Fix the visual 'glitch' of the Rebel Mobile Shield Generator for MDUs in RotM (Patch 4.2)
The mod is designed by the-farseer
The 'glitch' might be intentional since it only looks for the player like his shield is not working [it goes up and than fades away again] but his units aren't in more danger from ground units as usual because the shield is still working as one can exspect from vanilla. (The exception is that seemingly now landbombing-runs can be done against the position of the MDU. This last aspect of the differences between vanilla behaviour of units and that in RotM will not be part of this tutorial though.)
But if you find the graphic glitch disturbing (like I myself did) you can relative easily fix it.
The game shouldn't be running while you do the following or it might crash.
You'd have to restart it anyway after the change if it doesn't.
You need the EAWExtractor 1.0.2 (or a similar tool) from this location:
Gamefront.com
[Similar tools and other modding related info can be found here: Petrolution.net. Those AREN'T necessary for this tutorial though.]
The files you need are in the textures.meg of the 'Star Wars Empire at War' folder on your computer.
DON'T mix that up with the .meg of the same name in the 'Star Wars Empire at War Forces of Corruption' folder or you won't find the files we want.
The complete path is the drive letter you did choose when you installed FoC, followed by the name of the folder where your program files can normally be found, by default then LucasArts folder would come and finally one of the above mentioned game folders.
If you find more than 1 folder where programs are located make sure you search in all for the 'LucasArts' folder. If you can't find anything maybe rerun the installer and look up which path is suggested but break it up before anything is getting installed.
You have to select 'File/Open' in the menu bar of the EAWExtractor 1.0.2 and choose the correct texture.meg in the file dialog (remember there's one in the EaW folder and one in the FoC folder we need the first one).
If you want to do further modding you could simply use the 'Extract All' function of the EaWExtractor 1.0.2
and make a folder to extract all files to, e.g. modding/EaW_Orig. In that case it might make sense to extract all the .meg files that can be found in both game folders but separate the ones of FoC and EaW. Make a second folder, perhaps modding/FoC_Orig. You might not need the files that only support other languages though.
But now we basically ONLY need the following two textures:
Nb_shieldripple.dds
Nb_shieldwave.dds
[Off topic: If you want to be able to see that .dds textures as thumbnails in your Windows Explorer
you can install the following DDS Thumbnail Viewer:
Nvidia.de
Another important graphics format for EaW / FoW is .tga, so this thumbnail viewer might be of interest too:
Games.greggman.com ]
But back to our two files. Select them with your mouse and then choose 'Tools/Extract Selected'.
Your goal is to save that two files in the 'RotM/Data/Art/' Mod-Folder of 'Star Wars Empire at War Forces of Corruption'. Now we are interested in the second program folder since RotM is a mod for FoC NOT EaW.
FoC mods save their complete files in a folder in the Mod-folder of 'Star Wars Empire at War Forces of Corruption' out of compatibility reasons.
If you are a bit insecure, maybe first save the two files you extract in a totally separate folder of your choice and rename the two original files in the 'RotM/Data/Art/' folder, so you can easily undo all steps since you still have the original files as a backup, name suggestions could be:
Nb_shieldripple.RotM and Nb_shieldwave.RotM.
If you are done with exchanging the textures and have restarted the game your shield should be animated like you are used to. And the glitch is gone.
As I mentioned at the beginning your opponent might still be able to use a landbombing-run attack against you since I personally suspect the 'glitch' was only a ruse by the modder to create some smoke and mirror around the real change that enables the enemy to bombard you.
Btw if you compare the filelength of the two files that were originally in the mod then you see that they might be identical. Maybe the modder just cloned one of the files and renamed it to create that odd visual effect.
I hope you found this short tutorial helpful.
