Eventually I'll document how to mod and edit World of Warships files here. To start with I'm going to play around with replacing “unrealistic” camo for some ships with more historical (though not entirely historically accurate) paint schemes.

I use GIMP and the DDS plugin for this:

• https://www.gimp.org/
• https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-dds/
• https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-normalmap/

I will use the RN cruiser Leander as an example and replace the 2017 camo that was a campaign reward from Santa's Christmas Convy.

First you need to download the resource unpacker tool, MajorRenegade has uploaded it here.

In this case I'm going to update the camo to use the same textures and colours that are defined for the premium version of the camo for the Leander.

There are a few steps involved in removing this strange decision from the game.

1. Portrait
2. Voice
3. Name

Changing the portrait and voice are fairly straightforward, you can simply use one of the standard US portraits and voices. Changing the name requires modifying the translation file and unfortunately this change doesn't survive patch updates to it needs to be made after every update.

The files requiring changes to completely remove Seagal's portrait can be found here:

res\gui\crew_commander\base\USA\Seagal.png
res\gui\crew_commander\overlay\USA\overlay_Seagal_1.png
res\gui\crew_commander\overlay\USA\overlay_Seagal_2.png

Choose any portrait and the corresponding overlay files from the same directories and rename them to overwrite the Seagal PNG files in res_mods\$VERSION.

To replace the voice files, extract the audio files for the US captain from this location:

res\banks\Languages\EN\*.*

Move all the files in this directory to the following location:

res_mods\$VERSION\banks\OfficialMods\Seagal

Next, modify the mod.xml config file you extracted to this folder and replace the <Name>EN</Name> attribute with <Name>Seagal</Name>.

Finally, to change the name it is necessary to modify the text strings in the gettext translations file. This file is not extracted, but is part of the actual game installation, and can be found here:

C:\Games\World_of_Warships\res\texts\en\LC_MESSAGES\global.mo

This is the compiled version and will need to be decompiled using gettext and can be done online here.

Once you have the global.po version of the file, you can modify it using an editor such as Poedit by replacing the translation string for IDS_SEAGAL with another name such as George Rood.

Some ships have custom camouflage that not only change the colours, but also have a custom or modified model file as well. If you want to use the baseline model for the ship in place of the modified model, you need to follow some additional steps.

Here I will use the example of removing the “beer can” on the top of the Kobayashi custom camo for the Roma.

First determine the location of the “normal” model in the game files, for the Roma this is located:

• Creating Custom Ship Textures and Camouflages by Rem_