How do I get started again?

crazychop wrote:
I remembered there was a tool that is required to convert the binary ini files to plain-text format…Is that still needed?

It depends what file you want to modify.
Try this:
http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:_RnsG_p-9fMJ:eoa.seriouszone.com/%3Fpage%3Dbinieditor+neos+bini+editor&cd=1&hl=hu&ct=clnk≷=hu

I think he means a mass converter not a single program.

What you are looking for is QuickFix 1.0c, I believe you can find this in the downloads section.

There’s also Jason’s Freelancer Patch (an update to QuickFix, but if people aren’t recommending it, perhaps not; look in Critical Downloads) or if you just want to convert the original files try TINI.

Or maybe the SDK? I guess it can be more recommended for modding than quickfix and/or JFLP.
You find it either in the downloads area or at www.eoa.seriouszone.com

I found what seems to be a very compliant decoder / encoder here: http://nullprogram.com/projects/bini/binitools.html
I haven’t seen quotes in the ini section headers but I tested it and it appeared to work, although other versions of bini don’t do the same…

Is anyone more familiar and can comment on the difference here?

That said I tend not to use bini and use the SDK as a starting point instead, it has a quite a few bug fixes as well as including the ini files in their decoded format.

I will say this once more: BINI decoders (unless a new one was recently created/patched) have quite a few holes in them which render certain files (such as mBases.ini) unusable. While the game will work to a point with those broken files, editing anything becomes chaos and can lead to unexpected/unexplained crashes.

The SDKs have all those bugs fixed and more, so it is highly recommended that you stick with them. The BINI tools should be solely used for recompression or decompression of non-vanilla files - although I’d question the morality of this last purpose.

Well, if you use TINI (or however it is called) by adoxa, there should be no bugs since it uses the FL decoding functions.

Yes, I did think a new one was built by adoxa but wasn’t totally sure. Of course with that in mind this one should work, but most people still only think of the old BINI decoder, which isn’t good.

Yep, TINI is right (as in text ini, pronounced tinny). It uses the functions found in common.dll, so anything Freelancer can read, so can TINI. Of course, JFLP also comes with the files already unpacked. (If by errors you mean settings without values, this is actually allowed by the game and has been restored by JFLP.) To cause further confusion, my BINI tool packs the text files back to binary. My files are slightly smaller than the originals, since I take advantage of prefixed strings and boolean values. Both tools should be safe, since I unpacked all the original files, re-packed them, re-unpacked them, with no differences.

@adoxa: Yes, but it’s not specifically that they don’t have values (I know this is tolerated in quite a few instances), it’s just that when they do not, the old BINI tools didn’t do a line feed, which created all sorts of nightmares to use the file because two parameters would sit on the same line.

Ah, I didn’t realize that. I do know there was another packer/unpacker pair, but the packer would generate junk once the file was too big. The bini-tools packer is okay, but decided it was better to write my own than modify it to work without the quotes.