Command & Conquer Generals - Mod Tools - CSF Reading and Investigations

Channel:

1738 Creations

Subscribers:

1,330

Published on October 20, 2020 11:18:12 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNTFSsMzT9g

Game:

Command & Conquer: Generals (2003)

Category:

Guide

Duration: 36:34

221 views

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This was made months ago but I never bothered uploading it. Had nothing better to do.

I was asked to help figure out some problems with non-English Command and Conquer Generals CSF files and the original csfeditor program written back in 2002/2003. No source code was available and as it's been 18 years since the original release I doubt the problem would be fixed.

I'm not a programmer but I can do stuff so wrote a program to convert CSF to STR. Suprised that other modders didn't know how to do this, I thought I'd make a video explaining the process of how I read the file.

This isn't a programming guide. The CSF file contains basic strings used in the game, but they're in Unicode. This is how to read and understand the contents. The end goal is to output the CSF Unicode text to a literal string file (STR) for standard human reading. The STR can be read by the Generals game and is far easier to work with, however it does seem limited to standard English characters. Maybe it's to do with system or game install language? My CSF converter works in all languages and fixes all errors I found with the original csfeditor program.

I thought this was very basic stuff so I wasn't sure how to pace the video or what to explain. Hopefully it's not too condescending.

As there's a lot to read on the screen and most of it is in hex, I disabled the mouse cursor.

Tools:
- HxD
-- Any hex file reader will work, write ability is not needed
-- https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

- Game files used
-- Generals and ZH CSF files
-- Project Raptor Russian CSF file
-- Original csfeditor program (not made by me)
-- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zm5Kxoz1FdwgzasBjSMJV2I_78W-PkAv

- My CSF to STR converter
-- Program, no code
-- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A8Rvxp69_LkOG334N8fNHTc5UkWWXUjZ

- Annotated (sort of!) code
-- Build in C# with VS 2015
-- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Oe9nsY6iNfyiF6elELVYajwzeR4SXoCi

Time stamps:
00:00 - 05:15 - Intro and ramblings about tools and what we want to do
05:15 - 08:55 - Inspecting the CSF and STR files in Notepad++
08:55 - 11:59 - Basic walkthrough of HxD and what we;re looking at in Hex
11:59 - 21:44 - Inspecting the data we can read
21:44 - 31:12 - Deciphering the data we can't read (Unicode values)
31:12 - 35:13 - How we iterate through all entries in the CSF
35:13 - END - A bit about why I don't want to release the code and final thoughts

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