HOW IT'S DONE: DECODING THE FILES

Introduction

TS games prior to WF (and that includes EF) were not encoded. Using the manuals provided by TS with each game, it was relatively simple to understand how units and scenarios were constructed and then make one's own without recourse to an Editor. Since TS started encoding these files with WF, owners of TS games have (generally) found it difficult, if not impossible, to either make new units, or effective orgs, or adjust any of the internal data.

Of TS games we’ve examined, WF offers the most possibilities, so to build our own within the best possible format, we first had to crack the WF encoding system. Now, we generate our own platoon.obx and weapon.pdx files without any coding system. Then we use the standard-issue scenario and map Editors to construct the scenario.

The essential elements in building units and scenarios for WF are:

Additionally, one may want to have units operate on water, or in the air, neither of which WF readily allows.

Here's how to do all this.

Changing the National Codes

One of the stumbling blocks to creating The Third World War was that between 1945 and 1985, various nations changed allegiances. This took place when the Western Allies created the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and adopted West Germany as an ally; the Soviet Union became its Cold War opponent and formed the Warsaw Pact, which included East Germany and much of Eastern Europe.

To make our game work, the code numbers (as well as graphics) identifying each nation in WF needed to be revised. It is not possible to do this (easily, if at all) within the executable program (wf.exe), which leaves us with the single option of changing the *obx/*.oob files.

This table lists the codes and how they are allocated by Talonsoft for WF/EF, then by The War Office for The Third World War:

You can see that there remain a number of nations to be represented in The Third World War. There's a challenge for you :-o

Plain Text OBX & PDX files

A platoon.obx file is an encoded platoon.oob file, i.e. the contents are the same. To create a new .obx, or adjust an existing file, one must first eliminate the need to decode/encode. This is actually very simple.

The encoding is based on the 95-character ASCII set. To avoid the need for code, you need each line of the platoon.obx file to be of a length that is a multiple of 95. Because some lines are much longer than others are, we use lines of 380 characters in length (that is 4 x 95).

To make each line 380 characters long, we add = signs to the platoon.obx lines. Look inside our files and you will see this.

Therefore all one has to do is take the .oob file, add the = signs to each line, and save the file as .obx. That's all there is to it.

The same system is true for the weapon.pdx file. However, this file contains the units of every platoon.oob - which is very many. We have found that the best way to treat the weapon.pdx file is to delete all its contents and start from scratch.

We created a new, empty WordPad document and saved it as weapon.pdx. As we needed a new unit, so we created it in the platoon.obx file and then entered it into the weapon.pdx file. We don't place them in any order - the Find facility is the only convenience needed.

If you look inside our weapon.pdx file, you will notice that it is in Clear (i.e. not encoded). The only units within it are those used in WW3.

That dispenses with the TS encoding system.  

Here is a tool, provided by Scipio, to enable rapid encoding/decoding. We have packaged it with the latest Visual Basic Runtime drivers, which are required by the tool. I suggest that you place these in a new folder within the WW3 folder, so allowing easy access to the files.

How the Platoon.obx/.oob Files Work

Much of the information needed is within the manuals provided with the TS game. However, these do not contain the whole story, especially as new data appears in each game, and WF also contains AI figures unique to that game.

A platoon.obx contains all the units of that nation and describes various of their characteristics. Here is a portion of a typical platoon.obx file (in clear):

P01001 6 6 16 25 0 100 38 0 0 0 6 14 23 0 1 6 52 P00001 12 4096 8 3 264 15 41 1 45 5 40 30 25 Kiev-Class Carrier , Cruiser Carrier , =========================================================

This is one line of code, made of 380 characters. For the present purpose, let us get rid of those that are surplus to our immediate requirement, thus:

P01001 6 6 16 25 0 100 38 0 0 0 6 14 23 0 1 6 52 P00001 12 4096 8 3 264 15 41 1 45 5 40 30 25 Kiev-Class Carrier , Cruiser Carrier

The data within this line of code is in columns. The first column is P01001 and the last column reads Cruiser Carrier. We need to know what each column signifies. Here is a simple table, with three different units, that can guide us:

Note that there is a row that we have called “All 0” available for TS to apply a new measure of AI, but so far it has not been used with RS, EF2, or WF.

As you start changing the numbers in these columns, so you will begin to learn how a unit may be defined. Talonsoft's manuals contain much useful information on this. You may now begin to change the characteristics of a unit, or enter a new unit of your own choice.  

Making an Organisation

First off, we need to define terms and so avoid possible confusion. The platoon.oob has little to do with Order of Battle, despite its file name suggesting so. You have seen, above, that the platoon.obx is just an encoded platoon.oob, and all the platoon.oob does is define the units that appear in battle. Some of these are platoons, others vehicles, guns and individual officers. Only in the second column - Strength - can this file relate to a platoon.

Order of Battle is defined in these files:

Company.oob

Battalion.oob

Regiment.oob

Brigade.oob

Division.oob

Corps.oob

Army.oob

These files look similar to the *.org files that you can create in wforg.exe, but there is more to it than that. For example, if you create a battalion with the Editor, with selected Companies, a platoon or two, and then put in a Commanding Officer, most likely that CO will not be able to exert his authority over the Battalion. That is to say, effective Orgs may be created only in the above listed *.oob files (not including the platoon.oob).

Next, remember that Talonsoft has not created true Order of Battle files. Very largely, they have merely copied the organisation of the army at that period of history. This becomes more true the closer you get to modern times. Let me digress in order to explain. Prior to the 20th century, it was usual for an English regiment to be composed of two battalions: one serving overseas and the other recruiting and training at home, and these two would rotate. The regiment was not a fighting unit, but an organizational one. 

