Downgrade Enemy Unknown to Patch 4 (356266) R&D

[dubiousintent]

The 0.02 GB is the total size of the diff files not dealing with missing movies, so it is really the most important part of the mod :smile:

Did you determine if the later movies would work unmodified with the patch 4 version of the game? IOW, is it really necessary to retro-patch the movies?

 

-Dubious-

[Amineri]

Something you might look into is how XEW does the remapping to be able to invoke movies located in the base EU folder.

 

I don't know if this functionality was added with the release of EW or if it was there all along. However my EU patch 4 vanilla backup has both .txt and .bik movie files in the Movies folder so it seems to be something built in to the Unreal Engine.

 

An example of two such files in EU patch 4:

• CIN_TP_WelcometoScienceLabs_LOC.bik
• CIN_TP_WelcometoScienceLabs_LOC.txt

The text file contains:

1000
3000 13000 TP_WelcometoScienceLabs_01
13500 25000 TP_WelcometoScienceLabs_02
25500 30000 TP_WelcometoScienceLabs_03

In EW many of the movies are referenced only via such a text file (the movies folder in XEW folder is smaller than in root XCOM folder). The same text file is located in XEW movies folder, but there is no .bik file.

 

In EU patch 5 and 6 the .bik file was changed to : 1080_CIN_TP_WelcometoScienceLabs_LOC.bik, but the txt file is unchanged.

 

Which you probably already knew ^_^.

 

Just to point out the obvious did you try simply renaming the 1080_ versions of the movie files when trying to revert to patch 4?

[Bertilsson]

I'm not following the logic.

 

To me the *LOC.txt files looks like chapter indexes and not really related to the name or location of the file the index refers to.

 

I'm guessing there is either an .ini file or some native code detailing which files contains the movies and which files are indexes for those movies.

 

If I rename the movie files and downgrade everything else then I would expect EW to stop being able to find them.

 

Even if it would then also be possible to make a "wax on / wax off" script renaming and moving(?) all the files before starting EU or EW, the user unfriendliness and added complexity of that feature isn't really attractive.

 

So unless someone figures out what actually makes EU look for one file or the other and how to make that compatible with the files available in EU patch 6, I don't see this happening.

 

However if someone is able to figure out the details of how this works and there is a permanent fix possible that doesn't break EW then I am not opposed to implementing it...

[Bertilsson]

I have now looked a little bit closer regarding the 2.9 GB movie data and specifically looked into what the "upgrade to 1080p movie batch file" does.

As far as I can tell it consistently does this:

Delete: BattleOver_LOC.bik

Rename: 1080_BattleOver_LOC.bik to 1080_BattleOver_LOC.bik

 

Apparently EU <= patch 4 has both 1080p and 720p versions but only uses 720p version why deleting 720p and renaming 1080p works.

 

For EW it looks like Firaxis did the same thing but instead of replacing the low-res versions with high-res they made the game look for high-res version and also made the high res versions shared with Enemy within...

 

And to make it more complex they did not do it consistently which resulted in a mix.

 

The end result is that EU => Patch 5 and EW expects most movie files to be named 1080_* and EU <= Patch 4 expects NONE of the movies to be named 1080_*

 

This makes it possible to make the mod smaller by making copies of 1080_* files and name the copies same as EU low-res files...

 

But it would do so at the prize of increased complexity and ultimately a few GB more disc space used as there would suddenly be two high-res files for most movies instead of one high res and one low res like in EU <= Patch 4.

 

Edit: Considering that the game is already 18 GB and all is downloaded via Internet to begin with I don't really see any big issue with 3 GB extra download... And not really with a few GB extra storage either... And given that one of the alternatives saves me a lot of extra effort I personally prefer extra download and just rebuild the game as it was at Patch 4 :)

Edited December 5, 2013 by Bertilsson

[Drakous79]

It's hard to tell, if more people have good computer to play movies in 1080p (backup and copy 1080p>720p) or fast connection (that's big patch :smile: ). My connection is 100 Kbits/sec - that's pretty crap.

