Menu

Skip to content

PhxTools_20170430
Compare
Choose a tag to compare
@kornman00 kornman00 released this 01 May 04:12
· 29 commits to master since this release
v1.0.3
12e8661

Disclaimer: You're using these tools at YOUR OWN risk. It's your own fault if you try to cheat and get banned. Always make sure you back up your files before changing them.

Words to live by: Don't be a jerk or rotten apple. Help your fellow modding community members. Play nice.

PhxGui.exe

This tool is a drag-n-drop style desktop app.

  1. Select which game you're messing with. The default is Definitive Edition.

  2. Select the folder where files extracted from .ERAs will be put

  3. Select the folder where re-built .ERAs, defined by .ERADEFs, will be put

  4. Drag-n-drop files:
    A. One or more .ERA files, to extract all their files and generate a .ERADEF file which can be used to rebuild the archive

    • NOTE: when extracting files this tool will not automatically convert .XMB files to .XML, see the next step.

    B. One or more .XMB files, to convert them to .XML files which you can edit

    • If you convert an .XMB file to its editable form, you'll need to update the file reference in the .ERADEF to use the .XML based file, not the .XMB, or you'll never see your changes
    • Alternatively, you can use the "Always build with XML instead of XMB" option and the tool will swap XMB references with the XML file on disk if it finds one. NOT recommended if you mass convert all of your XMB files.

    C. One .ERADEF file, to build a .ERA file with the same name

    D. One .EXE file, which the app will try to patch (after making a backup, with the suffix "_UNTOUCHED") to support loading unofficial .ERA files

    • NOTE: The app tries to figure out how to patch new versions of the game. However, a future up may break the patterns it looks for.

  5. Pay attention to the "Messages" UI after any of these processes finish for extra details or error info. The log file, PhxGui.log, can also contain additional diagnostic information.

Known Issues

  • Some errors don't present much details right now. For example, problems reading the .ERADEF while trying to build a new .ERA will just give a basic message saying that the build process failed. This should be addressed in future releases

PhxTool

This is a CLI style app that resembles the original "KSoft.Tool" app from the 360 modding days. I'm currently leaving this undocumented since PhxGui should address 99% of user needs

Thank Yous:

  • Ensemble Studios. RIP.
  • 343i/Creative Assembly for continuing the RTS side of the franchise
  • 343i/Behaviour Interactive for working on Definitive Edition
  • Halo Wars Modding Group Discord for additional testing (https://discord.gg/UjfYKAN)

Change Log

2017.04.30

  • PhxGui: Improved formatting in PhxGui.log, to help interpret errors
  • PhxGui: Renamed "Test data load" to "Validate Game Data"
  • Fixed a bug in the "Validate Game Data" process where we'd try to load .tactics files before core files (eg, GameData.xml) were fully loaded, leading to false positive errors (eg, 'Supplies' being an undefined resource type)
  • Fixed a bug where we would fail to report which file failed to get packed into an ERA and for what reason

2017.04.28

  • PhxGui: Changed method of EXE patching to try and calculate the required patches instead of hard coding all the patches for each game version
  • PhxGui: Added a feature to try and validate some of the core game data in the ERA Expand Path
  • PhxGui: Enabled trace logging, information and additional errors can be found in PhxGui.log
  • PhxGui: Fixed "Always build with XML instead of XMB" option

2017.02.22

  • PhxGui: Added "Always build with XML instead of XMB" option
  • Extracted files will have their creation/last-write dates set to the time stamp data in the ERA
  • Included separate download for pre-built DirectXTex tools (https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectXTex).

2017.01.13

  • Re-release with Definitive Edition support and GUI tool
Assets 3