Is there any way of opening the worm character models,
To make, for instance, custom hats and hands?

There's no supported way. I expect it's theoretically possible, but it would be a nightmare to do and in the million to one chance you managed it, it would doubtless crash the game if you played online.

Is there any way of opening the worm character models,
...You must play!
I opened all thanks so old way...

@Maunem2: Он имеет в виду изменение самих моделей, а не выбор шапок и перчаток в игре.
<translated for the reccord: he means editing the models themselves, and not the selection of hats and hands in game.>

@Cojex: as Andrew said, it's very difficult, and you'd need to know quite a bit of coding. i believe, Andrew have replaced some .tga files for menus in forts, so you can take his word on it. i've messed with worm skins myself. to my knowledge, nobody has ever moddified the 3d models in the game.

edit: i stand corrected. just found a thread where some moddification of 3d models has been done. nothing that would help you with editing, though.

@Maunem2: Он имеет в виду изменение самих моделей, а не выбор шапок и перчаток в игре.
<translated for the reccord: he means editing the models themselves, and not the selection of hats and hands in game.>

@Cojex: as Andrew said, it's very difficult, and you'd need to know quite a bit of coding. i believe, Andrew have replaced some .tga files for menus in forts, so you can take his word on it. i've messed with worm skins myself. to my knowledge, nobody has ever moddified the 3d models in the game.


I am very expierenced with 3D modeling and programming,
I had to create a battle system from scratch(not easy).
And I model games and movies for the fun of it;
I found the flag .tgas and created my own.


edit: i stand corrected. just found a thread where some moddification of 3d models has been done. nothing that would help you with editing, though.

Moddification is exactly what I meant, I was planning on making the DBZ style armour(old style) for the worms, with scouters and ect.

...You must play!
I opened all thanks so old way...

LOL... funny
I'm not a cheater as to hack into a game, and if I do, I always play the game the "old way" first.

the models are in the .xom files. this thread (http://forum.team17.co.uk/showthread.php?t=30770) will tell you where you could find the .xom file containing a payload model. worms and custom hats/hands will be stored similarly in some other directories. if you aren't joking about knowing how to program, all you need to do is write a .xom loader, and figure out how the data contains in it can be converted into mesh and skeletal data. then writing a converter to put this into your favorite 3d format is a piece of cake.

the general structure of the .xom files is such. first, there is a 64 byte header. word* at offset 24 contains number of type chunks, and at 28 the number of ctnr chunks. header is followed by type chunks. each type chunk is 64 bytes long. the word at offset 8 relative to the beginning of the type chunk contains number of ctnr chunks associated with that type. starting at offset 32 is the name of the type chunk. followed by type chunks are schm and guid chunks. each 16 bytes long. presence of guid chunk is optional and is controlled by byte 7 of the header (0x01 or 0x02). these are followed by a strs chunk. at offset 4 of strs is the number of strings and at 8 is the total length of the strings. at 12 starts the table consisting of 4 byte entries, each corresponding to the offset of the string relative to the first byte of the string list. the string list follows immediately after, which puts it at offset 12+4*(number of strings) relative to beginning of strs chunk. each string is null-terminated. immediately after the strs chunk the ctnr chunks begin. length of each ctnr chunk will depend on the type associated with it and on the specific contents of the chunk. however, you will see the first 4 bytes being "CTNR" followed by 3 zero bytes. at offset 7 you will typically find the number of the string which might be interpreted as that chunk's name. that number is stored in the following fashion. if it's < 128, it's a single byte. if its >= 128, the first byte will contain the 7 low bits (0-6) of the number in its 7 low bits, high bit of the first byte will be set, and the second byte will contain bits 7 and up starting with its lowest bit. you might come accross similar way of storing numbers in other places within ctnr block. when a number is interpreted as a refference to a string in strs chunk, it is the number of the 4 byte entry which points to the string, and not the number of the string in the list.

so that's all you need to know about .xom files to navigate them, you can go ahead and write your tools for working with 3d models now.

* unless otherwise noted, byte, half-word, word, double-word, and quad-word reffer to 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 bits of data respectively. the byte order in .xom files is low byte first.