SWG Guides - Custom POI's : Star Wars Galaxies Guides

I figured out you can add custom point's of interests to your game, which will display for every toon logging in on that computer. It will not transfer to other computers that you log in to!

Yays or Nays please.

Yay, excellent post

yay handy if your datapad is brimming.

I finally took a look at this today. I can not find a clientpoi.iff. This doesn't even explain which TOC or TRE to start with.


This closest I've found is data_other_00.tre > datatables > clientregion > planet.iff (for each planet)

The format of these iffs are not what is listed in this post.

The format of these iffs is Name X Z Radius adding anything to one of these iffs and saving it as clientpoi.iff i the SWG datatables\clientpoi.iff file just crashes the game when you go to open your datapad.


Can someone put more light on this?

Ah right, I apologize. I must have written that in a hurry or something.

First time:
Download TREExplorer and save it somewhere
Open it up and go to file->settings->Associations: Make sure IFF is checked.
Press "Ok"
File->Open->Tre/Toc and navigate to your SWG directory, and select sku0_client.toc. This is a Table Of Contents file, that is also loaded by SWG. This picks the latest version of everything from the TRE files.

After it finishes reading it you will see a folder tree on the left side, navigate to datatables, then clientpoi. Right click clientpoi.iff and choose Export. Navigate to your SWG directory, and create the folder datatables/clientpoi and save clientpoi.iff in there.
Thus making it look: SWGDir/datatables/clientpoi/clientpoi.iff

Now for whenever adding POIs
Go to your SWG dir, datatables, clientpoi and double click clientpoi.iff


Then just scroll to the bottom and add a new one, dont bother with the @StringTable:KeyName format as name/description as that tells the game to point it to the stringtables, can just put the name/description in there and it'll display as []:Name, with Name being the name you put in. This has the added benefit of your custom POI's showing up at the bottom of the list.

Then put in the X Y Z coordinates (Y is Z and Z is Y in that list! So usually you'll want Y to be 0).

Save the file. Restart your game, and you're done!

Yay


Much better description of what to do!


Any idea where the description field is stored? Would be nice to click on the POI and it show a description like normal.

I've located the correct STF files to make the Name and Description work correctly. Working with these two files clientpoi_n.stf (names) and clientpoi_d.stf (descriptions) you can make custom POIs that display just like the normal ones.

Thanks for the great lead in here.

Yeah I know where those are, but it just was a whole lot of trouble. One time I planned to make a tool to edit those and such, but got distracted and never picked it up...
Tool would be based on TRE Explorers source code and linked libraries... Already had the part to modify the IFF files, and the stf's shouldn't be tricky either.
If there is interest in this I'll consider picking this up, otherwise you should take a look around modsource, the source code of TRE Explorer is released there somewhere.

IT would be nice if there was a tool that would do the editing for you. All you need to do was enter the planet, XYZ, name and description would be sweet.

Any idea what the appearance field does? Waypoint color or something?

I have no idea, maybe it is no longer used. "Red" "#FF0000" And "FF0000" don't do anything. Possibly it's also an overlay effect but can't really be bothered to try those out...

However I did wonder one thing, where are the descriptions used? I can't find that in-game...

Would be nice if was waypoint color so you could change the custom POIs to different color. I'll have to look around. Also, what I did for my guild was just zip up the 3 files so they could just put them in the datatables\clientpoi\ and string\en\ folders, this gets them to the point of only doing the assoiciation of the iff and str files and then adding their waypoints.

I made some SS if you want to use them as well. Again great work on finding this!

And a default layout for the files:

Also, I'm not sure how the self filling ID field in the two stf files will be effected by new POIs coming from later SOE patches. So what I did was start with high number. In my case I went back and changed my custom POI name and desc to start at 450. I figure I'd be safe with that.


I have not look, but is there an appearance file for the clientpoi?


edit

After a quick look, it seems the appearance field would use a piece of artwork from a file and we know POIs are waypoints not objects so it probably doesn't do anything and might be best if not messed with. Although, how cool would it be to put say darth vader in front of your house as the waypoint marker!! lol.

Haha, that would be hilarious. But I doubt it would do anything, since when I set it different values, it just kept on working.

Also, when SOE releases new POIs the files in the TRE's will be updated, and this overwrites them. So new POIs released by SOE simply won't be displayed.