Dune II - Siberian String Table Editor woes

[Will]

Working on a custom campaign and mod. Mod part is mostly done, now working on the Ordos campaign. This is progressing well; for now I'm not making things super complicated and it's just 1 mission per level. I will need new briefings and Mentat text, however, to reflect the changes in storyline and the tech tree.

So, after many, many hours of research I figured out how to find, view, extract, decompress and edit the Mentat strings.

What I've learned so far:

1. Choose "Westwood String Table Files (.ENG)" in SST Editor's file picker dialog, as read in a forum post.

2. Open MENTATO.ENG in SST Editor (which I extracted from ENGLISH.PAK using WestPak).

3. Auto Decompression is set to OFF, Use Compression is set to ON, as described in several forum posts.

4. I change one single letter to something else in SST Editor (to test I just changed the Raider Trike's armament description from "Light" to "Lighr". So not even changing string lengths or anything! Just substituting a letter for another one.)

5. Click Apply Changes.

6. Save File and close SSTE.

7. Run WestPak2_0.68a -> set Fix in the top menu bar to Dune 2 (I don't even know if this matters)

8. Using WestPak, Open ENGLISH.PAK

9. Select MENTATO.ENG in the PAK file -> right click -> replace with the one I just edited

10. Close WestPak

11. Start game -> start or load a game.

12. Go to Mentat screen -> click any entry other than mission briefing/advice -> DOSbox completely hangs requiring me to restart it.

I'm at my wit's end here, how do I work this absolute hell-beast of a program?. I'm using the 1.0.2.27 RC4 version of SST Editor, Dune 2 1.07 HitSquad version (not cracked) with the extra 1.07 fixes applied.

 

 

*edit* Guess we don't use BBcode here anymore ;D oops. fixed.

Edited April 22, 2021 by Will

[Nyerguds]

Right, those strings files use that obfuscation junk, don't they? I should really look into that and add it to my own tool...

[MrFlibble]

It's been a long time. The latest version publicly available from Siberian_GRemlin's site may in fact not be the latest version in existence -- I remember him sending me a build which I'm no longer sure if it was ever made public.

On top of that, the latest build actually broke something while introducing some new features. I distinctly remember having to hex-edit the main string file (which contains stuff on the sidebar, unit names and commands etc.) every time I edited it with SSTE to fix it to work properly in Dune.

One version of the editor very certainly works well with Dune II text compression, at least for game version 1.07, but I can't remember which one.