Advanced exe questions

A couple of questions concerning edited exe and such that I would greatly appreciate if anyone could take the time to answer, thank you. Both concern Total conversions and not individual maps.

Firstly, has anyone successfully been able to make Warcraft 3 load an additional MPQ other than the default? (Not counting SEMPQs or swapping the patch.mpq for the moment)

Second, does anyone know if anyone has ever found a way to add any more races to the game with a functional race selection menu (I have managed to get the race list for custom games to list more before but it was purely aesthetic)?

Thanks

P.S. I've read some about the Grimore tool that lets you add natives and such but was unsure: is it possible to use it in a total conversion, IE not just changes for one map.

Apologiese for my general ignorance of this subject.

For adding natives, each person playing the game needs a certain file containing the natives in order for the game to work. Other than that you should be able to use them to do whatever.

For loading MPQs, the only thing I've ever done is loading an MPQ with something like MPQDraft or Grimore where it places the files in the loaded MPQ at a higher priority than the Patch.mpq.

Thanks for answering the question about Grimore, each person having the files shouldn't be a problem as it's for a TC anyway.

Natives need the file and grimoire.

You can even just distribute a zip with the files extracted and let people extract the files in wc3 folder and then use the registry fix to enable local files for war3.exe (like it already does for worldedit)

otherwise grimoire's loadmpq is the best.

Number of races is entirely hardcoded.

Hmm guess I'll stick with my workarounds for the races then.

As for the MPQ thing, I'm using an SEMPQ at the moment, I just wondered if there was any other way.

Grimore is able to load MPQ files, like with a SEMPQ with a higher priority than the files in the patch MPQ.