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[CodeCat]

I haven't been paying much attention to modding C&C3 yet so forgive me if I'm repeating things here. I'd just like to put all the modding info one needs into one place.

Well, first of all, the game uses BIG files. So all your Generals tools still seem to work. FinalBIG and XCC mixer both should work. The game files are a lot more organised than they were in Generals, which I suppose is a plus. Each folder in the game folder has a specific purpose. Inside each of them is a list of folders, one for each version of the game. The standard game only has 1.0, but the more patches are installed, the more folders appear. It seems that the data for the patches is therefore kept separate, making it easy to compare patch data. Perhaps it's even possible to add new 'patch' levels by just adding another folder onto it? An interesting possibility definitely...

There's a few folders for different purposes:

Core - Contains all the main game data. This includes models, skins, code, etc. The stuff in here is the stuff that makes the game what it is, basically.
EnglishAudio - Language-specific audio. This would be unit voices, EVA, etc.
LangEnglish - Other language-specific stuff. This includes the cnc3.csf file for ingame strings.
Movies - Ingame movies, obviously
MP - Multiplayer-specific data. Currently this is only used for the maps, but what if we stuck code files in here? Would we be able to mod only the multiplayer part of the game?
RetailExe - Contains the game engine itself, in the form of the cnc3game.dat file. Also has the ingame cursors.
SP - Single-player data. This has the maps for the singleplayer campaigns.

Now as for the contents of the files themselves. It seems that some files are compiled/compressed in some way, so they're not usable as such without a way to decompress them. In particular this is the .cdata files in Core/<version>/GlobalStream.big which I assume contains not only the XML data for units, structures, weapons and such, but also models and textures for units. Right now, the wait is for EA to release a tool that can extract these files, or provide other ways to edit them.