[Chancellor23]

All right. For reference purposes, I’ve attached a copy of my modified Level_03_The_Hill.lua file so you can see if I’ve coded anything incorrectly. My changes:

• Added the SMLE to the Game.CachedWeapons table.
• Substituted the SMLE for the Gew98 in the Game.PlayerEnabledWeapons table.
• Changed the self:StartWithWeapon value to SMLE.

Assuming that the SMLE shares ammo with the Gew98, I did not modify the Player.Ammo table.

Originally Posted by Gniarf

You do NOT need top extract all the files from levels.pak. You can extract only some files (in \NecroVisioN\Data\[pakfile name]\[appropriate subdir]), modify them, keep levels.pak and the game will use the modified files.

That’s what I thought. It was like that in Painkiller. Unfortunately, that’s what I did and it didn’t work.

Originally Posted by Gniarf

WTF²? The files are probably in the wrong directory or not named properly; it should be NecroVisioN\Data\levels\Level_03_The_Hill\Level_03 _The_Hill.lua .Try extracting all the content of levels.pak and renaming the archive to levels.bak; if the game crashs then the files aren't extracted correctly (that dual directory issue again? No wait, we already did the empty loader.lua experiment, so we know the correct subdir).

I triple-checked the pathnames and file placements. The game did not crash upon launch; so, I’m sure I got the filenames and pathnames right. This time, however, I simplified the process because NVN doesn’t seem to be using the individual modified files. In C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspyr\NecroVisioN\Data, I created a subfolder named “Levels”. I copied all of the extracted files and folders into that directory, which is named C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspyr\NecroVisioN\Data\Levels. Then I swapped the modified Level_03_The_Hill.lua into C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspyr\NecroVisioN\Data\Levels\Level_03_The_H ill. To be on the safe side, I moved the levels.pak source file out of the C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspyr\NecroVisioN\Data folder to a safe place so there would be no confusion when I launched the game.

This did not work. I still got the Gew98 and the crash in Chapter 3.

So, I moved the Levels folder to my user profiles Data folder: C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Aspyr\NecroVisioN\Data\Levels. Because I removed the levels.pak file and the Levels folder out of C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspyr\NecroVisioN\Data, I thought the game might crash. It didn’t. Chapter 3 loaded successfully. But I still got the Gew98 as my startup weapon and aiming still crashes the game.

Final Verdict: I’m going to uninstall and remove all of the NVN folders from the Programs (x86) folder and my user profiles folder. I’ll check the Windows Registry while I’m at it. Then I’m going to reinstall the game, create a new profile, and play through to Chapter 3. If NVN still crashes, I’m going to try playing through the level without aiming the Gew98. Or give up on the game.

This is not a lucrative career. What I really am not looking forward to replaying is that head-shot Challenge Room. That was really rough. Everything else was easy.