I want to change the weapons used by the various Vampires in the game, giving them both an on-hand and offhand weapon. I was expecting that I could just open up Near Infinity, look up the hex offsets for "Weapon1" and "Shield," and WRITE_SHORT my new filenames in there. But what I got instead was wholly other: A list of items carried by the creature, and then the various equipping slots simply point to lines in that list. Yeah, I suppose I could replace an existing item easily enough, but how do I add a new item to the list, so I can have the Shield slot point to it?
My alternative is completely replacing every single Vampire .CRE in the game, and that's hardly elegant.
On a completely unrelated matter, has anyone ever figured out how to add new Description graphics? A while back, I made a nice little sword image that looks almost authentic, but I can't put the bitmap into a format that the game can read.