How to Mod Tennis Elbow 2013 ?
Tennis Elbow 2013 has a very open engine, allowing easy modifications of many things. Before to do modifications to TE2013, be sure to agree the License. To do modifications, you must have purchased the complete game. You shouldn't modify the demo version. After, you need a tool to access the files within the file “Pak01.PAK”
located in the “Data” directory. The format of this file is the same
than the one of Quake 2 .Pak files. So, for example, you can use the
tool here: /!\ Important: the directories in the .Pak file are relative to the Tennis Elbow 2013 root directory, not from the Data subdirectory. Ie: if you want to export the Menu directory, it should be to : "[TE2013 Dir]\Menu", not "[TE2013 Dir]\Data\Menu". You can also easily edit the .ini files in the “Data” directory:
"ATP" files are for the men tour, and "WTA" are for the women tour. Later in this document, the files are refered without their ATP or WTA part; just edit the one for the tour you want to modify. |
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When you do modifications, don't forget to test them, and even if everything looks fine, you should open the "System.log" file(within your TE2013 directory) with the Windows Notepad, and look for "Warning" and "Error" (use CTRL+F). Through these messages, the TE2013 Engine will let you know if something seems wrong. Sometimes, something is wrong, but the Engine will not detect it and crashes instead, so be cautious... ;-) |
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Players & Tournaments If you want, you can raise the maximum of players and tournaments by changing these lines in the Tour.ini and Players.ini, under the section [WT_Static] : MaxTournament = 500 But be careful, the saved games will take much more disk space with such parameters ! Moreover, when you change any of these settings, you'll lose your current saved games. If you need to count the number of players per country, change this line in Tennis.ini (or the .ini
of your current profile), under the section [WT_Static], from: /!\ Important:
Invalid Saved Games:
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The “Players.ini” file is quite self-explaining, and contain many parameters. Be very careful to always keep enough players for the Davis Cup / Fed Cup (ie: at least 2 players every year for all countries in the Final & Qualif Draws). Explanations about the parameters : These skills are not normalized : "Concentration", "ColdBlood",
"Constancy", "Motivation". Off Time : you can specify off time for the player, making him not enter any tournament on some specific weeks ; to do so, add the weeks you want him to miss after his rank ; for example : "28 -5.15.20-25.40-," instead of "28," in the RankPerYear line above will make the player misses the week 1 to 5, then 15, then 20 to 25, then 40 to 52 ; it's equivalent of "28 1-5.15.20-25.40-52", but you can omit the 1st "1" and last "52". You need to set [WT_Static]MaxOffTimePlayer to at least the total number of players with off time values. "FirstYear" is the player's career starting year. "SingleDouble" is the affinity for the singles or the doubles : Body = 177 62 How to set the skills ? For Concentration, ColdBlood, Constancy & Motivation for the best players, set them high from 75 to 95 depending of the best rank (from 20 to 1), and lower them a bit when the player has a weakness in this particular area. Outfit Code :
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The use of “Tour.ini” is less obvious, here a line per line explanation: [Tournament001]
To add a tournament, just copy/paste this entire section. The number after “[Tournament” is not important, the engine will sort tournaments by week and importance. You can have up to 30 tournaments per week per competition (ie: 30
for singles, and 30 for doubles). Don't forget the qualifications
count for 1 tournament apart, and Davis Cup Qualification as well. |
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The use of “TourCategory.ini” is even a bit more complicated. [Category01]
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The menus work with scripts. If you add a lot of stuff in menus, you'll need to raise the following values in the "Scripts\GameSys.ini" , under [Menu] : MaxAction, MaxAction, MaxCfg, MaxParam, MaxIniCode. Check in the "System.log" to know how much of these you're using, try to have about 10 or 20% more than needed. The Render Engine uses Shaders, contained in the “Scripts” directory, in the “Pak01.PAK”, with a little doc in the file “Shader.doc”. You can edit them with the Notepad, it’s only plain text. |
