XCC Mixer
| XCC Utilities |
| XCC AV Player |
| XCC Mixer |
| XCC Mix Editor |
| XCC TMP Editor |
| Other XCC Tools |
| XCC Sound Editor |
| XCC String Table Editor |
| XCC Editor |
| XCC Mod Creator |
| XCC Mod Launcher |
| XCC Map Encoder and Decoder |
| XCC Radar Customizer |
| XCC RA2 Map Updater |
| XCC WOL IRC Server |
| Command Line Tools |
| XCC INI CLT |
| XCC MIX CLT |
| Winamp Plugins |
| XCC AUD Writer Plug-In |
| XCC IMA ADPCM WAV Writer Plug-In |
XCC Mixer is the most popular and useful utility in the modding community. It is vital to any modder, as without it you can't extract any files from within the game = no rules to edit = no mod.
Setting up mixer
When you start XCC Mixer, you'll see two panels - the left one, where a list of files is shown, and the right one, where the files can be previewed. However, there is the third (hidden) one, which is a complete copy of the left panel. To open it, move your mouse to the thick double line separating the left and right panels. Move it slightly to the right, on the second line. Now click and drag to the right, until the right panel is compacted to about 1/3 of the window. Most of the functions use the directory open in the other panel as the destination (like, Selecting "Copy" in the left panel will copy the files to the directory currently open in the middle panel, and vice versa). Beware, it won't ask for confirmation when a file of that name already exists in the destination directory. Sadly, it does not remember the middle panel's position between sessions, so you'll need to open the middle panel everytime you use the Mixer.
Extracting files from the game
Navigate the left panel to the game directory. Open the mix file containing the files you want to extract. Navigate the middle panel to the dir where you want to put those files (most probably, the game dir itself). Select all the wanted files, right click on them and select "Copy". Voila, you have the files in your directory.
Converting art assets from TS to RA2
Note that TS uses cameos of size 64x48, while RA2 uses 60x48. And the buildings in RA2 are approximately 25% larger than in TS. You can use Irfanview to easily convert/resize any number of graphical files.
Navigate the left panel to the TS directory. Open the mix file containing the art assets you want to copy. Select the correct palette using Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-]. Navigate the middle panel to a temporary directory. "Copy as PCX" the wanted files. You will get a load of PCX files. Now navigate left panel to RA2 directory (or wherever you want to put the converted files). Select the correct palette again. Now in the middle panel, select all the PCX files whose name has "0000.pcx" in it, and "Copy as SHP(TS)" them. If you select all the .pcx, you'll get the same result, but then you'll see errors in the status bar. Ignore them.
The Mixer supports the following file formats and conversions: (incomplete listing)
SHP <-> PCX,JPG,PNG,TGA
VXL <-> PCX,JPG,TGA,PNG,TXT
HVA -> CSV
TXT -> HVA,VXL,HTML
DDS -> PNG,PCX,TGA,TXT,VXL (Will not give you a voxel...)