jwvanderbeck
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Posts posted by jwvanderbeck
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IMHO choosing your mods by what is popular is a mistake. Everyone's tastes are different and everyone wants different things out of mods. Otherwise mods wouldn't exist!
Every now and then you should browse through and see what catches your eye, because that little known mod may be just what you are looking for!
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I just want to say that Beyond Ferelden will never limit viewers and will always be available unless Wordpress shuts down, which isn't likely lol. Now no one knows what the future holds, but even if down the road I stop updating it, the blog will remain online.
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I talked about this on my blog when introducing the string editor, in this article, but anytime you mess with the string editor and export a talk table, you need to delete the one exported to the packages\core\override or you will lose every string in the game.
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Steam installs things to its own folder. Not sure what that is, but look in the steam folder for the game itself.
Your actual MODs and what not should live in the same place though which is in My Documents\Bioware\Dragon Age
Those are you "settings" so to speak and its where all mods should live.
DAModder should be working fine on the Steam version as, like I said, it stores your mods in the same place.
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You probably have it, the problem is that for many people the stupid console is invisible. Nothing shows when you hit the key and nothing even shows when you type commands. You have to do it blind.
You'll know its working if you hit the console key, then start typing. If your character doesn't wig out then your typing in the console :P
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Or use DAModder to handle installing and uninstalling your mods :D
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Bioware RPGs are more story driven, linear games versus the Bethesda less story open ended style.
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Don't worry :) The only possible issue I could see happening is if DAModder is trying to create a folder to prioritize a mod and that folder name conflicts with what is already there, or if the prioritizing from both apps might cause problems, I don't know. But in either case i'll work it out and not mess with your stuff.
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I do have one request though. Installing/uninstalling and prioritizing addin-mods and zipped override mods is all well and good but it would be a good idea to respect already existing override-only mods, folders and their location/names. As you might know, I maintain and use the override folder in the profile path and create new subfolders there. My installer does prioritize, copy, rename and manage files in those subfolders already and if a third party were to manipulate my files and folders, then that would be highly inconvenient. For me, the users and you, as this would no doubt create various support requests. I imagine other authors might agree here. Well, try my mutator mod and you'll see what I talk about.
DAmodder doesn't touch any existing core overrides. It will only work with ones installed through the application.
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What i'm to do for now is two fold. First, allow the user to manually adjust priority. Secondly, allow the mod author when configuring their mod to flag it as a "compatibility" or "general" mod that wants to allow more specific mods to override portions of it.
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Err probably best summed as "They are completely different games, completely different styles, completely different tools and not the same company at all" :D
Dragon Age is made by Bioware and is similar in style to most of their RPGs such as KOTOR, NWN, Baldurs Gate, etc.
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I'm going to assume for the moment that standard mods (actual game modules) will work in a similar fashion based on priority, with the highest priority loading first and the lowest priority loading last.
The waters become a bit muddy when dealing with a mod that has files in both locations.
Now the question becomes, what is the best way to work with this for the end user. At a guess i'd say a few things:
1) Allow a mod to be flagged by the author as a "compatibility mod", and when installing such mods, set them up to be loaded first if possible.
2) Allow a mod to be flagged by the author to be loaded early, so that others can override it.
3) Allow the user a method by which they can adjust load order manually if desired
I think allowing the mod author to specify specific load ordering might be a bad thing, but these are just my initial thoughts. As stated really the only time mods that affect the same thing will play "nice" is if one is a very general mod, and the other a very specific mod. In which case the author of the general mod knows that he or she was theirs loaded first and then overwritten by more specific mods. The author of the specific mod shouldn't have to say his needs to load last, since there are far more "specific" mods than "general" mods.
Those are my initial thoughts though. I'm open to discussion :)
It will be a bit until we're to this point in DAModder though. I'm working on the codebase to allow these things now, but we still need more mod adoption for the more advanced features like this.
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Which brings to another point: Would it be possible for the software to indicate if there are conflicts?, initially only with the override mods of course but eventually being able to say if a dazip mod is conflicting with an override would be extremely desirable.
