Hi everyone. I have been searching and reading on the forums for a few hours now, but I still cant figure this out.

What I want to do is apparently simple. I want to change the default loadout of the US Army units. I want to change them from using the M4 Aimpoint to the M16A2.

I know how to do this in the editor. What I am looking to do is change it so that the M16A2 is the default rifle. NOT the M4 Aimpoint.

So, when I play the campaign, all of the US Army Riflemen, Squad Leaders, Medics, etc will have an M16A2. (Not including the Automatic Rifleman and Machine Gunner)

Thanks guys.

(You probably know but this is for Arma:Armed Assault)

You could try creating a weapons replacement config or you could unpbo the campaigns and change all the weapons manually. :)

I clicked on your link, then clicked on the "paste bin" link and it says "Unknown Paste ID!"

Ahh, yeah, that was a pretty old link. If you find any other weapon replacement mods you could probably work out how do to it. It's not going to be easy though. Might just wanna shoot an AI near you and get their weapon instead. ;)

Haha thats what I would do when I was bored with my weapon loadout. But what I want to do now is have all the US soldiers around me equipped with M16A2s. I read somewhere that it is possible to do this by editing the files in the "characters.pbo."
I've managed to open the pbo file and I've found the US soldier files, but I cannot view/edit these. This is where I'm hung up. I'm using the "Arma PBO View" tool to do all of this.

So now what I need to know is how to get into each individual US soldier class file.
When I open it in notepad, its just a bunch of crazy text that no one could understand. I've heard you need to binarize(?) or somehow translate the text using a tool to be able to read and then edit it.

I have the CPBO tool but all my attempts with it have failed thus far.

So, knowing all this, is there any help you guys can offer me?

Added 12 hours 12 minutes later:

Ok new development:

I found a replacement maker tool for Arma 1. It works great all but for one thing. I cannot seem to modify the Rifleman.
I can change the weapons for all the other classes (AT, Squad Leader, Medic etc.) save for the rifleman. When I do try, upon launching the game I get an error message saying "Invalid Crew SoldierWB"
Again this only happens for the rifleman class, and none of the other stock units.

Any help you guys could give me would be greatly appreciated.

I broke open the characters.pbo, extracted the config.ccp, changed all references of "M4AIM" to "M16A2" but could not for the life of me get the silly CPP converted back to BIN. I than gave up and went to bed. :)

Might be easier to just add a few M16's to your description.ext's of the missions or something.

# W0lle : - You can delete now the config.bin, it's not necessary to convert the config back to .bin once done

Seems like it may be possible to leave it as is?

I used PboView to open the characters pbo, then I opened the config.cpp file as is and went through and changed all M4AIM to M16A2. then I packed the characters folder ack into a PBO but when I loaded into the game editor to try it, all the units were still using M4s.

I'm quite confused haha. A step by step would be very helpful. I've seen some of the other posts on the BI forums and here but they dont make sense to me. Too many gaps in the explanations.

I tried that and it failed spectacularly.

Ok this can't be this difficult haha. People have made tons of replacement packs ranging from weapons to vehicles. Can someone tell me how to create a replacement file, or maybe make one for me?

Added 4 hours 1 minute later:

Ok so I've managed to open up the config file by converting it to a .cpp and modifying the lines i needed to so that the soldiers are equipped with the M16A2, but I have another problem. Once I load the game and get to the main menu, I get a slew of errors like "Size:'requiredAddons/' not an array"

There are other error messages, but they all follow that format of "Size:'[text]/' not an array"

I think I may have to convert the config file back to a .bin, but I have no idea how to go about that. A few google searches have left me empty handed.

I think I'm in the final steps here, so any help you guys could give me to wrap this up would be awesome. Thanks!

Yeah, that's exactly the errors I was getting too. I think the problem is I was using ArmA2 tools to convert the file instead of the old Arma1 tools perhaps? Problem is you can't have both installed as I understand it. But leaving it as cpp certainly didn't help! :)

Ok, so how do I convert this file back to .bin?

That is the question... :)

I downloaded the binarize tool for arma but I cant figure out how the damn thing works. Any help?