Mass Effect 2 TLK Tool is a tool for modifying TLK files from the Mass Effect 2 game. Those are the files that contain dialogue lines for characters and all the other text lines for UI.
It allows to extract data from TLK files and save it in an XML file, which can be freely modified and saved back to TLK format. It doesn't have any fancy GUI for live-editing TLK text strings, as it was created mainly to allow collaborative translation.
It's original project page was at BioWare Social Network (link), though the service is about to be shut down. Hence the move to Github.
All files with text from the game have the .tlk extension.
For example, the English language TLK file for original game is usually located here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Mass Effect 2\BioGame\CookedPC\BIOGame_INT.tlk.
Files for DLCs are in separate a folder:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Mass Effect 2\BioGame\DLC.
For example, English TLK file for Lair of the Shadow Broker is located here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Mass Effect 2\BioGame\DLC\DLC_EXP_Part01\CookedPC\DLC_24_INT.tlk.
Different language versions have different endings, e.g. English have *_INT.tlk and Polish have *_POL.tlk.
This is a project created back in 2010 when editing TLK files from Mass Effect 2 wasn't possible at all. It started as a help-project in a group of translators that wanted to see the first lore DLC (Lair of the Shadowbroker) in Polish. Unfortunately, though original Mass Effect 2 game was translated to Polish, the DLCs were said to be technically "incompatible". Of course, that was not true, they were simply blocked from being installed. It wasn't the case only for Polish language, but also for a few more.
So the only thing that was a problem for translators was that the TLK files containing text lines from the game, were of unknown format. Fortunatelly, it was only a custom binary file format with Huffman coding for text data. Simple TLK decoding demo was released by DerPlaya from BioWare Social Network, which was a great starting point. After more research, this tool, with full TLK format support, was made available.
Soon after, the first DLC was translated to Polish and many other languages. Many other mods use this tool to change in-game text strings. There is even a full Mass Effect 2 translation to Turkish, made with this tool. And probably many more projects based on this one, that I'm not aware of, since it's been open-source from the beginning.
As the project has moved from BioWare Social Network, here are some stats gathered there (updated 7.1.2015).
| Project creation date | 18.09.2010 |
|---|---|
| Project page visits | 18485 |
| Downloads count | 7087 | (version 1.0.4, published 11.11.2010) |
|---|---|---|
| Downloads count (source) | 308 | (version 1.0.3, published 21.10.2010) |