Re: 1.3 Patch and Existing Mod Compatability

[MistenTH]

This is probably the mother of all questions for all of us running around with custom mods.

 

Anyone from Petroglyph can give us the specifics on whether there will be any clashes?

 

I've already spotted the text file change, but that's no biggie since it's not crucial to running the game.  Same for hardpoints, it's either overwritten or not.  But how about the targeting change, and also other changes that we do not know of ?

 

Thanks.

[Zer_Teron]

They said they made the changes to the Config.MEG, so it wont affect mods at all

[Athanasios]

The text file is not big deal, especially for mods that added way more changes into it.

 

As for the rest, they patched mainly the Config file, so, we shouldn't have any problem. The MP issues are not .xml side but code side (obviously, otherwise we would have fixed them ).

 

EaW:Total Realism in fully compatible for sure. The changes to hardpoints and the rest "balance" labeled issues have been already tweaked. One .xml conflict would be the spawning times, but that's already tweaked too. Yet, i cant assure for the rest mods...

[FormulaRedline]

Does anyone know what xml files changed?

[smellymummy]

but in the balancing improvement section, theres several changes there, aren't those tweaks in the xml files? like the health of vaders unit, or recharge times of this and that unit, etc.

 

i recently downloaded the kyle/mara enabled for galactic conquest mod, and that one includes ALL the xml files instead of just the xml files that got changed. kinda difficult to figure out if that mod is going to conflict with anything or not, there is 300+ files afterall

 

and to figuring out what files changed, you can use a program like ultraedit that compares files.. and go through each one at a time

 

edit: or use the attached perl script i just made. run it in dos like this: perl script directory1 director2

 

it will show the differences file by file. you can also add > output.txt at the end to get the output written to a file (btw you will need perl for windows installed, like activestate perl)

Edited March 23, 2006 by lostsm

[maxpublic]

The files in the /data/xml folder always override the meg files.  So it doesn't matter what they change in the meg files, your own xml files will take precedence.

 

Of course, a lot of the files are interdependent so without direct knowledge of what xml components they altered in the meg file you could get some interesting results.  For example, you could've altered the costs and build times in squadrons.xml based on the stats in the old spaceunitsfighters.xml file, without ever making your own spaceunitsfighters.xml file.  But now if they alter the meg equivalent of that file (say, they nerf the Y-Wing) you won't know about it until you play the game and wonder why your Y-Wings are blowing up even faster than they did before, or don't seem to be able to do any damage.  The company could also have altered the meg squadrons.xml to reduce the price of the Y-Wing to compensate, but since your squadrons.xml overrides theirs you now have incredibly weak, highly overpriced Y-Wings that won't be obviously wrong until you play the game for awhile.

 

In any event I'd wait on the patch; it appears to introduce even more bugs than it fixes.  Some folks are even reporting that SecureRom no longer recognizes their cd as valid (it times out) and they can't play the game with the new patch.  Apparently Lucas Arts or Petroglyph introduced some new code into the executable which is supposed to be able to better detect pirated copies of the game, but instead it seems to be reporting valid copies as pirated ones.

 

But SecureRom has always sucked big green donkey dicks, so this is no surprise.  I'm waiting until they get the patch right (1.4 or better) since 1.3 is mostly about multiplay anyway.

 

Max

[smellymummy]

it has plenty of singleplayer changes. and use the script above ^ to see what they changed exactly in the xmls from 1.02 to 1.03 in case there's new values or changes you would like to consider

 

as for the securerom thing, it is dissapointing, but just wait a little while and there will be a fix from the net community. until then play 1.02.. or make the xml changes yourself by comparing the two versions (limited by what 1.02 can handle of course)

[maxpublic]

It's an interesting thing when you have to rely on the community to provide code so that you can properly play the game you paid for.  These 'protection' schemes don't seem to do much of anything except for annoy us honest customer types, while the pirates laugh themselves silly over how ineffective they are.  Sometimes I think I should buy the cd, shelve it, and download a pirated copy to avoid the protection hassles....

 

In any event, the 1.3 executable doesn't work for me either; it crashed the game out right after the logo movies, and replacing it with the 1.2 executable had the same result (so it isn't only the executable that's to blame).  Had to reinstall and repatch to 1.02 to get everything working again.  It also overwrote my masterenglish.dat file which I forgot to back up prior to patching.  If you do patch don't forget to back up that file!

 

Max