Help with editing Rugby 08

[Killswitch]

Hi guys, I'm relatively new to modding Rugby 08 (not really, I'm actually new indeed to modding it lol, anyway...), so I wanted some help since a lot of you guys here did amazing jobs with rosters and all these kind of stuff.
I wanted to edit Rugby 08 to keep the vanilla game intact, except I wanted to add some new teams (from that season, 2007) to the game, but I don't have any idea of how I can do it. I know there's some mods to update to current seasons like the TRF24 mod (which I have and it's amazing btw, played it a lot once I found it a while ago, even asked a question if I could play it alongside the vanilla game and yes it's possible), but I don't know any way to mod the vanilla game to add new teams.

Let's say, for example, I wanted to add Connacht to the game. How do I add it? The kits, the players, etc.? Is that possible? I don't know if it's possible to add new teams and players to the game WITHOUT REPLACING any original ones. I believe it is because of the aforementioned TRF mod, which has more teams and more national teams too than the original game. So, how do I do that?
I also know there's that Woosah's editor but I think it's only worth for when you want to replace and/or modify something originally in the game rather than actually adding something new. Can anyone please help this newcomer newbie out? Thanks in advance.

 

[Carel du preez]

Good day man,

I cant answer all your questions but regarding one i think i have an answer for you.

Theres no way to add more players into the game except through create a player but there is a lot of double players (unlicensed) floating in the game not sure how many.

But what i do know is that you can add faces without replacing in game faces by creating your own faces and after that assigning and using a MD5 hash generator for the heads is "players/heads/*****" passed through md5 hash, where ***** is the ID number for the head. For example, "players/heads/41096" is file "ece8fd605441dc7df40cddbfacec78a4.big", ignore all the quotation marks. This site can generate md5 hashes: https://www.miraclesalad.com/webtools/md5.php

Just be sure not to use the same ids that are all ready in game as obviously it will replace ingame file.
Attached is a list of available open spots to use in the MD5 to generate new .big file (all highlighted numbers are all ready in use in game the rest can be used for your own unique faces)

Heres a lot of guys on the forum that will help,enjoy!

 

[jim546]

It is sort-of possible to add teams to the game, but not really possible to add new players. as Carel above mentions there are some duplicate/unused players in the default roster that you could re-use. I'm going to ignore that bit for now and go over a summary for adding a new team:

The file that controls which teams are enabled/disabled is be2970b0ada8e42cf891ce60ffe69575.xml which can be changed with Notepad or any text editor. Inside this is all the available team slots, to enable a team change its "Active" value from No to Yes. That's the easy bit. The team name might be controlled from here as well, or in another file called dc31.... .english. Let's skip that for now.

Once a team is enabled you will first need to give it a roster. Woosah's editor or the Excel editor can add players to any of the teams with a bit of tinkering.

The hardest bit is adding all of the texture files needed for a team. A team requires these textures: Home kit front, home kit back, away kit front, away kit back, 4 kit UI graphics for the team select screen, menu UI logos, in-game UI logos, ball texture, flag texture. any team playing in a RWC will also need RWC home and away kit files and 4 RWC kit UI files. The file names that are known for these teams are in an Excel sheet that ama1 has shared on this forum. The names are in MD5 format so all look like gibberish.

The majority of the textures are in a .fsh format, which can be accessed through a program called FshEd. This can't edit images itself, but can open and package fsh files for you. There is a plugin for this program that allows you to use different file types such as .png, but I can't remember the exact details of it. The other program needed is BigGUI which opens/packs the .big files that the kit fronts use.

What makes this difficult is that most of the graphics .fsh files contain a text file in them that acts as an address/reference for that texture, and without getting this correct the file will not work in-game. This can be done with FshEd and Notepad, but it gets fiddly trying to remember the correct references to use.

Any files you create/edit get placed into your Rugby 08 folder in Program Files, next to the .exe . You do not need to package these files into "data.gob" which you might see mentioned elsewhere, ignore this.

A final warning is that previous modders have said that adding too many extra teams to the game causes it to crash, as the game has some limit to how many teams it expects to use. I've not experienced this myself as when I've messed with adding teams "it just works" (tm), but it's worth keeping in mind.

 

[Killswitch]

Jeez I thought it was way much more easier, like having a program where you can freely add players and teams to the database without compromising the integrity of the files (much like other sport games like, let's say, FIFA for example with the famous Creation Master by Rinaldo). Yep, I might as well give up on trying to mod this game by myself, I'm experienced in modding other games but I always do it with an specific database tool that organizes everything in just one program like the aforementioned Creation Master or, like in the case with other completely different games like GTA San Andreas there's that TXD Workshop to extract/add the textures and the models of the game. This way I think it's way too difficult for me to do and I would end up doing some **** that would cause the game to crash or stop working properly.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the help guys, I'll try to find some 2007/08 season mods in this forum or elsewhere if that's possible. If any of you or anybody else knows where I can find a 2007/08 season mod for Rugby 08 that completes the game with the missing teams in each championship and/or organizes the teams by their own leagues* I'd be very thankful.

*What I mean by that in case it's not that clear, it's the fact that we only have the Super XIV teams in the vanilla game organized by an individual league. All the european clubs are in a single "european" division rather than separated by english league, french league, italian league and the celtic league.
Thanks again guys.

 

[jim546]

Yeah, unfortunately because the player-base has always been small there's not the big demand or the skill-base to create an all-in-one mod like you'd get for FIFA or similar. Instead the process is in bits and pieces like I described. Once you know what you're doing it's straightforward, but there's a few stumbling blocks to overcome when you're learning the process.

 

[Killswitch]

Yeah, unfortunately because the player-base has always been small there's not the big demand or the skill-base to create an all-in-one mod like you'd get for FIFA or similar. Instead the process is in bits and pieces like I described. Once you know what you're doing it's straightforward, but there's a few stumbling blocks to overcome when you're learning the process.

Thanks, maybe one day I'll try that but for now I'll keep with the modding on games I know how I can do it and/or games that have specific tools all-in-one.