[Bertilsson]

Oh well...

 

The script that created the diff files already separates which files are missing in P6 vs P4 in order to determine if rebuild or patch is necessary.

 

I guess I could in theory expand on that to look for possible replacement files whenever a file is missing.... Once replacement file is identified it should be possible to spit out a few scripts that let's the user decide if cloning or renaming in both directions before playing EU/EW is preferred.

 

If all movies can be identified it should result in 0.02 GB base mod, 1 cloning script and optional renaming scripts...

[bokauk]

Great work Bertilsson, this looks promising! :)

Edited December 6, 2013 by bokauk

[Bertilsson]

Some very good news:

The first beta tester to report back, seems to be very happy about playing EU Patch 4 :cool:

 

Positive experiments:

If I delete the entire XCom-Enemy-Unknown\XComGame\Movies folder, the game keeps functioning completely normal except that all movies are skipped. (If I also remove XEW folder; the game automatically starts unknown instead of giving me the option to select within/unknown).

 

This means that in the very worst case scenario: It is possible to make a downgrade patch of 0.02 GB which disables all movies (and optionally saves 6 GB disc space by deleting the existing ones).

 

But more likely I will add some logic to the script responsible for generating the mod to make duplicates of existing "twin" movies whenever an expected movie is missing and still stay at 0.02 GB in mod size (with 3 GB redundant movies on HDD which doesn't have to be downloaded).

[Bertilsson]

A little update:

These are the only missing P4 movie files which cannot be found by simply adding 1080_ to the name in P6 folder:

No match found: 1080_CIN_TP_Containment_SectoidCommander_LOC.bik 45,1 MB // 1080_CIN_TP_Containment_SectoidComm_LOC.bik is identical
No match found: E3_shield.bik 2,3 MB  //completely missing?
No match found: TUT_XCOMDeployed_LOC.bik 1,2 MB  //completely missing?
//Couldn't care less about below
No match found: LogoLegal_PS3_DEU.bik 0,7 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_PS3_ESN.bik 0,7 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_PS3_FRA.bik 0,7 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_PS3_INT.bik 0,7 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_PS3_ITA.bik 0,7 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_PS3_KOR.bik 0,8 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_PS3_POL.bik 0,8 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_PS3_RUS.bik 0,8 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_Xbox360_DEU.bik 0,8 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_Xbox360_ESN.bik 0,8 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_Xbox360_FRA.bik 0,8 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_Xbox360_INT.bik 0,8 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_Xbox360_ITA.bik 0,8 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_Xbox360_KOR.bik 0,7 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_Xbox360_POL.bik 0,8 MB
No match found: LogoLegal_Xbox360_RUS.bik 0,8 MB

So right now it looks very promising to make the mod really small without any sacrifice at all (except disc space).

 

After some closer examination of the other sub-folders I'm starting to think all that is really needed is this:

1. Downgrade Patch all files in CookedPCConsole
2. Downgrade Patch XComGame.exe
3. Make retro-named copies of missing movie files using movie files still present in P6
4. Rebuild (or just ignore) the 2 (3.5MB total) movie files.
5. Deal with .ini files in common folder
6. Deal with .ini files in My Documents\My Games
7. Ignore everything else

1-4 is very straightforward and will most likely be taken care of today.

 

5-6 I would be very happy if someone could share a little insight about or ideas how to deal with.

 

Right now I'm thinking somewhere in the lines along just directly replacing all .ini files with backups from my Patch 4 installation, preferably with some logic to ignore dlc related files if dlc related files are missing in target folders.

 

Edit: Delete/rename 6 in order to make the game rebuild on it's own seems simple enough and does not seem to be triggering any auto update.

Edited December 7, 2013 by Bertilsson

[Jarzy]

I can test the 3GB patch for you :) I've got a nice 60MB connection so GB ain't a problem :>