Original Guide[www.evernote.com]

While the modding tools for Dawn of War III have a lot of potential a few stubborn decisions by Relic have made things a little more difficult than they need to be. One of those things is the mod tools being out of date with none of the October patch files being visible within the Attribute Editor. Others cannot be "Cloned" within the editor and thus you can't edit them for your mod.

This presents a few annoying problems for enterprising modders looking to create tuning mods for the game. Anything you edit will overwrite the game properly still, but some stuff may be out of date if it was changed in the October patch. And perhaps more importantly the October Elites are not currently visible within the Attribute Editor making it impossible to tune them.

Luckily there's a workaround solution thanks to copernicus, a long time modder and tool maker for the Essence engine games. His tool "rgdConv v1.4" allows you to convert Relic's .rgd archive files into .xml which can be edited with any text editor and then repackage them again as .rgd files for use with your mod.

First you need to download the tool here:
RGDConv v1.4[www.dropbox.com]


Extract it to a folder somewhere handy, and then create a few empty folders within the directory. I use "Input", "Output" and "Edited" to organize my own workflow.


Next you want to use the Archive Viewer tool and extract the Attrib.sga from your [Your steam path]\Dawn of War III\DoW3\archives folder. I would just extract everything but you can also selectively extract the files you are most interested in editing.


Now that you have the archive extracted, move the specific .rgd files into the "Input" folder. I recommend pulling the entire folder chain so you know where the file came from. Next you want to press the Windows key and type "cmd" this will bring up the windows command prompt.

Right click on the address bar for your RGDConv folder and click copy address as text. Then in the command prompt type the letters "cd" and then paste the address and press enter

Next type the following without quotations "rgdConv.exe hash_dict.txt input output -x -d"
This tells the program to consult the dictionary and then take all the folders from the input folder and move them to the output folder while converting them into .xml files.

You can now open these files with .xml and edit them similarly to the existing tools, albeit it without the friendly user interface. I use Notepad++ for this and I recommend using Ctrl+F and searching for what you are looking for. In this example I will enlarge the targeting reticule for the Battlewagon Launch Em ability from 1 to 5.


Now you want to do a very similar process. Go back to your command prompt and type "rgdConv.exe hash_dict.txt output edited -x -d" without the quotation marks.

This will convert your edited .xml file back into an .rgd file useable within the game.

Now in order to use it with your mod you have to bake the .rgd file into your mod files. To do this open your .mod file with the Mod Builder and start adding new folders to fill out the same directory path as the file had in the Attrib.sga archive. Then once you've made all the folders right click on the appropriate one and click "Add Burn File" then path to your Edited folder and select the appropriate .rgd file. As an example here is my Battlewagon directory.



Now "Build" your mod as normal. I always navigate to my "C:\Users\dulla\Documents\my games\Dawn of War III\mods\tuning\local" folder and then copy the .sga to both my mod name folder and the steam ID for the workshop just to be sure it will take effect ingame.

You can confirm that the file is burnt into the archive correctly with the Archive Viewer tool and opening up your mod .sga file. Just remember to make sure the file path is exactly the same as the file you want to overwrite.


Above image shows the change within the game.