Today, the battalion is regarded as the smallest unit that can serve a nation  independently and when the UK sends a battalion to serve overseas, it is a organised as a Battalion Group. This unit does not exist prior to being sent overseas and is composed specifically for the job to hand. If the basic requirement is for infantry, then the core battalion will be selected from the Infantry. Other units are then attached, depending on the foreseen requirements.

Similarly, in WW2, divisions sent into a theatre of war were usually composed of

a core division with many other units attached to it. As technology advanced and firepower becomes more deadly, so the size of the basic fighting unit has shrunk. Throughout history, the basic unit was the army, then Napoleon Bonaparte invented the corps (to allow him to fight two armies at one time). In the first half of the 20th century, the division became the basic unit, and in the second half, the brigade, now it is the battalion. To read more on this, study how the UN forces were put together for the Gulf War with Iraq, and how smaller units have been stitched together for service in the Balkans.

If you attempt to use the Editor to create these units, you will fail, if only for the reason stated above (inserted officers will not exert authority). This method would also fail to reflect how real units are composed (as per the above argument). And finally, that method will fail because units cobbled together by use of the Editor will never work together effectively.

Let us therefore examine how an effective Order of Battle should be written. As a working example, we will use the WW3 files.

Here is an extract from Company01.oob, where 01 is the national number of Russia. 

Let's move onwards and upwards, to the Battalion level.

Modern Unit Bitmaps

There are images of modern units within The Operational Art of War (TOAW). These images are compatible with other TS games, notably WF. The TOAW images are within the Graphics folder. Here is an example:

To use them, rename the selected image. They do not need resizing, or reformatting. To find the name of an existing unit image, look in the relevant platoon.obx for that unit. Here is an example:

You want to provide a new image for an American tank that you've just created. American units are labeled 10, so that the platoon file is platoon10.obx. American companies are in company10.oob and unit numbers for American units start with P10. In platoon10.obx you create a new tank; let's give it the unit number P10099. We will also give it a picture number, also P10099.

(Note: in this, the number 10 denotes American, the 099 denotes the unit type and number; 109 would denote a gun of some type, 209 a type of infantry, etc.)

Now we must rename the TOAW picture. In the platoon.obx the picture is P10099, but in the WW3 folder, it is prefixed with a U, so it becomes UP10099. So rename the TOAW image UP10099 and place it in the game folder (in this case, WW3). Now, when you place this unit on the map, the picture that shows up will be that of P10099.

There are a number of other consideration, that are not essential, such as the unit's shadow (a .bit file) and whether or not it is an Early or Late unit (if late, it should also be copied into the Special folder as L-UP10099).

TOAW has images of a great variety of 20^th century units to select from. They each appear in a variety of colours, allowing their use by different nations.

A simple graphics application allows easy manipulation of these images to create entirely new units. PSP and Paint are good for this purpose.

Example: The Falkland’s Campaign

As an example, let's now have a look at the files we've provided you, to play the first Falkland's scenario.

Bit images

The .bit files are unit shadows. In this game, I have selected a different theme from Western Front (that saves me the job of drawing outlines for each unit) and they look like this:

Notice that there are six images; they are for each position a unit may be viewed in.

Controls

We use the file controls.bmp to provide the game with the insignia of each nation in the game. Note the light blue roundel of Argentina and the blue, while and red roundel of British forces.

False landscape

In The Falkland's Campaign, you'll notice green trees bitmaps. Now, here is how this scenario is made to work: the Talonsoft game engine thinks these are really trees, but I have painted the tiles blue (copied from water/sea tiles) so that this element of landscape appears to be water. Here is an extract of one of the tree files:

Now you see how we do it. "Ships" therefore are land vehicles, moving across a normal landscape, but appear as ships sailing across the sea.

Icons

Now for the icon bitmaps. Here is an extract from one of these image files:

Sounds

To see how I introduced new sounds, open the sound.dat file (with Excel). You can introduce new sounds only (as far as I can tell) in the second row, where I have added a few "1"s, allowing a new sound to exist.

To change the unit sound, you must first select the .wav file you need for that sound, then name it as per the number allocated for that unit's sound in the .obx file.

EF and WF combined

WW3 could have broken out in 1945, when the western allies met their eastern counterparts. The U.S. General Patton is thought to have encouraged such a thought. To assist any developer of such a game, here are EF and WF units combined and playable within WF. Clearly, certain nations have had to change sides, as far as WF is concerned, i.e. the Soviet Union now adopts the code for Germany.

Commentary

In my view, designing will progress most productively when all interested parties work together. Richard Seibert's approach, as expressed to me, is fundamentally different: "...have you ever heard  the term too many cooks in the kitchen ? its okay when there's a couple of us but can you imagine 20 or 30 people slamming you with designs and ideas ? its best to work in small groups with focus and strive towards the common goal which is industry support of designers by showing them what we are capable of..."

Which perhaps explains the "secret" nature of the project mentioned in Britwar's CS forum.

The interest of The War Office is the same as that of the wargamer, rather than impressing Talonsoft, or some other company. Talonsoft has never shown interest in our endeavours; their Jim Rose explicitly rejected an offer of co-operation; and staffers who have been (falsely) suspected of helping us have been warned off.

The War Office has, from the beginning of TS, led the field in independent design - often against the opinions of TS and other designers. We have accepted responsibility for providing technical support and editorial management of The Third World War August 1985.

The job of exporting WW3 to RS, or EF2, is - in terms of time - a matter of moments, but it would be impractical to support different versions of the same game within different hosts. The selection of the right host is therefore critical. Though RS is probably slightly more advanced than WF, the latter has much more player support. EF2 is not as adaptable as WF, so for now, we stay with WF as host and continue our efforts to enhance its abilities, as we did by introducing to WW3/WF skiing from EF2.

Here's you chance to enter a public debate on these issues.

The War Office's Forum
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