Started work on Enderal: Forgotten Stories

[cosmicdan808]

Howdy,

 

I'm working on adding support for the newly-released (on Steam anyway) standalone Skyrim total-conversion "Enderal: Forgotten Stories".

 

My WIP forks:

https://github.com/cosmicdan/Vortex

https://github.com/cosmicdan/vortex-games

 

Current questions/assumptions:

 

1) Doing everything on master branches in my forks. Assuming that's fine.

2) Is it OK for me to release a (obviously unofficial and 100% unsupported) build of Vortex for the few players of Enderal to use until Vortex official releases it (I'd just open a thread of Steam forum for the game, and I'd definitely remove it once official comes out)? They can be a good test bed for sure - as we don't have any mod-manager for it at all right now. If that's OK, let me know if there's any flags or something to change to avoid spamming false error reports

3) Regardless of #2 above, I still want to use it personally - Is master branch relatively stable or should I roll-back to a certain commit for testing? I can't see any "release" branch nor tags so I'm not sure.

4) Made a thread on the Steam forums linking to this thread (mostly so others are aware and don't do duplicate/redundant work), assuming that's OK. It's at https://steamcommunity.com/app/933480/discussions/0/3247562523078419686/

 

Right now I'm still going through and testing/working on everything as I go but I'll commit early and often of course - I'm mostly working on trial and error here since this is a unique situation - ability to install Skyrim mods from Skyrim nexus in a non-Skyrim game - so obviously it's a bit more than just copying and adjusting the skyrim entries spread all over the extensions (e.g. I'm not sure how to handle fomod yet - I'm going to test that when I get to it). And of course because I'm completely new to Vortex.

 

----

 

BTW, I had the popular...

KeyError: '2017'

...error when running yarn install command. I found the solution was to run...

npm install --global --production windows-build-tools

...which automatically installed Python 2.7 x64 and some extra Visual Studio 2017 stuff which was obviously missing in the repo readme (about 1GB worth). Maybe worth updating.

Cheers!

Edited February 17, 2019 by dconnolly

[Tannin42]

Hi! Thanks for your work!

 

I'm actually working on Enderal support myself. Since it's a gamebryo game it requires support in several of the other extensions and the core application.

 

 

regarding the build problem: This shouldn't be necessary, python 2.7 is listed as a dependency in the readme, everything else you need should be there as well.

[cosmicdan808]

Hi! Thanks for your work!

 

I'm actually working on Enderal support myself. Since it's a gamebryo game it requires support in several of the other extensions and the core application.

 

 

regarding the build problem: This shouldn't be necessary, python 2.7 is listed as a dependency in the readme, everything else you need should be there as well.

 

The build problem was, at least in my case, a problem with the Windows SDK being incomplete. Similar issues on other projects points to a change in Windows 10. Python is fine - was just mentioning that it too was included in the steps that fixed it for my machine (so it could be considered as not only a solution but it would make the readme more concise by effectively removing a step). Not a big deal, was just an aside - may have been specific to my machine as I already had a minimal Windows Kit installed.

 

Yeah I'm having trouble compiling it anyway, something about [email protected] being incompatible with NodeJS 10. Looks like you've already done it all though - thanks! I see you updated dependencies so I'll try rebuilding and testing this out with a big test based on this list; I'll downgrade to NodeJS 9.x if needed.

 

Thanks again!

Edited February 21, 2019 by dconnolly

[cosmicdan808]

Well, everything seems to work well enough in the end - at least with Vortex itself.

 

Some notes regarding building:

 

- I can't run "dist build" because "node-sass" is missing from the main asar archive for whatever reason
- When doing "run start" I get a couple errors on startup which I just ignore - one about missing Unity Mod Manager, another about some CSP thing (checking Nexus webpage I guess?)

 

I can't build it so am just running dev version for my personal use for now.

 

Notes regarding the actual changes/game:

 

- The enderal plugin isn't correct - I made comments on your commits, but have since found out more - you *need* to start the Enderal game via Steam - which means the steam:// format - starting Enderal Launcher.exe manually results in an SKSE failure
- I noticed that you didn't redirect enderal > skyrim for Nexus integration - is this intentional? Mods seems to install OK still, I just need to force to install for "currently managed game". I suppose this would need more work in the case that the user has both Skyrim and Enderal installed and managed though.

Apart from that, nice and thanks for Vortex! Might see if I can replace MO2 with it on my next mod build.

[cosmicdan808]

A recent commit broke INI files I think. Something has reset Enderal.ini's SLocalSavePath to "Saves\" (vanilla) when Enderal requires it to be "..\Enderal\Saves\".

[Tannin42]

Sorry for the late reply.

 

- "dist build" would actually do two builds, "dist" for production and "build" for development

- dist won't work because it's set up to sign the executable with our certificate, which you obviously don't have. So either you use the "ci" build script, though I'm not entirely certain it actually runs correctly or you change the electron-builder-... scripts to not require certificates

- node-sass should be included automatically, but like all native modules it can't be bundled in the asar and should be in the app.asar.unpacked directory.

- It's perfectly ok if you get a couple of messages on startup, e.g. UMM being missing is not an error, it's just telling you.

 

Regarding Enderal:

- Are you sure about steam? Because I can run Enderal just fine starting the launcher directly from Vortex.

- Yes, it's intentional. enderal has it's own game section now. I knew of that before it was actually created so I already wrote it with the new section in mind

- Yes, found out about the ini thing, it's fixed in the code that actually got released