Can someone out there post some general guidelines on how to write mods for TSM?

I'm seeing mods being put up, but not a whole lot in the way of support or tutorials the way they're provided for TS3 on the main website.

I have S3PC and S3OC on my machine, which is running Windows7. I did the wrapper for Medieval, but didn't notice any difference whether it was present or not. Maybe that's because I didn't try modifying any CAS parts, but just tried doing some basic tuning mods.

I have two basic questions:

1. The text of the entries, unlike that for TS3, is not that self-explanatory to a non-programmer. Is this game written in a different language, or is there some part of the wrapper that I failed to install that would suddenly make it understandable to me?

2. When I try to open many of the entries, I get the following error:

"Unhandled exception has occurred in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you click Quit, the application will close immediately."

Clicking "details" provides stuff like:

************** Exception Text **************
System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array.
at s3pi.Interfaces.TypedValue.ToDisplayString(Char[] text)
at s3pi.Interfaces.TypedValue.ToString(String format)
at S3PIDemoFE.MainForm.getValueControl()
at S3PIDemoFE.MainForm.controlPanel1_AutoChanged(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at S3PIDemoFE.MainForm.browserWidget1_SelectedResourceChanged(Object sender, ResourceChangedEventArgs e)
at S3PIDemoFE.BrowserWidget.OnSelectedResourceChanged(Object sender, ResourceChangedEventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.ListView.OnSelectedIndexChanged(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.ListView.WmReflectNotify(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ListView.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

If I can't open these files with S3PE, what did the people who modified these files use instead?

Any other help would also be appreciated.

Thank you!

I have a tutorial concerning XML and ITUN modding in the thread titled 'Mods' on page 21. Further down on this same page velocitygrass has posted a link to their DTTB Converter and Wrapper which is necessary for reading XML and ITUN resources, as these are compressed in that DTTB binary crap. Some other text-based resources can also be read when you have this installed.

This Wrapper and the CaSPart Wrapper are the only ones I know of, so a lot of the resource types cannot be read or, presumably, modded, at all. I do not use s3oc, but I presume it cannot be used at all with this game.

_IMG and IMAGs can be read fine in s3pe, so it's possible to do default replacement graphics thingies.

Thank you -- that's what I needed to know!

Someone ought to sticky those threads.