Sam.

Look up the associated StrRef listed in the LUA file for each quest? And when the title StrRef changes for the same quest ID, you know you have a morphing name.

You can check in e.g. BGEE.LUA for the buildQuestsTable() function and the "quests_old" section, and you could also search all DLG files for "AddJournalEntry" and "SetQuestDone", but all of this will only give you the "official" quests, not the "hidden" ones (those that do not come with a journal entry).

Searching through every CRE to find which ones use the gnoll animation and listing what weapon they have equipped is fairly straightforward. Searching through every area and area script do determine how many gnolls are spawned based on difficulty slider position, party level, etc. is considerably less straightforward. Edit: See Creature Lister

A significant time sink is actually posting all the "Copying and patching 1 file ..." (and similar lines that don't actually tell you anything) to the console (in my experience on Windows at any rate). Using SILENT can speed things up considerably under some/many circumstances.

NP. That's what I expected you to really be after based on the topic title, but your line of questioning was erratic enough I thought I'd try to cover a broad view of the basics just in case .

From what I can discern, what you're asking about is a bit of a mixed bag. An executable's (EXE, DLL, etc) "resources" including FileVersion, ProductName, etc. can be edited with Resource Hacker. See the "Version Info" field, although in recent versions only if it has not been compressed with an EXE compressor like UPX or mpress. Many of these fields show up in the details provided by Explorer. Many other fields (such as name, timestamps, etc.) are NTFS metadata or extended attributes. FileAlyzer can view these, but can't edit them. Various programs can edit some of these programmatically, but I'm not familiar with a single program that can edit ALL NTFS metadata/attributes. As an example, AutoHotkey can be used to edit modification time, creation time, and last access time. To further complicate things, many file formats, especially multi-media files like WAV, MP3, MPEG, etc. can have metadata embedded in to the file format which Explorer can directly display (either in the main window when set to Details or under a file's Properties as you have shown). These can include Artist, Title, Album, etc. And to make matters even harder, Explorer can display attributes read directly from some file format's internal structure, such as an image's dimension. MediaInfo is a fantastic tool for displaying (but not editing) this type of information. It would help to know exactly what you are after.

@Gordian I've been looking through your list of mods for inspiration on my next EET install. What is MIH_EQ?

Back in 2009 with the bigg's instructions, I disassembled the ToB EXE and made a list of all the (then) INI settings which the game read. How exhaustive is this list? Does it cover everything, just what is not covered in the default game GUI, or some selective subset of the above?

FWIW, here is the even more minimalist MVE file without the probably unnecessary shutdown chunk: BLANKER.MVE I still think you could pre-make a BIFF of these, and just overwrite the original BIFF with the custom one and not alter the CHITIN.KEY file (as per Miloch's strategy).

At a minimum you'd still need EE compatibility for Tweaks Anthology. Recursively deleting the appropriate WBM files from the game directory is probably the simplest way to go.

Compiling a BIFF inherently modifies CHITIN.KEY, doesn't it? ?

After thinking it over, you may not even need the shutdown chunk as we haven't initialized any audio or video. I'll make one later just in case. FWIW, CamDawg has already added this to the to-do list for Tweaks Anthology.

IIRC Disable Startup Movies just overwrote the MVEs with zero byte files, but the download link is bad so I can't check. However, by looking at the MVE file format description and actual MVE files, I believe the attached is the minimal "valid" MVE file. Haven't tested it and NI doesn't like it, but the latter isn't entirely unexpected as there is no data to decode, just header, magic number, shutdown chunk, and end chunk. BLANK.MVE

"usable" may be a bit of a stretch. For me, the new forum software seems to be using up a huge amount of screen space to display comparatively little content.

PS BAM can do all this, or I could add the necessary functionality. With hundreds or thousands of frames this large it wouldn't be particularly fast, but it would be automated so you could just let it run in the background. A quick automated pre-pass with ImageMagick to clear up the fuzziness at the edges of the shadow and ensure the shadow colors are set properly, and you wouldn't have to do anything manually. I'd be willing to do it, or help, or provide a detailed guide.

This is the programmer within you that says this. "The count" starts for me from the "first" color, not zero'th one, as we are not dealing with ones and zeros only, aka binary, but of decimal one. Yes, even though it might be flagged as zero in the binary data(I have no way to verify this). Which is why we use the ordinal form of the word "one" rather than the word itself. And if it's not obvious, there's no such a thing as "zeroth" in English, as it doesn't make sense. And yes, wikipedia is wrong. I say the count starts at 0 because the internal structure of the binary file format starts counting from 0. This is an objective fact. Please keep your verbal vomiting to yourself.

The count starts at 0. You will receive the best results by assigning a unique shadow color to your shadow catchter material, for example a strong red (RGB 255.0.0). BAMWorkshop 2 used a pink color to determine where shadows are present. That way the shadows are assigned to palette entry #1 (the 2nd palette colour) and there are no "false" shadows in the darker portions of the creature. This makes a lot of sense, however, depending on which games you intend to use the animations in, there are definitive reasons to ensure the shadow color is in palette entry 1 and that it is set back to pure black. For greatest compatibility with all engine and graphics settings variants, no other entry in the palette should be pure black.

It would seem I've gotten old.

There are several version of stutter debugging tools out there that, while not quite what you're looking for, are in that direction. They won't give all the information you're looking for, but will tell you which blocks are firing. Combine that with either TobEx or the EE's CLUAConsole LogMessages() and LogSet() functions, and you can save the info to file. Stutter related tools How to gather clues when debugging stuttering

There are guns with a rate of fire of over 1 million rounds per minute. Just 10 attacks per round, please...

Yes. Don't do it unless you intend to start a new game, and even then you're probably better off waiting a bit longer for V10 to be released.

Toggling the flag would be easy. Not breaking NPCs, special encounters, etc. in doing so would be much more effort.

If it's calculating true analytic (not numerical) solutions to the full no-assumptions Navier–Stokes equations, I'm very interested in that. Moreover, if DavidW has solved the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, that would be pretty cool.

Thank you both, I have gotten it working. Another question: is there a COPY_LARGE version of COPY_EXISTING? Or more to the point, is there a way to get the filesize of a biffed file too large to patch?

When I run ACTION_DEFINE_ARRAY foo BEGIN 1 2 3 END DEFINE_ACTION_FUNCTION xyz STR_VAR foo = "" BEGIN ACTION_PHP_EACH foo AS k => v BEGIN PRINT ~%v%~ // should print 1, 2 and 3 END END LAF xyz STR_VAR foo END with the MODDER flag on, I get this warning but if I run ACTION_DEFINE_ARRAY bar BEGIN 1 2 3 END DEFINE_ACTION_FUNCTION xyz STR_VAR foo = "" BEGIN ACTION_PHP_EACH foo AS k => v BEGIN PRINT ~%v%~ // should print 1, 2 and 3 END END LAF xyz STR_VAR foo = bar END there are no warnings but 1 2 3 are not printed. What am I missing?