A RebEd card is a file that holds the settings and pictures for a single unit in Star Wars: Rebellion. Cards are made and loaded with RebEd, and were shared on Rebellion fan sites.

How cards work

Each unit is loaded from its own card. A card does not create a new unit; it overwrites an existing one – a character, fighter, starship, facility, troop, special force or defense. Card files use the extension .R?C, where the middle letter stands for the unit type (for example c for character and f for fighter). Cards were added because editing the game's settings only as a whole was too limiting for building scenarios.

A card made over one character can be loaded over any other: major and minor character cards are compatible. If the new name is longer than the name of the character being replaced, RebEd warns that the name will be cut short, but the pictures and stats still load.

Installing a card

The 2001 SWRebellion FAQ describes the steps:

1. Unzip RebEd and the card into the same folder.
2. In RebEd, open the menu for the right unit type (for example minor characters) and pick the unit to replace.
3. Use Load Card, then start the game.

Making a card

The 2004 guide walks through a full example card, built over Han Solo:

1. Plan. Find a well-lit, high-resolution picture of the character that can be cut cleanly from its background. Rebellion's character pictures are 200 pixels high, so the source figure should be at least 100–150 pixels tall. Save a reference picture of an existing character from RebEd's encyclopedia picture editor.
2. Base picture. Turn off antialiasing, scale and crop the figure to match the reference, and paste it into a copy of the reference image so it uses Rebellion's fixed 256-colour palette. The base picture is 400×200. Fill the background with the blue transparency colour; RebEd treats the bottom-left pixel's colour as transparent.
3. Build picture. Make an 80×80 version for the build picture. RebEd can generate the smaller pictures automatically.
4. Edit in RebEd. Choose the character to replace, set its stats, load the base and build pictures in the picture editor, generate the small pictures and the encyclopedia picture, and edit the name and description. The new name cannot be longer than the name of the character being replaced.
5. Save. Click Save Card and enter your name as the card's author. Card signatures are not secure; they only record the author's name, shown in the Card Viewer and the Load Card window.

The 2001 FAQ gives the same picture sizes and names pure blue (red 0, green 0, blue 255) as the transparent colour. Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView and Photoshop are the image editors the guide mentions.

Beyond cards

Events tied to a character, such as Han Solo's bounty-hunter events, are changed with RebEd's DLL entries editor rather than with cards – see DLLEntries.txt. Enough cards and DLL changes together make a total conversion.

History

In October 1999 the site's sidebar showed a running total of more than 1,600 RebED cards, and the RebED Card Guild, run by EW, Skippy and Webspider, collected cards for download.