This part is already planned. In fact its one of the pieces i'm working on right now. As long as you are using packages that are compatible with DAModder, and thus have the data to work with, then DAModder will inform you if there is a potential conflict and help you decide what action to take. For core overrides, it will scan the filenames in use and use that to indicate conflict. for standard mods, the author will be able to specify what events the mod overrides, if any, and use that data to provide information on possible conflict.
As far as the priority stuff.. like I said if you can tell me a surefire way of controlling load oder, i'd love to know. But so far nothing i've done has worked reliably so i'm a bit lost on it. I haven't spent that much time with it though. Been spending more time on code :)
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wow. I die all the time on Normal in the bigger fights. I can't imagine setting it higher. I must really suck.
I also suck at using mage spells without frying my whole party :)
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I've yet to find any solid way to force ordering of mods. Everything i've tried has been hit or miss. In the end though I still don't see how load order matters since if two mods conflict they'll still conflict no matter what. If Mod A and Mod B both override the same event, one of them just isn't going to work not matter how you load them.
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Nope, each AddIns.xml stores all the languages, so yours gave me them all :D
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Thanks. I got it. Yeah I can use this once the new core is in to rebuild the corrupted ones, at least for the Bioware mods.
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You have all the DLC content?
All I need is a uncorrupted AddIns.xml
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95% of the foreign language descriptions are in Bioware DLC anyway. So I had an idea this morning. If I can get a hold of the uncorrupted XML data for ALL the Bioware content, then I can make the tool use that to reconstruct the information on the Bioware mods.
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Ok so here is the deal with the XML problems.
If you have edited your XML file yourself in some program, then you may have unfortunately corrupted your XML file in a subtle but significant way. The AddIns.xml file is supposed to be a UTF-8 encoded text file. In brief, the encoding is how the various bytes in the file are read from the file and written to the file. In these days of Unicode, it isn't possible to store every character in one byte, so we have to have a way to use multiple bytes and translate that to the proper Unicode character. This is what the "encoding" of the file tells the program.
Now what I've learned from looking at files that were causing problems, is that every one of them has essentially lost its encoding. The "BOM" or byte order mark, that identifies it as a UTF-8 file is gone. Even worse, is that many of the characters in the file have been completely butchered to the point that they can't be re-created. Which characters are damaged depends on how that character is stored in Unicode, but in brief the higher in the chart the character is, the more likely it is the be corrupted. Essentially this affects characters that have accent marks, and almost all Cyrillic characters like Russian script. The data just isn't really there anymore, thanks to whatever program you used to edit the file :(
So the bad news is that if your native language is one other than English, you may find that most of the descriptions in your language are destroyed. It depends on the language. English is not affected at all, some are only mildly affected, and others especially Russian, are almost totally destroyed. Unfortunately DAModder can't reconstruct this data because it just isn't complete anymore. I spent the last 3 days trying, but it just isn't possible.
What I have done though is written a small tool, available from inside DAModder, that will rebuild the encoding and any characters that it CAN manage to reconstruct. This will once again make your AddIns.xml file a valid UTF-8 file and you can use DAModder like normal. Depending on your language this may very well work fine for you, or if you don't mind just using English it will work fine as well. If however you find that the titles and descriptions for your mods in your language are just no good anymore, then you need to find a way to re-install those mods to get the descriptions back. I don't know if it is possible to re-install the Bioware DLC, so at this time I am NOT recommending that. But if anyone knows how you can do that, then it would be a good option. Another option would be to simply reinstall the game which I presume would then allow you to re-download and install the DLC you had previously purchased.
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Honestly i'm really hoping most authors will just be nice and make their mods in ZIP files. It makes it so much easier for everyone involved, and 90% of the mods out there aren't so big that it should matter on compression efficiency.
Is it possible to add 7Z and RAR to DAModder? Yes, but its a ton of work. I have a library I use for handling standard ZIP files that works really well, and is well integrated into all my code.
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Going to be a significant amount of work to update for people who have modified core resources it sounds like.
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Woah did I read that right? This version contains the full single player resources?!
AMEN! No more hacksville!
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Only ones I know for certain is that Claudia Black, G, did Morrigan, and Kate Mulgrew, J, did Flemeth
We need top endorsed Mods on main site
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