TCs: what all do I need to zip up?

[teukros]

A friend just tried installing my TC on his laptop and it wasn't a howling success... the only file I sent him was the .reb file which is 274 kb. OK so I wasn't expecting the models to make it since my TACTICAL.DLL is 16 MB. But the behavior which I observed was weird....

 

The only changes I've made have been settings, encyclopedia entries, and a couple new cards, all changed with RebEd;

 

changes to the ENCYTEXT.DLL and TEXTSRA.DLL, made with ResHack;

 

And some new models (and the Battlestations program).

 

So when he used RebEd to load my TC it said "String too long: Truncated" three times. Oh you've just GOT to be kidding me, I said. The card title "Golan Arms Defense Platform III" had been truncated. Okay maybe that one was a little long. And the planet Duro was back to its old misspelled name, "Duros". But the Sessawenna Sector was still correctly named... and strangest of all, the T.I.E. cards had all been renamed from e.g. "T.I.E. Interceptor Squadron" to "TIE Interceptor Squadron" (no truncation but no periods either).

 

So of all of these things, what do I need to send him?

 

A. ENCYTEXT.DLL

 

B. TEXTSTRA.DLL

 

C. GOKRES.DLL (I have no idea what this file is for, I've never edited it directly)

 

D. TACTICAL.DLL (or would it be easier to have him install the Golan III and MC-40a models himself and tell him that any other models are optional? Is this even possible?)

 

E. DLLENTRIES.TXT and DLLENTRIES.BAK

 

F. A .zip of the entire GDATA folder

 

G. Any recently modified EDATA files

 

H. Anything else...

 

 

And will he need to download and run the Battlestations! program himself?

[Evaders99]

Well since you've probably done so many edits with the Resource Hacker, it is probably best to go with the DLLs and the dat files. There's just too much that RebED cannot keep track of.

[teukros]

Hmm, "all of the above". Just what I was thinking.

 

I'm a little concerned about the TACTICAL.DLL (it's just so BIG) would it work okay if he just installed the MC-40a and Golan III models?

 

What the heck is that DLLENTRIES.TXT file for anyway?

[the_mask]

If these were the only new models, that you installed for your TC, sure

 

The dllentries.txt tells RebEd what entries there are and in what dll file it should look for them. You can easily upgrade RebEd's abilities with it, but then you should also put that dllentries file in the zip of your TC.

Otherwise, if someone else installs it, RebEd will complain, that your TC was made with a 'newer' version.

[teukros]

OK, here's a wacky question:

 

If he plops all of the modified .DLLs (ENCYTEXT.DLL, TEXTSTRA.DLL, GOKRES.DLL, and TACTICAL.DLL) into his main Rebellion folder, replaces his GDATA folder with a .zip of my GDATA folder, and also replaces into his EDATA folder any of my EDATA files which have been updated this century,

 

does he need to bother with RebEd and the .reb file at all?

[the_mask]

If you haven't updated any event pics (strategy.dll), then nope

 

But I thought the tactical.dll was too big for you to send

[teukros]

Oh, well...

 

my adventures continue...

 

once before Rebellion somehow "short circuited" (that's how I have come to think of it) and it was completely ignoring the TACTICAL.DLL in the Rebellion folder, it was only using the one on the CD. Sometime in the last few days it happened again, but this time with the ENCYTEXT.DLL. I actually noticed it first on my friends machine, he got some error message about it not being a valid windows file. So I rooted around in my registry for a while and eventually decided to just give up, uninstall and delete everything, and start over. The Rebellion folder had been in my Games folder since 1998. This time I installed it to where it thought it wanted to go, into the Program Files directory.

 

So now I am re-entering data from my documentation and my main objective now will be to methodically go, step by step, backing up everything, and to put together a modest TC that other people can actually use, maybe even in two-player games! Duro and Sessawenna will still be misspelled. A lot of encyclopedia entries will be rewritten to be shorter. The ships will be butt ugly. And the Imperial starfighters will still fly backwards! (Geez I hate that) But this is the second time in the last couple of months that this has happened, and I still have no idea why...

[Evaders99]

Perhaps Rebellion isn't on there as a full install?

[teukros]

No it is... for the life of me I can't figure it out... hopefully it doesn't happen again... and if it does I'll (hopefully) be able to restore from backups.