strings.bin

M2TW and the Kingdoms expansion use .strings.bin files instead of normal .txt files for most of the text translation files. The text translation files are the ones in data/text that in RTW had format

{internal_name}      In Game Name

thus providing translation between the internal name used by the engine and that displayed by the game.

To access the strings.bin files at all you first have to unpack your M2TW installation. The strings.bin files in M2TW can be opened with notepad and contents are decipherable to an extent but are not readily edited.

Alpaca has produced a tool that converts the .strings.bin files into the equivalent normal .txt files similar to those used in RTW. The converter may be found here. It can not convert battle.txt, battle_ed.txt, shared.txt, strat.txt or tooltips.txt.

The general principle for using the converter is run the program as instructed to obtain .txt version of the files, edit the .txt files as you would their RTW equivalents, if just altering the ingame text you can use

{internal_name}    New Name

and New Name will appear in game.

If adding regions, events, character names etc you have to also add new sections to represent the internal name inside {} brackets in format to correspond with existing entries.

If you then launch game with only the .txt file available and not the original strings.bin file the game will read the .txt file and in most cases regenerate a new .strings.bin file from the .txt file.