A program to combine multiple DaZips into one.

[blackninja420]

Ok, so I requested this a while ago, and no one wanted to put any comments in it, so I will post it again. I really think that a program that would be able to combine mutliple DaZips, like the programs for combining mods for Fallout 3, would be welcomed and praised for Dragon Age.

 

There is no doubt a hardcoded cap for DaZips, I have tested it by getting to the max limit where the game will lag so much that it freezes during certain parts, and have un-installed, reinstalled, and changed the mods multiple times, and it always happens when I get to that amount of mods.

 

So, I really really think that a program that made it so people could combine DaZips together would be an excellent utility for the community.

[marbatico]

there is a DAzip cap? :blink:

[TGBlank]

Cap may be related to Module core scripts instead of dazips themselves, further testing with mods that don't use module core scripts is needed.

 

Other than that, you cannot merge said scripts through a program, you simply can't. Resources, non-conflicting scripts and other misc stuff can be extracted and repacked, or put into the override folder. In any case these kind of things shouldn't cause issues at all.

[xiwi]

Recently I had a problem with some dazips breaking my game and then found the daModder utility, which is useful for uninstalling and filtering official/unofficial dazips. You may not be able to literally combine dazips, but you could install a few of them, make a backup session, unintall and repeat. These would effectively work as Dazip packages ^^

 

Other then that, I would be interested in information about really merging dazips manually.

Q1: It is really necessary to extract and repack everything? non erf files won't be read at all?

Q2: How would the process for transforming them into override mods work? extract every *.erf to override or one should move things to Addins, etc. It would be great if plain override works =). I would be able to check compatibility easily by transforming everything into override mods.

Q3: What is the *.cif file, is it needed to make an override mod?

Q4: Are there things in dazips, that cannot be done with overrides?

 

Just looked into a file and seems the resources are located in x_modcore.erf in \Contents\addins\x\core\data\ (where x is the name of the mod). Will try to make an override out of it, and bring some light to this ;)

 

 

PD: I just checked and your override folder is also copied when you make a backup including mods, so you could do override packages as well ;). Most importantly have the ability to restore things to a point when they worked. Sadly many bugs are only found when starting a new character, so it's advisable to backup often.

 

edit: just tried, cif file doesn't seem to be needed to transform mod into override one... descriptions and such won't work right with override method and it can't resolve conflicts as dazips seem able able to

Bear in mind the backup sessions mentioned above will delete and restore data, not just replace it. For example if you have a session 1 (mods A,B,C) and session 2 (mods A,B). Restoring session 1 and then session 2 will leave you with mods A and B. It would be interesting to add incremental backups ^^