For editing the CSF file! This file holds all string values in the game. If you want to change a unit name, message or UI text then you'll need to edit the CSF file. Or use the extracted string file.

See notes in my "CSF to STR" program mentioned below.

Instead of editing the CSF file, you can use this plain text string file instead. It's basically an export of the CSF in to a readable format.

This seems to have been built with the CSF Editor, or at least using its XML output feature. Therefor it has the issues as mentioned/fixed with my "CSF to STR" program below. I'm leaving this up as a legacy download as it's what we've used as a modding base for the last 17 years!

The original "CSF Editor" by Scorpio9a has some issues. The one mostly affecting English users is that there is a lot of dialog missing. It also doesn't seem to be able to output non-English CSF files to XML, which is required for creating an STR file.

I was asked on YouTube how to extract these modded and non-English CSF files to STR. The only way way I could think of was... to write a new tool. I'm not a programmer but can get by and so ended up with this.

After looking through the CSF file in a hex editor and deciphering the unicode, I believe a big problem with the old CSF Editor was that it can't handle quotes("). If it comes across one it assumes the end of a sentence, when the game actually uses them to highlight speech as part of dialog. There were also some odd handlings of unknown characters which I dealt with in a slightly different way. Yet another difference may the way the CSF file tells you how long a string is meant to be, which is frequently wrong for very long strings. Quite annoying.

...basically, STR files generated with my tool should be more accurate. If not, send me the CSF and what errors/issues you're seeing so I can try to fix them.

v0.9.4 is a minor update which changes the way blocks are read. This was to fix an issue with the German language. Should be better for all languages now.

v1.0 has added support for recovering corrupt CSF files. There are CSF editors around which corrupt the files, yet people still use them! We've known about this corruption for over a decade yet people still use them. Not that I care, but I care more than the people who wrote and abandoned these original programs. I can't recover the corrupt data but I can attempt to recover what comes after. The problem is that may also be corrupt.

DDS importer and exporter script. Verified with Photoshop but should work with GIMP.

For exploring and extrating files from .big archives. Newer versions are probably available but this one I had archived and verified working.

For importing W3D files in RenX.

For importing W3D files in RenX. This version supports importing animations, however is a little more fiddly to work with.

For exporting 3D models. Can be used to import but requires importer scripts above