Standalone mod?

[HJGF]

lol that doesnt applies to latin america hahahaha

[fo0k]

if you remove that folder you will find yourself putting a huge amount of it back into your mod folder just to make the game work HJGF.. that said if you did start from scratch you would end up with uber knowledge of everything in the game by the time you finished and then be able to answer any question here.

EA rant...
EA dont make any money off it any more really.. The main reason not to release it free are the logistics of doing it... that would far outweigh the money coming in from sales...

There is no way anyone at EA or Dice would get upset about any modifications to this game unless someone was actually 'selling' a new modded version.. again the legal bills would exceed bf1942 profits easily.. its just not worth their time.

I say mod the shit out of this beast as much as possible. without modders there would be no heroes, 1943 etc. By modding this game we generate revenue for EA indirectly.. simply by making the battlefield brand so fucking cool.

[Coroner47]

The way i see it from a former c & c++ programmer is that like most modern apps & games the executable just loads data from the archives/mods into the arrays or classes from routines in the executable. The mod should & appears to be just a data archive. I don't know if anyone has done this but, i would say replacing the bf1942 rfas with your own would create a new game/mod. From a former programmers view "bf1942" is just a total conversion mod. Its like "Microsoft Word" is "Battlefield 1942" ( the executable ) and "I Drink too Much Beer.doc" is the "bf1942" mod.

I would say you could completely replace the 1942 part of battlefield 1942 with whatever mod you wanted to. Although i see that there would be legal problems with this! This would be modifying the game, not adding on to it. I'm not very good with copyright laws... i breach them everyday, like most people!

[Senshi]

@Coroner: completely correct. bf1942-folder in mods is actually just like every other mod. Same goes for the expansions, they are separate folders XPack1 and XPack2...it's a really nice system, actually.

[HJGF]

if you remove that folder you will find yourself putting a huge amount of it back into your mod folder just to make the game work HJGF.. that said if you did start from scratch you would end up with uber knowledge of everything in the game by the time you finished and then be able to answer any question here.

EA rant...
EA dont make any money off it any more really.. The main reason not to release it free are the logistics of doing it... that would far outweigh the money coming in from sales...

There is no way anyone at EA or Dice would get upset about any modifications to this game unless someone was actually 'selling' a new modded version.. again the legal bills would exceed bf1942 profits easily.. its just not worth their time.

I say mod the shit out of this beast as much as possible. without modders there would be no heroes, 1943 etc. By modding this game we generate revenue for EA indirectly.. simply by making the battlefield brand so fucking cool.

Well ya i know that i will have to do a huge copy paste for all this folders and bla bla bla so thats y im starting with a little map. BTW wich files are extremly necesary to make the game work as i said before? and also i would apreciate somebady helping with the researching of this thing.

Thanks

[Senshi]

All the "main folder" Battlefield 1942\ files are 100% necessary. Especially .exe and .dll files, obviously.

Regarding the mods\bf1942 stuff. You obviously only need the files that are actually used on your map. So you could extract all the standardmeshes, objects, textures, sounds that are used on your map (weapons, buildings, vehicles) and delete the rest.

[HJGF]

yep ty senshi ill try but by now ill just make a map with only pistols or something like that

[Jeronimo]

Don't forget about the mods/bf1942/settings folder. This is actually independent from the "bf1942 mod", it belongs to the engine itself, but still it is put in there . I have a mod.dll and some other unusual files in the bf1942 folder, too. Could be necessary as well...

Seems like the separation of engine and mods hasn't been done too strictly by EA right from the start.

[HJGF]

now that u say this i could just change or edit bf1942 vanilla and well rip out some stuff and make it lighter im gonna try with Battleaxe so i only need UK and Ger thats a good start

Thanks

[Apache Thunder]

The minimum from vanilla you would need is most of the game.rfa file and most definitely the soldier meshes and the animations rfa. The animations rfa is most critical as it contains all the basic animations that make the soldiers work. You don't have to include the vanilla sounds if you plan to do new sounds for just about everything in your mod or else you must include those too.

So the general rule of thumb is to include the animations, the game.rfa the soldier meshes/textures and maybe the sounds too if you don't make new ones.

Oh and don't forget the font.rfa ai.rfa, menu.rfa and the shaders.rfa. shaders.rfa is the only RFA in the entire game that no body has tried to mod. I get the feeling there is a lot of potential if someone can figure out how to mod the shaders in the shader.rfa to do really fancy things like dynamic shadows on statics for example.

You probably can't create new "shaders" but modifing the existing ones most certainly has an effect. I made random changes to one shader which resulted in all animated meshes appearing blue ingame with no lighting. So the game does indeed pay attention to those files. Now if only we knew how to make a new shader to replace an existing one. All I can gather is that they are DirectX8 Vertex Shaders. (VSO files are compiled versions of VS files I think) and the PSO files are called Pixal Shaders. Which I think the sprite system uses along with treeMeshes. I haven't found the direct X 8 SDK which comes with the correct version of the VSO compiler and plus I don't know how to code vertex shaders so I can't do much in this field.