ToEE_Fan_Fixes_V4-0-RC1

1st such a tool would give modders more freedom when creating mods and 2nd users more freedom as to not only choose between mods but also easily combine them.

 

My programming knowledge finished on VB3... so I can point out mistakes :google: . I know several people from IE community but first I'd have to convince them to buy ToEE. And play it. What about Drifter should he be interested?

 

Edit: Solving these issues would change the modding process so that individual mods could be released in parallel. Compare this with the current state of ToEE modding where Bob waits for Ralph to finish so that he has all of Ralph's changes. Maybe that's not what we're going for here, but consider it a side-effect.

Consider: The protos.tab in Bob's mod has item 4244 as a greatsword and the protos.tab in Ralph's mod has that item as a Ring of Spunkiness. In order to build a tool that would install both of these mods together, it would have to be smart enough to recognize that both of those items are to be installed, split them into a new protos.tab and update the description.mes, as well as changing any extraneous scripts, dialogues, and other files that happened to use the value 4244. I guess I could go with ToEEFE3 pro and swap back and forth, but the scope of this tool as I understand it is to install all of the mods I select into a single ToEE installation.

This is a great way to solve the problem above! Now both our modders can (instead of submitting an edited protos.tab) create a file with the protos information for their new weapons, as well as information directing the installer package to update the appropriate description.mes line(s) as well as any other dialogues and scripts that need to be updated. This is, however, extra work for our modders and might not be very realistic if we want wide usage of the installer tool. Also, this solution doesn't work for more complicated situations such as dialogues.

Consider: Bob's mod turns the innkeeper in Hommlet into the local arena sports magistrate. Considerable editing of the innkeeper's dialogue file is performed to give him new options -- somewhere in the neighborhood of 30+ lines are added. Ralph's mod adds an innkeeper's daughter quest that also requires some modification to the innkeeper dialogue. Considering that the lines in the dialogue files are linked and cross-linked to be interactive, this fix is not as simple as adding the relatively few lines of dialogue from Ralph's quest to the end of Bob's innkeeper.mes file. Perhaps this would be something simple for a human to figure out, but we are talking about a program that is supposed to do this stuff for you, and in that regard this is no easy issue. I suppose the tool could be smart enough to figure it out, but it ain't gonna be easy.

Maybe. Possibly. First we have to figure out how to make it work, then we can figure out how to make it easy

~daetar

PS - I don't think it is clear from my posts, so I'm stating it bluntly here. I think this is a great project and could be an incredible addition to the community. I'm not trying to attack anyone, I'm just stating the problems as I see them in the hopes that one of you creative people has already figured out how to deal with these problems.

 

Also we don't have to wait, we just say to each other, don't use ##01 - ##25 I'm using them and a quck cut and paste puts all our stuff together quick and simple

 

On Allyx's recomendation I tried out Beyond Compare. It works great for protos.tab files. It compares them side by side and highlights any lines that have differences, plus it shows you exactly where the differences are. One click of the mouse and you can copy the line from one file into the other. I used it to copy your death rattle changes into Allyx's shopkeeper map protos (apparently he was useing a pre-death-rattle version of protos for his mod).

 

If most modders like the tools the wide usage would come. Also users would force it- again the example of weidu which made life so much easier for end users that most of them simply stopped using non-weidu mods, so modders had to rewrite them...

It's impossible to make all the mods compatible, for obvious reason. Such a tool would rather make combining of already compatible in terms of content mods easy, plus e.g. a modder who makes an addition to the files (like adding new items) would not have to update his mod constantly because somebody made a new fix in protos.tab or something.

 

Yes, but many users are... scared of doing such things to their files. It depends how you see modding community - whether it's supposed to be a closed group of people doing things just for themselves or people who want to share their work with everybody including RPG enthusiasts who are "computer challenged".

 

ShiningTed, doesn't Phalzyr's ProtoEd tool merge protos.tab files already? I think I toyed around with that, but it didn't seem to work for me so maybe that feature isn't complete.

If it doesn't do what you want then let's figure out the requirements and I'll start writing a new tool. I've already got a few requirements just based off of the discussion in this thread, but I'm sure there are more specialized features you are asking for that can be incorporated to expand the tool beyond what I'm planning. I'll start a new thread (probably tomorrow) with the initial set of feature specifications. This tool will *only* be for merging protos.tab mods and handling all of the secondary file change requirements as noted by Agetian.

~daetar

 

ProtoEd does merge protos.tab files and .mes files. When I use it, however, it usually ends up duplicating almost every line, so I end up with a protos.tab twice the size of the originals.

I look forward to reading your thread, and I am sure I will have some imput. Thank you for stepping up to take on this challange.

 

Sorry I haven't got back to this yet. It's family mayhem at the moment with birthdays and other responsibilities, not to mention a nice sinus infection that I'm sure one of my kids gave me, the little rascals! Anyhow, I'll be getting back to this some time next week as time (and health) allows.

~daetar