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How to add a court ? To add a court, with QPed extract the directory "Data\Court07" (you can't extract other courts' pictures), and then copy everything from it to "Data\CustomCourt01" (you have to create this directory). Edit the icon "Menu\Art\ico\CustomCourt01.tga". You can have up to 4 custom courts visible in the Training Club menu. Alternatively, you can put everything in the new folder "Data\Court10". For the 2D Courts : (visible only when "3D court" is "Off" in the "Video Options") To edit the texture, launch your favourite painter program (Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc...) and open the file "Data\CustomCourt01\Court.jpg" . You'll have also to modify all the .bmp files, which are the sprite files. For the 3D Courts : Open the file "Pak01.Pak/Scripts/GameSys.ini" & look for [Stadium01] . Each 3D court uses a 3D Mesh + 1 texture. You can easily edit & add new texture, but you can't edit the existing 3D meshes. The ground texture will be : "Data\CustomCourt01\CourtTex.jpg" ; the default settings texture for the outdoor stadium is : "Data/Models/Textures/Stadium/CourtA01.jpg" ; for the indoor stadium, it is : "Data/Models/Textures/Stadium/CourtIn1.jpg" . Adding a skin means the game engine will look for CourtA01.jpg or CourtIn1.jpg in the subfolder : "Data/Models/Textures/Stadium/[NameOfSkin]". Physics & World Tour : You can also edit the Court.ini to modify the ball rebound physic & sound, and the skid sounds. If you want to see this court in tournament mode, edit the "Data\Tour.Ini"
file. You can have a total of 200 courts used in the World Tour. To set a icon in World Tour for your new court, you add a "Icon" entry in your [StadiumXX] section which tells what existing icon (from 1 to 9) to display ; for example, the new court 10 will show the icon from the court 7, the Blue-Green Cement, with this : [Stadium10] |
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Moving the camera for the 2D Courts If you add or change an existing court view angle, you'll want to move the camera to match your custom view angle. To do so, edit the "Tennis.ini", and change this line, under [3dEngine], from : Be careful : when the DevMode is turned on, the settings & current World Tour game aren't saved when you exit the game by clicking on the top right cross of the window, or by pressing ALT+F4 . After, in game, press F9 till the line judges and the chair umpire are removed : they are not in 3D, so they won't move when you move the camera. Keys on keypad :
At the same time, press these keys to affect the movement speed :
Once you're done, locate the [Camera] section within your "Tennis.ini", and then copy these entries into the "Court.ini" of your new court : [Camera] Note: of course, the values will be the ones that you'll have set during the game, so they might
differ from these ones. |
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How to add a new T-shirt ? To add a new T-shirt, you should extract all these directories & files, using QPed :
Step 1 : create the new T-shirt (or any other outfit part), and save it in the correct directory (look into the .pak "Data/Models/Textures") with a correct name : "ShirtXX.jpg" where "XX" is the number of the new T-shirt Step 2 : edit "GameSys.Ini", and locate this text : "NbPreset & NbType & FirstType" . Just under, you'll see the list of all possible outfit parts. You just have to increase by one the "NbType" of the part you added a style to. For a male T-shirt, it's [Male_Shirt] . Step 3, only for Female's T-shirt & skirt, and the Male's T-Shirt : you'll
have to define on what 3D model to put the new T-shirt or skirt texture. To do so, open "Data\Models\Textures\Female.Ini"
(or Male.ini) and look for [Female/Shirt], [Female/Shorts] or [Male/Shirt]. If you add a T-shirt,
look this line: For the T-shirt, you'll also need to define a mask to tell the engine what part is the skin in the texture. Step 4 : you should be done now, just launch the game, and look if your new part style is available in the outfit customization screen..! |
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How to distribute your Mod to other users ? The best way to create a Mod that you can release so other people can install it easily is to do the following :
A little explanation how the game engine loads files : When the game engine wants to load a file, it'll look for the file in the hard drive 1st, then if it didn't find it, it looks for it in the last .pak file (Pak02.pak on a unmodified installation), then if it still didn't find it, it looks in the previous .pak files till the 1st one (Pak01.Pak). So if you add Pak03.pak, the game engine will look for files in it after the files in your hard-drive and before to look for them in Pak02.pak . In both cases (hard drive, then .Pak), the game check the Mods subfolder 1st and then the game folder.
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If you need any additional information, you can ask for help in the Forum : And read the FAQ here that explains a lot of other topics, including animation: |
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