The problem is the art manager that came in steam titan quest game folder doesn't work for me neither does 1.6 says I'm missing 3 .dll files. I'm not trying to build a mod just doing minor editing of weight values of items and suffixes/prefixes. I was wondering if someone can make a program for me one that reads and write database.arz without having to unpack it first...
Can you post the names of the DLL files that are missing? I could almost bet that it's a missing Visual C++ runtime. From the file names we could see what package is missing so we could tell you what to download.
Art Manager is really the tool to create mods or make modifications to database.arz. The process is rather simple.
1. Create your mod.
2. Import any .dbr files that you want to modify. You can copy the files manually to the working directory or import them in Art Manager. It's your choice.
3. Modify the .dbr files. Again, you can do this in Art Manager or in any text editor.
4. Build the mod with Art Manager (F7). A file <modname>.arz is created in the custommaps folder of your TQ IT profile.
5. Copy the original database.arz from the game folder to the TQ IT profile where the new <modname>.arz is. Rename database.arz to <modname>.arz, overwriting the original mod file.
6. Build the mod again with Art Manager (F7). Now the Art Manager will inject all your modifications into <modname>.arz so you have an updated game database with your changes.
7. Move or copy <modname>.arz back to your game folder and rename to database.arz.
Of course you can skip step 1 if you already have a mod created. Always keep a backup of the original database.arz. You will need this if you want to remove changes to original files in database.arz because the Art Manager will not revert anything. It can only apply changes not restore data.