Jonwil's CNC3 Modding Tools

Included in the zip file is an XML editor with syntax highlighting based on the SciTE editor. It should make editing C&C3 XMLs just that little bit easier.

Also included is a tool called aptextract.exe which can extract any APT UI file and give you an XML file and textures you can edit and use in your mod similar to the DefaultUIScreens items in the SDK. In addition to the GUI view, you can call it with a command line similar to aptextract aptlevel0 c:\output and it will extract the data for aptlevel0 to the folder c:\output.

He realizes the names of the APT entries are not very descriptive, if anyone has any ideas on how to make the descriptions better, please let him know.

Also, He has written a tool called textureextract.exe. This will extract any texture from the game. Fill in the name of the texture (without any extention, e.g. abbhive_nrm) and it will generate a texture file plus texture XML.

The texture files are in DDS format because that is how the game stores them internally and if he converted back to the TGA format used as input when the game was made, the quality of the texture would be degraded. You should edit the DDS file in something like photoshop and then use both the dds file and texture XML in your mod. Like aptextract.exe you can pass in the name of the texture and then the output folder on the command line.

Also, he has written a tool called w3xdecompiler.exe. This tool decompiles compiled streams back into w3x files. Pass in the name of the w3x file you wish to decompile including the .w3x extention (referenced in an include tag in one of the xml files from the SDK for example). The "decompile low detail version" checkbox says that you want to decompile the "low detail" version of the model.

The output from w3xdecompiler.exe is NOT the same as what would have been passed as input when the game was made. In particular, it does not correctly decompile BoneInfluences tags, ShadeIndices tags or W3DAnimation (it may not actually be possible to decompile the data correctly as information appears to be thrown away by the build process).

Again you can pass the filename followed by the output folder on the command line. If you put l (thats a lowercase L) as the third parameter, it will extract the low quality version. (so something like this will extract the low quality version: w3xdecompiler abbhive.w3x c:\output l)

Full source code for all tools is included. The SciTE code is under the licenses specified in those folders. The other code (cc3tools.dll, aptextract.exe, textureextract.exe, w3xdecompiler.exe) is under the GNU General Public License Version 3 (basically if you make changes to the code in question and distribute a new binary version, you must also include the source code changes).

This also means that if you want to use cc3tools.dll or any of the other code in another program, you need to comply with the GPL for that program too and release its entire source code.