Good news everyone!
JaxFirehart from the Tale of Two Wastelands team has volunteered to help out with developing an installer for Skywind / Skyblivion.
He has written a successful installer that verifies the installation of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, makes changes to the Fallout3.esm file, uses command-line .BSA unpacking & repacking tools to copy files etc., and it even modifies .INI files too.
He is willing to share the code and also help with understanding it! I will leave it to him to post in this thread and update things, or feel free to ask any questions about it.
Thanks!
The installer is written in VB.NET (cringe, I know). Currently the TTW installer handles files in one of two ways: it can manually extract Fallout 3 .BSAs, delete resources already found in Fallout New Vegas, and then repack them, or it can use a binary patch file to automatically just update the .BSA files. The manual extraction is slow, but also small, so download size is kept small. The binary patch is less slow, but download size is huge. The installer currently uses a combination of these two, it uses the manual extraction for initial installs and then uses binary patches for further installations. This keeps download size small and allows for quick, easy updates.
I assume that Morrowind and Oblivion files are not automatically compatible with Skyrim, so the manual extraction will need an extra step where it patches the old files to be compatible with the new.
I am in the process of overhauling the installer code to boost efficiency and make it easier to maintain. I know to know as much as possible so that I can properly write the patcher to be game neutral!
funny howe there are doing for fallout what this site is doing for elder scroll but a beter instal would be very good hope u get it working
if the make fallout 4 whit the skyrim engine the things that can be done
walking tru skyrim in my power armor shooting dragons whit me laser gun
walking the wastland in my dragon bone armor shooting fire balls at the behemoth a the dreams
We also need the installer to check if the player has the sounds from Morrowind still, and if they do, to make copies of them, and somehow convert them from .mp3 to .wma and put them in their Skywind sound folder.
We need this for sound effects, because if we wanna be legal, we cannot give out Morrowind sound effects, but if the user actually has the sound effects, and converts his own, there is nothing wrong with that. There are actually mods on the Skyrim nexus that allows you to use your Morrowind and Oblivion BGMs with Skyrim.
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/18987
Mehh wrote:
Shouldn't everyone have a complete Morrowind installation on their computer, regardless? The installer should require that, right?
Wait, are you referring to the Morrowind "Bitter Coast Sounds" expansion pack?
Oh wait, I was thinking of the music. If users want the Morrowind battle music, they'll have to convert it from .mp3 to .wav or .xwm. The sound effects need to be copied from their folder, and renamed or we'll have to change some of the forms' directory names to remove the U and S from the sound effect's file name.
That's great. We need a way to verify installation. Can the installer also check for DLC's of Skyrim? Like if we wanted to make sure the players have Dragonborn DLC for Skyrim?
About the sound conversions, we would like to do this, but if it's too much work then just game/dlc check would be fine to start out with. We can pack those sound files with the installer.
I guess we can just change the form's sound file type's name. Like for example 0Thunder1 is looking for fx\morro\Fx\UThunder1.wav but the file is named _Thunder1 in the Morrowind sound folder. We could just fix that, and have the installer simply copy their Morrowind sound folder to their Skywind sound folder. It's probably a hell of a lot easier than having an installer convert sound file types.
Hosting sound effects is a huge nono.
Remember, with TTW, the resources are identical in format, so no modification needs to be made to convert FO3 resources to FNV resources. Because of that similarity the most efficient way is to unpack, clean, and repack the archives. With the massive difference between MW, OB, and SK assets, no matter which way you try to approach the problem, SOMETHING is going to need to be patched.
I don't have the time or disk space to install Morroblivion (or related projects) so I really need a run down on EXACTLY how it is installed at the moment.
With my little knowledge here is what I envision:
Morrowind, Tribunal and Bloodmoon .BSAs are unpacked and then repacked into:
Morroblivion - Meshes, Textures, Sound etc...
At this point, they are then patched using a binary patcher. These binary patches will be huge, but I don't see a way around that.
So after that you have your Morroblivion .BSAs that are up-to-date. Then you need to patch, morrowind.esm, tribunal.esm and bloodmoon.esm. Or do you guys just go ahead and merge all of those into a single Morroblivion.esm?
The key to my patcher is getting everyone onto an even playing field so that future patches can be distributed and installed quickly and easily.
I think I might need to re-install my TES3 and TES4 so I can test drive this and see how it works and see if I can get a good idea on how to make an installer.
So, Skywind and Morroblivion are a bit different than TTW :) We no longer have any default Morrowind textures, so we wouldn't need those files from Morrowind. Also, meshes need to be run through a converter, and a lot of ours have been edited manually, so we probably wouldn't want to try just getting them straight from Morrowind either.
Basically, all this installer would need to do, would be to check to make sure that Morrowind and all DLC are installed, as welll as Dragonborn (in the near future), and install the latest master file (I don't think a patch process would work here due to the extremely drastic difference between the original .esms and Skywind.esm). But, it would also be nice if it could copy things like sounds over that are used directly.
Our meshes aren't protected at the moment, and they really should be though. Perhaps they could be packaged with the installer? I think textures should be fine as a separate download, especially since the file is so huge.
So Morroblivion simply uses converted Morrowind meshes? I had assumed you guys were using your own meshes!
We have a lot of our own, but sadly many of them are still just converted and modified straight from Morrowind. We're working on it though :)
I'd concentrate on Skywind for the installer though. The Morroblivion guys seem content with they are using at the moment, and Skywind has no protection at all (not good).
Oh, and VB as in Visual Basic? :) I actually really like coding in it.... not that I'm good at all.
Among "real" programmers, VB is considered a joke. I'm in school for software engineering but after three years I still know almost no c++ and VB is quick and easy to learn and utilize. I am working on installing Skywind/Morroblivion/Skyblivion now so that I can get an idea of file inputs and outputs.
If the installer only needs to check for morrowind.exe and the morrowind DLC Tribunal and Bloodmoon and the Skyrim DLC DB and maybe Darnguard,then I could just use the same installer [after some changes] that I used for our old master.?
As for the sound,I could change the format to the skyrim format,and just let the installer put the files into the correct sound folder during the install,same with textures and scripts.
Then at a later date they might be changed to .bsa files,which could be installed to the skyrim data folder.?
But the more things like meshes/textures etc that are merged into the main master the better as it cuts down on extra files to be installed.?
Hey don't worry about the fact that its in VB.Net, it makes no difference to the resulting compiled code :) Hey I got my start using VB as well, but it has been about 5 years since I looked at it however!
Perhaps, but I do kind of like the idea of a custom built installer, as opposed to a free one found on the internet.
I only know a little programming, and all of that is in either VB or C#. Actually, the skywind exchanger program on the project release thread was made in VB. Speaking of which, I still haven't updated that link...... I made a new version forever ago.
Shadow,I agree,that is why I suggested using the same installer that was used for the old master.?
And it is obtainable over the net,just has to be setup to do things in certain ways is all.
That's what I mean, Jax is offering a custom built installer that we can tailor to our needs, and get to perform different operations. The one you used was found free on the internet, and caused issues with installation on some systems.
Ok,np,sorry for misreading your post,but there are [or must be] some other better freeware installers out there that can do better search functions for installed files.?
ironman12345 wrote:
I looked into that extensively a while back for the original morroblivion installer. The short answer is - nope. If you want good features, you need to pay, sometimes thousands of dollars.
Jax also looked into the same issue for TTW, but ran into the same problem. $300-400 minimum for a decent pre-coded installer, and it still couldn't do everything.