Spring RTS Engine

I've installed BA 4.7 (Unziped into Mods dir) Restarted the game. But spring doesn't see the mod. It sees Only XTA and AA...What the...?

EmperoR[BMS] wrote:I've installed BA 4.7 (Unziped into Mods dir) Restarted the game. But spring doesn't see the mod. It sees Only XTA and AA...What the...?

Don't unzip the .sd7 file?

A lot of people unzip the sdz file because it's actually a zip, just with a different extension. Don't do this! .sdz and .sd7 files are packages of files and are the actual mod.

I suggest more mods are packaged with .sd7 as less people have 7zip on their computer.

I suggest an auto-installer instead. Inside each sdz/sd7 there should be a small file that tells the archive where to go (maps/mods), then the program finds that file and puts the archive where it belongs. I actually could probably code a batch script to do this...

I suggest someone makes us an auto installer.

why do we use the default extensions? wouldnt it make more sense to use a different one so that this problem doesnt happen?

oh well, i spose its not that much of a problem...

I could attempt to make an auto installer thing, it really wouldnt be hard. Just a program with .sdz/7 associated with it that runs 7zip to extract a 'auto.txt' file with a directory name in it, simple.

You want to read the directory from the registry (Spring install directory. No clue where it's stored tho.)

You can determine whether something is a mod or a map by using a heuristic based on:
* Are there any .smf or .sm3 files in the archive -> It's a map.
* Is a modinfo.tdf present -> It's a mod.
* None of above -> Unknown / unrecognized file.

This is what I still want to make for next release, but if someone else can do it it would be nice

Ideally it should work like this, I think:
It gets fed a .sd7 / .sdz file, it shows a dialog with "Do you want to install this file in C:\Program Files\Spring\?" with a checkbox "Remember this choice", then it installs the file, and shows a msgbox "[Mod|map] succesfully installed in C:\Program Files\Spring\[mods|maps]. In the lobby, press reload [maps|mods]."

Maybe we could even implement some mechanism so this tool can send a signal to any supported open lobbies, so it can auto-reload mods/maps.

Actually, maps techincally can have modinfo.tdf files for including other archives (eg. feature pack), and with the two different map formats things just get trickier. I was thinking of simply having people include an 'install.txt' or something (ill work out the specifics later) that contains the path to install it to. So there could be '/maps/' for maps, '/mods/' for mods, '/' for updates, '/base/' for content updates, '/ai/' for ai, ect.

Could do that too, but I guess you'd want it to work for the 450 maps on unknown files too. And since mods never contain maps AFAIK, you could first check for .smf/.sm3 files in the archive, if none found, check for modinfo.tdf. I think that would work fine in 99% of the cases.

Maelstrom wrote:I could attempt to make an auto installer thing, it really wouldnt be hard. Just a program with .sdz/7 associated with it that runs 7zip to extract a 'auto.txt' file with a directory name in it, simple.

That would be novelty awesome.