BASIC FILE MANIPULATION
By: Arinos

FILE NAMES AND EXTENSIONS

Computers store everything on a hard drive by naming the file and giving it a path - an address of where it is on the hard drive. All files have an address. The address, or path looks like this:

C:\program files\furcadia\furcadia.exe

C: tells your computer to look on the C: drive. You may have more than one hard drive - or you may have a hard drive and a disk or floppy drive. They are all lettered to tell your computer which drive to look in.

program files\ is a folder on your C: drive and furcadia\ is a folder inside that folder.

furcadia.exe is a file - files have the name of the file a " . " and an extension - a three letter description - usually these tell your computer what type of file it is.

So C:\program files\furcadia\furcadia.exe tells your computer to look on Drive C, in a folder called "program files" and then in a folder called "furcadia" for a file called furcadia.exe

In furcadia, we have FSH, FS2, FBJ, MAP, DS, TXT, and PCX extensions (just to name a few). File names and extensions matter in Furcadia.

If you have installed Furcadia to wherever it wanted to install it, it is installed at C:\program files\furcadia\

Inside that furcadia folder are all the files you need to make the game work. There is another folder inside your furcadia folder called "patches" and inside that is a "default" folder.

NAVIGATING in WINDOWS

To get around on your hard drive, you can click start, and then My Computer. This will bring up a list of all of your drives plus shortcuts to things windows thinks you use a lot - namely My Documents or Shared Documents.

If you left click once on C:, you will see the thing you clicked on change colors. That means you have selected that thing. If you double click on it, it will take you to a list of what's on drive C.

On drive C you will find folders and file names. Folders will have a little folder looking icon beside them. You should - from C: be able to see a folder called program files. Double clicking on that will show you everything in that folder.

Continue to navigate until you get to C:\program files\furcadia\patches\default\

THE DEFAULT PATCH DIRECTORY

Once you get there, you will see a lot of files. Don't change any of them. Furcadia needs those just as they are to be able to work properly. But while you're there, note the file names - you will see item.fsh , item2.fsh, iteme.fsh, floore, wall3.fsh etc.

If you double click on a FSH file, your patch editor will open with that file loaded on it. If you just click on a file name once, you will select that file and it will change color to tell you that's the one you're working with at the moment.

Let's just select iteme.fsh - click on that file once and it will be highlighted with a different color. Then RIGHT click on the file you have selected. A little menu will appear where your mouse is and you will see that you can open, cut (don't CUT - that means delete!), copy (always copy - never cut), create a short cut, rename, or delete (Don't delete anything from your default patch folder! EVER!)

COPYING, PASTING, MOVING FILES

Select copy - this will tell your computer to put that file into it's little memory area so you can do stuff to it in a bit.

Then you can go navigate somewhere else. In your list of folders and files, you may see " .. " at the top of the list. If you see that, double clicking will take you up one folder. Otherwise you can use the button at the top of the screen that looks like a folder with an up arrow to move up one directory - if you keep clicking on it, eventually you will end up back at your c: drive.

Well, nevermind that, let's paste that file you just copied! Go up one folder until you get to furcadia\patches\

Click on "FILE" and then NEW - you want to make a new folder. Now you can name that folder anything you want. That part won't matter. Make a new folder inside furcadia\patches. I'm going to call mine Arinos1

Once you make the new folder, double click it so you move into that folder. Then anywhere in the white area where files would be if there were any in it, right click again and you will see the option to PASTE

When you do that, your computer puts whatever it has in it's memory into that folder - in this case it's a file called iteme.fsh because we just copied that - remember?

iteme.fsh should be in the new folder that you created! How neat! Now you should know how to copy and paste (and delete) a file and where they all live in your hard drive.

ZIPPING AND UNZIPPING

A ZIP file is a file with a ZIP extension after it. Remember how I said extensions tell the computer what kind of file it is? Well, a ZIP file is one that has been magically squashed so it's smaller. It's very handy when you want to send a lot of files, or when you want to store things. You need a program to do that.

You can get a zip program from WINZIP or QuickZip

There are several words you need to know to work the programs - one is Extract - that means it takes all the stuff in the zip file and decompresses it so it's usable again.

Add to Archive means you add folders or files into a zip file - you can zip up a whole hard drive (who'd want to - but you can!) into a single ZIP file.

Those programs and their websites have all the information you need to zip and unzip a file.