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Prec's Need Help thread.

Precipice

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I need a lot of help with a lot of different things. Just in the offchance that an experienced modder swings by, I'd like to have a bunch of this stuff in one place. Assuming of course that such a person was generous enough to offer assistance.

I'll start with this one.
I'm having an issue with one of Silverback's tools, SavingIt. Tool is available here: http://fabletlcmod.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=1666&start=0&

I have seen modders say that a lot of stuff goes into the save and that's why so many things require starting a new game. I want to investigate the save files as I suspect that tng level scripts may, possibly, be fuller and more detailed in the save. It would be acceptable and expected if the saves retained script data in a binary format; I'd be able to decrypt that given enough time, and I have enough time. Unfortunately I don't know, I can't get that far by myself because it's additionally zlib compressed. I suspected either zlib or lzo, but the huge tipoff was that the tool came packaged with a zlib library.

The tool doesn't work for me. I don't expect a whole lot of help with this, seeing as how even if I could reach the author, he's very clearly stated at the start of his thread, "There will be no support from me, I don't care if it works for you or not. Judging by the majority of the posts, it won't." It does do stuff. It attempts to work, I suppose. I only need it to extract the contents so I can pick at it, and when extracting section 2 (or even section 1 but section 2 is the meat) it produces a file, but it's only null bytes. I'm wondering if I may have done something wrong, or if my save is just busted (for a small game Fable sure has a lot of bugs and glitches).

I've tried it out on previous saves in the same profile with the same result. I'll experiment some more later on and see what happens.

An important note is that I do not want this to come off as disparaging of the tool author, Silverback. He explains very well that the tools weren't meant for public use, that they were merely rudimentary tools used to crack the formats, which appears to have worked very well. I am making excellent use of his other tools, notably CAppearanceDef and EffectExplorer.




Whenever I have other problems I'll just post them here; I would find it uncouth to have myself take up the first several page of the section with my threads.
 

Precipice

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He still has stuff on the modding site. I've learned a lot from his graphics 101 thread. But evidence of content removal is there as well. Links to his posts that are dead, for example. Same with Keshire and a few others.
 

Keshire

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Same with Keshire and a few others.

Hey now! I've never removed anything purposefully. And I do still bounce around to see if anything interesting is going on. But it's been years since I've messed around with Fable.
 

Dark Drakan

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Hey now! I've never removed anything purposefully. And I do still bounce around to see if anything interesting is going on. But it's been years since I've messed around with Fable.

He lives! Good to see you around here again & im sure you can help @Precipice better than any of us.
 

Keshire

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He lives! Good to see you around here again & im sure you can help @Precipice better than any of us.

I had someone track me down on reddit to ask me some questions a couple days ago. So flipped through my fable bookmarks to see what was going on.

I'm not going to be much help on the save game stuff. I've never messed with it. Even my general fable knowledge is kinda fuzzy. I'd end up having to redo Silver's work from scratch.
 

Dark Drakan

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I had someone track me down on reddit to ask me some questions a couple days ago. So flipped through my fable bookmarks to see what was going on.

I'm not going to be much help on the save game stuff. I've never messed with it. Even my general fable knowledge is kinda fuzzy. I'd end up having to redo Silver's work from scratch.

Well your knowledge is better than any of ours in regards to most of the modding topics and don't know if you still have any contacts you could contact who could maybe help in other areas.
 

Precipice

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Starstruck. Very starstruck.
I had someone track me down on reddit to ask me some questions a couple days ago. So flipped through my fable bookmarks to see what was going on.

I'm not going to be much help on the save game stuff. I've never messed with it. Even my general fable knowledge is kinda fuzzy. I'd end up having to redo Silver's work from scratch.
Wasn't me bugging you on Reddit, promises. I did see you there and a couple other places but I didn't want to come off stalkery. Hmm. Well, too late.
But I do appreciate you dropping by and taking the time to reply, even if it wasn't what I was hoping for. I'm making great progress tooling around with things on my own but there are things that just don't make sense, even by Fable standards. I'll have more questions and I was hoping in the event I have really good questions that I can't figure out on my own, is there a Kesh-signal I could use?
 

Gikoku

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I had someone track me down on reddit to ask me some questions a couple days ago. So flipped through my fable bookmarks to see what was going on.
Even though I bumped into you on the 2K forums (nice work again there) and have seen you on reddit also, it wasn't me. Small world though.
 

Precipice

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This one isn't me needing help but solving the ancient riddle of where is Maze's face. Not, like, on his head, but the texture for his face.

I saw it asked on the modding site and thought, in the textures, duh, where everyone else's face is. But if you go and look, the texture is just the will lines, and opening up the model for Maze shows an invisible face with will lines on it. I was puzzled, and I love puzzles.

Anyone read Johndoe's graphics 101 thread on the modding site? I don't blame you if you didn't; it's interlaced with insults to the reader that are difficult to brush aside after a while, despite it being very informative on Fable graphics. BUT! It didn't prepare me for this technique, apparently exclusively used with Maze and has potential for cool use elsewhere.

Maze's face is in the will lines texture, but the alpha has it made transparent. On the model, you can set a flag to use or ignore transparency. Maze's face is in the model twice, once for his face and once for the lines to glow. The face part of his face has alpha disabled, making his invisible face visible, and the glow part has alpha enabled, so that only the will lines glow and not his whole face. I thought this was impossible, mostly because the reference I read said that alpha must be enabled on textures with alpha or you'd get a crash.

Too long didn't read: That's some Houdini **** right there and I can't wait to use this technique myself.
 
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