TibEd 1.x Tutorial

This guide is supposed to get you started with TibEd.

What can you do with TibEd?

TibEd modifies unit settings. That means, with TibEd you can change the speed, the cost and the weapons of units. This is the basic idea, and that you can edit a lot of other things in the game is not very important.
You could, for example, make the Grizzly Tank (from Red Alert 2) stronger and faster. Or you can make the Refinery very cheap so you have more money left for extra units.

How do you do that?

We'll now try this (because TibEd can edit multiple games, and we can't do it for every game here (it's the same everywhere), we'll just stick to Red Alert 2 for now).

TibEd 1.x interface

This is the most important part of TibEd. On the left side of your screen is the section tree (marked in red). The section tree allows you to navigate through the different groups of settings (Vehicles, Infantry, Buildings, Aircraft, Weapons, etc). If you click on a different item in this tree, a different section will show. If you click on vehicles, the rest of the screen will change. Now click on the infantry again, and the infantry editing screen returns.

We're now going to use the rest of the screen. Marked in yellow, you see a list. Since we selected "Infantry" in the section tree, this is an infantry list. Based on your selection in the section tree, the unit list has different contents. Select the "Conscript" from the infantry list, and you now have the conscript settings in front of you. Because the conscript has a lot of settings, the settings are divided over multiple pages. Every page contains a number of settings. You can switch pages using the unit settings pages buttons, marked blue in the image below.

Now that we've discussed the different parts of the screen, we've now arrived at the actual editing: the unit settings (marked in purple). Every single settings controls an aspect of the unit you've selected (you can quickly identify them by looking at the sidebare image above the unit list). For most of the settings, you can imagine what they do (Cost, Speed, Strenght, Armour), but a lot of others are quite vague (Prerequisite, Primary) and for some, the exact effects aren't even known (Locomotor).

Now, try to change the Cost setting of the Conscript, either by using the Up/Down buttons next to the cost, or by typing in a new cost with your keyboard (please do not make Cost negative or 0, this will make the game crash). If you want, you can also increase the strength of the conscript, though you don't notice this very well in the game.

That brings us to another aspect of editing - crashing the game (to keep things easy, internal errors are also crashes). If you set the cost to 0, and play the game, it will crash. A cost of 0 is an illegal value. Because there are so many settings, it's impossible to test out every value for every setting. As a result of this, the values you enter aren't checked by TibEd - they're just put into the game. If you use a strange value (HIGH, when you need to enter a number), the game will crash, but sometimes it happens if you put in a 'correct' value (65000 for Cost), the game will probably crash.
This means that, when editing, you have to take care with what you change. Every setting could in theory crash the game. Just be reasonable when editing (it's no fun when you crash in the middle of your game).

If you want, you could change other values, but for our "first changes" onto the moon... oh wait into the editing world, sorry for that ;) we'd better keep it simple.

Putting your changes into the game

Making changes is one thing - using them another. Now that we've made changes, we need to 'put' them into the game (Saving to game it's called in TibEd). To do that, press the little disk with the red letters "RA" on it. (if you can't find it you can also selected the 'File menu', and then 'Save changes to game'). Your changes are now active in the game, and TibEd asks whether you'd like to run the game. If you have a high-end (fast) computer, you can select yes to run the game, but if you're using the minimum computer for Red Alert 2 (a Pentium II 266), I would recommend selecting No, closing TibEd and then starting the game yourself. It's very good for Red Alert 2 performance to close TibEd first.

My changes are fun - but now I'd like to get rid of them again

Your changes are fun - no doubt, but maybe you want something else? Just make new changes, and save them to the game to put in your new changes.
If you'd like to get rid of your changes - you want the original game back - you can select 'Remove changes from game' from the file menu (or the brush with the red letters 'RA' on it from the toolbar). This will remove all traces of TibEd changes from the game.

Keeping your changes - New, Open and Save

If you made a lot of changes, and would like to use them later, you can consider saving them to disk in the special TibEd file format (this is also the way if you want to send your changes to someone else who has TibEd). The New, Open and Save operations work exactly like in Microsoft Paint, Wordpad, etc, so there should be no problem. The only 'problem' is that you can only have one TibEd changes file open at one time (it's the same in Paint and Wordpad).

Common problems

There are 2 problems which everybody has - so I'll tell about them here:

The End of the Basic guide

A lot of things aren't covered in this guide (try the 'Features' menu). Try the support forum if you're having problems.

Have fun with TibEd!

Koen van de Sande

 
© 1999-2023 Van de Sande Productions