CREATE YOUR OWN HURRICAN LEVELS AND MODIFICATIONS

Short introduction
Extracting content from the hurrican.dat file
Replacing graphics and sounds
Using a custom folder
Using an own language file
Creating own levels using the leveleditor
List of enemy values for the leveleditor
Important tipps & tricks


Short introduction

Using your own content in Hurrican is quite simple. As you may have noticed, all content for the game is stored in the "hurrican.dat" archive in your Hurrican directory. You can however "force" the game to load alternate graphics/sounds etc. instead. Just create a folder named "data" in you Hurrican root-directory. Whenever the game loads graphics, sounds, music, levels or whatever it needs, it will first look into the "data" folder. If this folder or the specified file does not exist, it loads the "default" file from the "hurrican.dat" archive. So far, so good (so what...). By now, you will ask yourself: "That's pretty cool, but how the hell do I know WHAT files the game loads and HOW are they called?". Don't worry. Read on to learn how to extract all the files from the archive to your data folder.

Extracting content from the hurrican.dat file

The hurrican.dat file is nothing else than a winrar archive that is locked up with a password. And it just took about two days after the release until someone cracked the password and gained access to the files, now that is security. Anyway, the ultra-secret master-password is called... attention please.... kochello
Who or what is kochello? That doesn't matter right now, but is has something to do with resident evil 4 which we played a lot when it came out ;)
So now you can go on and unpack all files from the hurrican.dat archive into your data folder.

Replacing graphics and sounds

As i said before, the game will try to load the files from the data folder instead of the ones from the archive. So whenever you modify a file in the data folder, it will take effect the next time you launch the game.

Using a custom folder

The data folder is good for testing around, but how can Hurrican handle multiple modifications? You don't want to overwrite an existing mod everytime you want to test something else, do you? To solve this problem, you can create subfolders for each modification. As you did before with the "data" folder, create now a "levels" folder, again in the hurrican root directory. Now switch into the levels folder and create a new subfolder. This will be the folder for your modification. So by now, the hurrican folder should look something like this.

hurrican/levels/mymod_xyz
hurrican/data
hurrican/hurrican.exe
hurrican/hurrican.dat
etc.

Now launch Hurrican from the startmenu so that the startertool will appear. The combobox under the "choose levelpack" label should now show the entries "standard" and "mymod_xyz" plus all available modifications you have installed. Simply choose your own mod folder. The game will now try to load all content from this new folder. If a file doesn't exist, it will try to load it from the "data" folder. If it doesn't exist there either, it will be loaded from the archive. So all files that are located in your mod folder will be loaded instead of the original files. The rest of the content will be loaded from the archive though.

Using an own language file

To use an own custom language file for your mod you could e.g. open the english.lng, change it, save it as "mytexts.lng" and tell everyone who plays your mod to go to the preferences menu and switch manually to your own language file. The advantage would be: it would work. The problem is: you can't make sure that everyone loads your modified language file.
You can solve this by saving an "custom.lng" file in your mod folder. When you launch Hurrican with a modification selected, it will look for such a file and load it if it exists. This way, you can make sure that everytime your mod is played, the game will load the correct texts for it. The only downside is that you are limited to one "auto loaded" language file and thus one language. If you have your texts in more than one language, you must tell the users to choose them manually.

Creating own levels using the leveleditor

As mentioned before, extract all content of the hurrican.dat file to hurrican/data, then download the level editor here and extract it to a directory of your choice. Run the editor and it will ask you for the hurrican.exe file.

List of enemy values for the leveleditor

Download the list with all enemies featured in the game and what effect it will take when you manipulate their Value1 and Value2 paramteres here.

Important tipps & tricks

coming soon...