Modular submods?

[Withwnar]

This has been playing on my mind of late since seriously getting into combining submods. Just thinking out loud here...

Merging tools are great but, even with their help, combining more than two submods quickly becomes cumbersome and error prone.

What if submod files were written in a modular fashion - containing only their changes - and a tool existed to combine any number of them into the final files read by the game.

For example: submodA adds a new unit and so does submodB. A's EDU contains only the block for A's new unit; B's EDU contains only B's new unit. The tool would read in the "base" EDU (vanilla M2/mod), then A's, then B's and produce an EDU in the data directory containing the sum of all three.

Obviously there's a lot more to it than that. There are many moddable files and in different formats/structures, and how to handle submods that modify file contents rather than just add to them?

But if it were possible then 1) players could easily "plug in" submods, providing all kinds of combinations, and 2) submod developers are freed from basing their files on version X of submod Y for compatibility reasons.

Naturally others have thought of this before (though I couldn't find any discussions) so the reason that such a tool hasn't been made is either because:

1. It's impossible
2. It's possible but too difficult and/or time consuming

If it's impossible then fine: at least I can stop considering it.

Any thoughts?

(P.S. Wasn't sure whether to put this under Scripting or Tools. Please move if there's a better place for it.)

[Alpha Zeke]

Something that might be related to what your working for is the ss_setup.exe program written by Gracul for Stainless Steel 6.3. It inserts campaign script into the campaign script, but can only copy other files around. PM him about it, as it sounds to me like what your thinking of

[Ishan]

I only read this line:-

For example: submodA adds a new unit and so does submodB. A's EDU contains only the block for A's new unit; B's EDU contains only B's new unit.

And it's not possible the game reads only a single EDU and when it's not there it checks it in the data.packs.

[Withwnar]

I only read this line:-

Read the rest. You missed the critical step (combining into one EDU).

@Ømega
Thanks, I'll follow that one up. From what you say, though, it only partially does what I'm getting at here.

[cpdwane]

Read the rest. You missed the critical step (combining into one EDU).

This would probably be possible, but TBH most people nowadays only play complete mods rather then small submods, and as a result I'm not sure anybody who is capable of making this would be interested in making it. Perhaps if this was 4 or 5 years ago when a lot of people still played vanilla with small submods added on, this would have been made. But nowadays you are probably better doing it manually if you are capable of it.

Very nice idea though, the fact that mods on RTW cannot be combined is one of the few things in which ETW and NTW modding are superior.

[Taiji]

I'd say 2 and recommend an app like CompareIt.

[Withwnar]

It would be an ambitious project but I think that I could do it. If I had the time and enough people would use it to make the effort worthwhile.

Fair point about the "complete mods". I don't know about other mods but TATW has many interesting submods popping up all the time which I would be keen to try. I found merging three submods to be a laborious exercise and that's with me being no stranger to merging files and having an understanding of the file structures. Even then I was crossing my fingers come game-launch time.

I also wrote a submod myself which - to make it compatible with another popular submod - I had to build on top of that other submod's files. If a new version of that other submod is released then I'll need to rebuild mine to maintain current-version compatibility. If I try to make mine compatible with multiple submods then the problem is compounded exponentially. All because the other submods have changed - not mine.

Anyway, as I said, just thinking out loud. I would like to try but in reality it would probably take up too much of my time. And judging by the lack of response to some other good tools I've seen around here I'm not sure if it would be worth it.

Thanks for the input chaps.

[Alpha Zeke]

I just want to say that, even though Gracul's program is only partial, it may be the right track to getting to your goal. Although, I have no idea how he programmed it, I would assume C++ or something

[Withwnar]

The more I think about this the more a nightmare the program's coding would be. Appending script blocks, units, etc. is one thing but resolving differences is a very big other. Possible, yes I think so, but way too involved to be justifiable. Alas.