Changing ingame images?

[Tassyr]

So I've got a very, very simple question. I've used Paint.net to remove the red and yellow 'halos' around crew/enemy crew (unless you're selecting them, of course) since that effect always screwed with immersion for me. So... how do I package these files so I can load them to my game?

[UltraMantis]

You can use the Dat Manager to open resources.dat, delete the regular files, replace them with your versions (filenames should be identical) then repack the resources.dat

An alternative would be to create a GMM compatible mod. For that you would have to edit animations.xml and save it as animations.xml.append (Remove all non-edited content from the xml.append file, you only need the changes) and place it in a folder called data. The edited animation sheets must be placed in img\people (or elsewhere if you specify different paths in animations.xml.append). Next you zip up the data and img folder, and rename filename.zip to filename.ftl. If all goes well, you can use GMM to patch your mod into the game. The upside is that you can also share the mod with others since it doesnt include the entire resources.dat file (which is not legal to share and unneccesarily large as well).

Having backups of data.dat and resources.dat is advised.

[DryEagle]

Make sure the images are saved as 32-bit png; paint.net will often do 24-bit if you picked 'automatic' in quality, so you will need to re-save it as 32bit or the game won't load the images at all.