Keen: Modding

Hello everyone!

I've finally mustered the courage to start a new mod, aiming to create one with completely new graphics (perhaps a sequel to Back To Fribbulus Xax).

To achieve this, I'm following the updated Keen Modding Tutorial (patch-based). Before explaining the issue I'm encountering, I want to express my appreciation for the continuous updates to Keen Modding "techniques," which undoubtedly make life easier for modders.

Now, let's get to the point of this post: I'm running into some difficulties extracting graphics using uGrab. Specifically, when I execute ugrab_k4_out.bat, I receive the following error message:
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to resolve this issue?

Thanks in advance!

P.S.: Since I'm using a Mac, I'm running a virtualized Windows machine using UTM to work on the mod (just wanted to mention this in case it might be relevant to the problem).

Take care,

-- Alopex

Hello, Alopex! I'm sorry that you had to wait for nearly a whole month to get a response; not many people visit Keen: Modding these days.

I've never used uGrab before, but one question I'd like to ask is: Are you modding version 1.4 of Keen 4? When modding the Galaxy games, it should always be version 1.4 from Apogee. Also, why is there an EGADICT.CK4 file in your directory? I feel like it shouldn't be there. Though, maybe I'll try out a test run of uGrab and see how that goes...

Quillax wrote: Tue Oct 22, 2024 5:06 pm Hello, Alopex! I'm sorry that you had to wait for nearly a whole month to get a response; not many people visit Keen: Modding these days.

I've never used uGrab before, but one question I'd like to ask is: Are you modding version 1.4 of Keen 4? When modding the Galaxy games, it should always be version 1.4 from Apogee. Also, why is there an EGADICT.CK4 file in your directory? I feel like it shouldn't be there. Though, maybe I'll try out a test run of uGrab and see how that goes...

Hello Quillax!

Thanks for the reply!

I managed to solve the problem: in the tutorial (after the UNLEXE part), it asks you to rename the KEEN4 EXE file with a name different from the one specified in the ModId definition file. That's why uGrab launched that error with EGADICT, because it couldn't find the EXE.

The tutorial should be corrected to avoid this kind of problem.

You're welcome!

Great to hear that you solved the problem yourself! Good catch on the executable file name, it looks like the tutorial got it slightly wrong (it should be "keen4e.exe", not "keen4.exe"). I'm surprised that the mistake went unnoticed for nearly 14 years! I went ahead and corrected that. I also included a note about the executable file names for the other two Galaxy episodes, mainly to point out that Keen 6 does not have an "e" after the number in its executable file name (i.e. "keen6.exe"). That's probably why you didn't have this issue when modding Keen 6.

Quillax wrote: Sat Oct 26, 2024 8:31 am You're welcome!

Great to hear that you solved the problem yourself! Good catch on the executable file name, it looks like the tutorial got it slightly wrong (it should be "keen4e.exe", not "keen4.exe"). I'm surprised that the mistake went unnoticed for nearly 14 years! I went ahead and corrected that. I also included a note about the executable file names for the other two Galaxy episodes, mainly to point out that Keen 6 does not have an "e" after the number in its executable file name (i.e. "keen6.exe"). That's probably why you didn't have this issue when modding Keen 6.

Well, the issue is that the previous tutorial was written with ModKeen in mind (which I personally used for Back to Fribbulus Xax), a tool that doesn't require a definition file within the mod folder. When integrating with uGrab, the tutorial needed to be adapted to include this specific file, hence the problem I faced.
By the way, to debug this issue, I received assistance from the legendary K1n9_Duk3, who explained that the definition file specifies the EXE that uGrab uses to extract EGAs.