Caesar IV

[AdelineJ]

Hello !
I played at Caesar IV for a long time. After my Civilization IV BTS tutorial, I would wan to attack Caesar IV. And for that, I must open the file .dat. Anyone knows how to open them ?
Thanks !
AdelineJ

P.S. I tried in changing .dat in .jpg, .txt, .mp3 or to open with Access, Open Office, Notepad++ but no results...

 

[Maniacal]

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fileextensions/f/dat-file.htm

 

[coanda]

.dat is a data file. It's a pretty generic extension which basically just means "some program has a use for the contents of this, somehow;" it doesn't imply any particular format to the data contained within. If it's gibberish in a text editor, odds are pretty good you'll have to use a hex editor to alter it, plus lots (and lots) of trial-and-error. There are lots of working hex-editors out there; I use xvi32 personally.

 

[AdelineJ]

Thanks, finally a program that opens my files .dat ! But I understand nothing ! I would want to read this datas to modify the game but I understand nothing, no words... How must I do ?

 

[Maniacal]

I'm going to guess these files are what is generally referred to as "hard coded" in regards to modding, ie, its not something you can easily modify without the right tools and possibly cracking the .exe file.

 

[coanda]

Thanks, finally a program that opens my files .dat ! But I understand nothing ! I would want to read this datas to modify the game but I understand nothing, no words... How must I do ?

Hex editing is a pain. Basically you are looking at a representation of the actual binary of a file, and you need to guess what it corresponds to. Sometimes that's easy - for example, if you open a file which you know contains information that you have $1928377, you can just go look for the hex-equivalent of that and be pretty sure that any such entry you find is the correct one. But most of the time it involves just picking a likely-looking entry, editing it, seeing if the program still runs, and seeing if you can figure out what you changed if it does still run. It's time-consuming, frustrating, tedious work.