How to make own portrait for Fallout Tactics.

Polski

Making your own, unique hero in FoT is surely one of those things that gives you great plesure. It is sad that game programmers haven't made possibility of attaching your own picture too. But not all is lost :) You can make it with 10 simply steps !

Before that, you must have few things. First, download super duper utility named Game Resource Viewer. Second, get any DTP program like Photoshop or Gimp. And of course your picture :P

Let's start.

1. After scaning your picture, cut area around your pretty face :) (a)

2. Now you must remove the background behind your face and fill it with contrast colour. You don't have to be like a surgeon ;) you will resize this image and some non-exactly cuts wont be as much visible.

3. Now convert the image to grayscale and after that again to 24bit. (b)

(a) (b) (c)

4. Now resize it to 75x100 (c). In Photoshop you can easily do this by making Layer with your face and change 'Canvas Size' to proper value. After that you could make 'Free Transform' on this layer and place it where you want.

5. We must enter now to the Fallout Tactics directory. There is 'gui_0.bos' file in the ''Core' subdir. Change its extension to *.zip.
Unpack 'mp_tr05.zar' from it (it is in 'char' subdir). After that you can change gui_0.zip extension back to *.bos

6. Run the Game Resource Viewer and open unpacked 'mp_tr05.zar'. Copy your face picture to clipboard and paste it ( button) into the place of opened one. 'Inser page' window will show up (image below). Change value to the left bottom corner from 0 to 1 and press ok.

------------>

7. If everything is ok, you can see your face instead this tribal above. Now just 'Save as' and give your requested name. If program hanged up then try repeat point 3.

8. We now must put this new *.zar file into FoT. There are two possibilities:
a) you have played FoT already - we must then check what picture is attached to your hero. Enter to the Fallout\core\user\char directory. There is 'yourname.chr' file. Open it and find text matching this pattern: "CORE_prefabX" or this "CORE_rec_XXXX". You must change your *.zar name to this you have found in the file.
b) you haven't started yet - act like described above and chenge *.zar name to "CORE_prefab1" (if you want male hero) lub "CORE_prefab4 " (for female).

9. In the core directory make "\gui\char" subdir and copy there just made your Fallout picture.

10. Dismissed.

In case of questions please mail to unborn@interia.pl with "Failure is not an option" topic ;p Feel free to change (translationz?) and distribute this manual.