Help a newbie MM7 Modder?

[stcTempest]

Hi All,

As many of you probably have experienced, I had the itch to get back into playing some MM games, since it's been a few years since my last play through. But, this time I wanted to take it to another level and try my hand at some small mods. I'm having trouble getting started. Here's what I've done:

1. Installed GrayFace's patch v2.1.
2. Acquired MMArchive.
3. Used MMArchive to look at the Might and Magic VII\DATA\Events.lod file.

I wanted to see if I could make an edit that I could easily verify altered the game, so I used MMArchive to extract all of the Events files. Then, I edited and saved Class.txt so that the description of knight was something else. However, when I started the game, the description of the knight was just as it had been before.

Two main questions:

1. What am I doing wrong in the above case that makes it so I can't change the class description. Obviously I don't really care about class descriptions in the game, but if I can get a hold on how to change that, I figure I'll be much closer to understanding how to mod MM7.
2. I have heard that the skill tables are in some Tables file. But when I look through all of the Events.lod contents, I don't see any files called tables anywhere. I see an entire folder for tables in MM8, but not in MM7. Where do I look? And is there a good tutorial somewhere for how to edit those skill tables in such a way as to actually affect the game (see my (1) before, here).

Thanks so much for any help you all can give. It's exciting to see that there's still a community that enjoys these lovely games.

[GrayFace]

1. Place the file into DataFiles folder and edit it right there. When it's time to distribute, you'll place it into a custom LOD file created with File->Extract Selection As Archive in MMArchive.
2. It requires MMExtension. Once you run the game with it, skills would be in Data\Tables in 2 files.

[GrayFace]

BTW, it blows my mind a bit that there is (a little bit of) discussion about M&M in this sub-forum as well. Never thought it's anywhere besides the M&M sub-forum.