Is there any way to modify the menu .bin files?

skacky on 9/9/2020 at 21:37

I've been working on the menus for The Black Parade and I'm currently facing an issue with SIM, which is the menu used when you press ESC during gameplay.
Basically the layout used is about the same as Thief 1 and 2's: Save and Load at the top, Objectives, Map and Options, and then Quit and Continue. To do this I edited our SIM image and fed it to makerect, which created a SIMR.BIN file specifying where the buttons become clickable.

This is all fine and dandy, with one exception: the Quit and Continue buttons are flipped, meaning that Continue is to the left and Quit to the right where it should be the other way around.

So my question is as follows: is there any way I can edit SIMR.BIN manually so I can rectify this issue?

Jax64 on 10/9/2020 at 00:13

I realize this will not answer the question you pose in the title, but if all you intend to do is switch the two buttons, this can be done without touching the file generated by makerect. The configuration variable “rect_sim” defines which buttons are assigned to each button slot on the sim menu. It accepts eight comma-separated integers representing the index of the selectable regions, which should determined by their positions, with the top left region being index 0 and the bottom right region being index 7. The order of the list of values provided should be structured as follows.

Code:

[continue],[options],[save_game],[load_game],[map],[objectives],[quit],[restart]

For example, this is the default configuration for Thief 1 and 2:

Code:

rect_sim 7,2,0,1,3,4,6,5

This configuration, however, will swap the “Quit” and “Continue” buttons in the menu:

Code:

rect_sim 6,2,0,1,3,4,7,5

skacky on 10/9/2020 at 10:49

Oh it's great if I don't have to touch that .bin file, I was under the assumption the button slots were controlled through this file. All I want to do is switch these two slots, yes. So, how do I use this rect_sim variable?

EDIT: Okay, FireMage found it. It is found in DARK.CFG, probably the last place I would have checked. Using 6,2,0,1,3,4,7,5 it works just fine. Thanks a lot Jax!