cards modification questions

[tnors]

anyone familiar with editing the data.bar file? i'm trying to change the number of cards available in a deck. i was able to extract the \cards\data\homecity.xml file but, it needs to be compressed back into the data.bar file and the bareditor does not have an import function. i also don't know where to put the <maxcardsperdeck> tag in the homecity.xml file. i just stuck it in there under "deck."

[Darwin_]

Most files do not need to be recompressed back into data.bar and can remain as xml files in the data folder for your changes to appear in-game.

[tnors]

so many questions.

1. what is the difference between the two files in users\username\my documents\my games\aoe3\savegame\sp_"name"_homecity.xml and
program files\steam\steamapps\common\aoe3\bin\data\homecity"name".xml?
2. the two files have matching tags such as <numpropunlocksearned>, <level>, <name>, <heroname>, etc and both have a "decks" section. should the identical tags in each file match?
3. why are there 2 "decks" sections in each file? why not 1? do the cards in each section have to match in both homecity files?
4. when the homecity.xml file is extracted from data.bar, it is embedded in \cards\data. so after the file is edited and the extension is changed back to .xmb, is the file just dropped back into files\steam\steamapps\common\aoe3\bin\data or does it need to be in files\steam\steamapps\common\aoe3\bin\data\cards\data?

[tnors]

5. there are also data2.bar and data3.bar. both of them also have a homecity.xml file. do they need to be edited as well? do they need to match all the changes in the homecity.xml from data.bar? where do they end up after edits?

[princeofcarthage]

1) The documents one is your created homecity, which stores data such as your card unlocks and stuff for singleplayer. The one in data is actually the data file where you can mod the game as you wish.
4) You can drop the file directly in \data
5) no. if you are editing bar files only datapy.bar needs to be edited for Tad.

On side note : regardless of what your intention might be, you can not use this online. Most likely it will give you crc mismatch. Before doing any edits keep backup of the original.

[tnors]

thanks so much for the replies. some things i've learned

i'm actually trying to change the number of cards visible to be used in game. the tableau only shows 11 cards per age that are available to be used. that means even though i have unlocked all the cards, 23 for the 1st age, only 11 will be available to me in the game. this gets worse for later ages because there are more cards for those ages. iow, i'm trying to have all possible cards for an age available from the beginning of that age. i guess this is going to be a hard limitation due to the graphic layout. there's no way to make the thumbnails smaller or add a scroll bar. given the layout, i will always have cards unlocked that i can't use, 22 cards for the first age. that stinks.

i have no idea what the x/25 designation means for "cards in deck." there's 11 cards per age available for a total of 44 cards. i don't know what 25 means or where that number comes from.

if <gameid> = 1, you can't alter the deck by adding or removing cards. you will get an error. my tag is currently 4 and that allows me to customize.

if <maxcount> = -1, that card is available infinitely, not just once. i changed that for all cards. now they are all available infinitely.

the multiple deck sections are redundant. you can pare that down to one deck in the homecity file. or you can have multiple decks. whichever.