Menu Skin Editor

[trasha]

Hello everyone. (sorry for my terrible english btw)
I wanna ask if there any chance to create and replace the TFT background picture and menu colors?
I can easy make my design using photoshop but for the rest of the work i have actually no idea.... what kind of software did I need to have and which files i need to replace.
P.S. I make a search on internet but find only a software called "Warcraft3Viewer" .... that I totally cant understand.
Will be great if someone hit me with some tips ... thank you fist!

 

[Retera]

Hi, can you list the game version you are interested in?

Game version 1.32 changed the menu system so that it is now HTML and JavaScript. Game versions prior to that, which have the Frozen Throne logo on the menu, use a custom document format called FDF that is not the same as HTML.

this is a picture I got from Google Image Search by looking up the k-4-in mods which were a set of about 30 menu options for the user from a while back. The way these mods are made is pretty simple once you choose what system you will use to inject WC3 assets into the game:
- within the game files, create an MDX model that stretches a texture over the menu and displays only that image instead of a 3D model as the background (UI\Glues\MainMenu\MainMenu3D_Exp\MainMenu3D_Exp.mdx or some file path similar to this for the custom model)
- also within the game files, look for the button border definition files for these menu buttons, which have the color blue embedded in the 2d Texture asset used to formulate buttons of arbitrary size. Then edit their color. Here is an example of the file ui\widgets\glues\gluescreen-button1-popupbackdropborder which is probably one of the ones to change, although I am going from memory and didn't check to confirm:

When you replace these assets in the game storage in whatever way you are using for the modding, then it will cause the menu to load a different artwork and button coloration.

 

[trasha]

Hello and thank you for your reply!
My gave version is 1.26.0.6401
Also Im prty sure that I dont have "MainMenu3D_Exp\MainMenu3D_Exp.mdx" or "gluescreen-button1-popupbackdropborder"
Also I dont have any idea which software I need to instal to properly open,replace or edit them. :/

 

[Retera]

My gave version is 1.26.0.6401
Also Im prty sure that I dont have

What I described is the process for 1.26. For newer game versions, the process is something else different than what I described.

To get the files that I described, you need to be able to extract and remove them from within War3.mpq and War3x.mpq where they are stored. These are archives (think of them as being similar to ZIP files) which contain the files I mentioned.

Getting a tool to extract from an MPQ archive is probably something you can read about elsewhere. For many years I used WinMPQ, but more recently sometimes I used MPQ Editor from Zezula. There are also other options. Most of them are interchangeable and functional, so it's up to you which thing you want to use.

 

[trasha]

Ok, I download the software and finally with you help I find the files and export them.
After that I manage to open them on "War3 Model Editor" but still dont know how to edit them?!
How can I change the basic 3D background on TFT with 2D image?
Did I need to download something else for that or ?

 

[Retera]

I learned by doing, not by asking other folks, so it's possible the most successful thing for you to do would be to figure it out for yourself.

Maybe look at MainMenu3D_Beta or whatever it's called -- the arthas face. That one is a model that is only a flat plane pointed at an image. So you could replace the frozen throne 3D model with that flat picture model. as a potentially fast way to do that.

In general, to change a 3D model to a 2D image, the solution is to have two triangles in 3D that are immediately in front of the 3D camera, so that it essentially draws a 2D picture in the 3D space and points the camera at that picture.