What I want to do is open up Barbarian.app and Barbarian.ans (with 010 Hex Editor) and change their SNO's (the 5th DWORD in each file) to match appearance and animsets of the Unburied. If I do this and save it, will it work? Or will my barbarian still look like a regular old barbarian? Or will the game not load at all?

My computer is in the shop, so I can't test it out myself.

Folks over at the Mooege forum have talked about stuff like this.

I think the game will load fine as long as SNOs exist. You will need a tool that allows you to update the MPQs. I don't think the game verifies the checksums on the MPQs at runtime so you should be ok there.

Well, I gave it a try on my crappy netbook (which can't run the game, so idk if it worked). What I did was I hex edited the Barbarian.acr file and swapped out the appearance SNO and the animset SNO with those of the unburied's.

I loaded up the game (or got as far as my netbook would allow) and then terminated the process to examine the CoreData.MPQ to see if anything had changed.

For some reason, after doing this, when I open my CoreData.MPQ file, it no longer comes up with organized folder names on the left and comprehensible file names on the right. Instead, there is a complete lack of folders and the files are all named in a format such as 'File0000001.XXX'.

Do you know why this may have happened?

Also, what do you mean by ''a tool that allows you to update the MPQs''?

What is a good program that can update my MPQ files?

MPQ files are archive files. Similar to zip files.

I use Ladik's MPQ Editor. But I only extract. I've never tried modifying the contents.

Oh, okay. That's what you meant by update MPQ files. :] Ladik's is the one I use too. Works well. My computer is in the shop probably until the week before D3 comes out, so I can't test this which is a bummer. However, for my sake and for anyone who ever finds this thread in the future and wants to know if it works or not, would you be willing to test this out? If you're too busy, I completely understand.

Just in case you're willing to though, I'll go ahead and post the steps on how to do this below:

1. Back up CoreData.mpq
2. Open it up with MPQ Editor
3. Navigate to the actor's folder and go to the Witchdoctor_male.acr file.
4. Right click and select open with '010 Editor' (you can get that here: http://www.sweetscape.com/010editor/)
5. Find the section near the top that says '5D 44 00 00' and replace it with 'Bc 44 00 00'. (Changes appearance)
6. Scroll down and find where it says 'BC 2F 00 00' and change it to 'E2 2F 00 00' (Changes animset)
7. Save the .acr file and close out of everything.
8. Run the game and see if your appearance and animations are successfully converted.

Again, if you're too busy I understand. It would just be nice to know if MPQ editing works before the game is released. :]

Nevermind. I tested it out myself on a different computer and it reverts back upon loading up the game. I guess memory editing is the only option here.

/thread.

Did you clear out the Cache directories? The game probably uses those if they exist.

By the way, this is not something I have worked on, so I really am not the best person to help for something like this.

The cache directory has a bunch of patch mpqs, none of which are named CoreData.mpq. Could this still be causing the problem?

Here is how the game loads MPQs:
1) It first loads a given "base" MPQ. For example, CoreData.mpq.
2) It then loads all the patch MPQs for that give base.
3) Each of these patch MPQs must be loaded in order! Each patch is cumulative because they are based on binary diffs.

So a given file in the original CoreData.mpq could have been patched 5 times out of the last 17 patches. You can't just grab the first one or the "last" one (since it's just a diff, not a full file). You need to load ALL of the patch MPQs to correctly extract the file.