Greetings. Here I am with my first post. My friend and I are trying to mod a favorite game of ours (Lords of Magic Special Edition, by Impressions/Sierra back in the late 1990's), and we've run into some trouble with the graphics. The game uses MPQ archives to store most of its data. I'm sure many of you are familiar with MPQs (also used in Blizzard titles such as StarCraft, WarCraft, and Diablo). The graphics files (in the case of Lords of Magic, sprites which move in a 3D environment) all have a .imp extension. We have yet to find any kind of software that can open these files. We want to give our game a makeover, but we have no way of doing so without the ability to alter these files. We've tried 3dsmax and milkshape to open them, but nothing seems to work. If anybody has any ideas as to what exactly these files might be or what they might work with, please please give your input. Also, if you'd like to experiment, I can send you one of the files for you to look at. Thank you ps, I found this forum in a google search. I went looking for a game developers' message board where there might be some people with some knowledge (the LOM community doesn't really know much about programming)...from what I've read so far at this place, I think I'm in luck.

I've just checked out battle.net, and Blizzard are quoted as saying that the MPQ file format is "similar", between their games. It's a long shot, but try opening the .imp files with this.

Edit: I'm off to bed, but if that does happen to work, I'm not sure you can actually do very much with that tool, in terms of saving things back to the file. So, if it does work, Google around for mod making tools for Diablo 2, Starcraft and Warcraft 3, and you should come up with a tool that more accurately meets your needs.

Unfortunately, that didn't work. While Lords of Magic uses the MPQ technology, it doesn't seem to use the same file formats as Blizzard games. I've checked on a few of the games and none of them use .imp files for graphics. Thanks for the suggestion though.