Spring RTS Engine

I was having trouble playing a certain mod as I was getting the red sync error. Turns out a mod I had in there had a file that this other mod depended on as replaced. I realised this and moved this into the root spring folder. This meant I could host games with this mod and there would be no red sync. However, the mod's custom side did not appear. When we got in game, it desynced straight away.

After a bit of looking, I discovered that if I deleted the mod I'd moved into the root spring folder, the problem went away. I had already tried clearing registry data, deleting lobby\ and restarting. The only reason I tried deleting the mod in TASpring\ was because DarthVader in lobby said that zip files could cause desync issues. I have no idea what happened.

.sdz/.sd7 archives in the root folder are always mapped to the virtual filesystem, so unless everyone puts the same files in their root folder or you're lucky, spring will desync.

Tobi wrote:.sdz/.sd7 archives in the root folder are always mapped to the virtual filesystem, so unless everyone puts the same files in their root folder or you're lucky, spring will desync.

Ah. So to Spring, the mod folder is just a convenience, but the client reads from the mod folder only? That would make sense.

Not really.

On game/lobby start, there are a few things happening:

All archives in the spring root are mapped to the virtual file system. So to spring/lobby it looks just as if you extracted the archives you put in the root there.

All archives in base, mods and maps subfolders are scanned, and indexed. The index is put in ArchiveCacheV4.txt. On game start, the files in there are optionally mapped to the VFS. If you play AA, only AA is mapped (so to spring/lobby, it looks like only AA and the map you play on are put in the root folder), etc.

For spring, base, mods and maps folder are treated indifferently though. Putting maps in mods or mods in maps or base should work fine. Not sure if the lobby handles all that properly.