tolsen64 on 26/9/2011 at 05:13
I'm having a bit of a problem with choosing a language when installing a mission that has alternative languages.
Most have been straight-forward with a language folder or zip file in the folder that would contain the text files or images for the game. I've been just moving the contents of the selected language folder out of it or unzipping the zip flies "here" and it seems to work fine.
I've discovered some wierd ones in missions lately. In "The Golden Book", there are two zip files. One called ItalianPack.zip and the other called RussPack.zip. I unzip the ItalianPack.zip and find that there are "english" folders in its contents. When I look inside these folders, there are .STR and other files, as well as images and sounds. However, they aren't in english. They seem to be russian (at least the voices are in the sound files).
So this is a mission I may not be able to properly install the language in. Does anyone have any thoughts on how i should go installing languages? Just keep doing it like I did it in the latest release and the wierd ones wont have a language installed? This seems like the only way to go right now.
gnartsch on 26/9/2011 at 07:32
As far as I understand, the problem is that Thief does not support all possible languages.
So anything besides the few supported languages (english, german, french, ... and maybe 1 or 2 more ?)
need to be installed by 'replacing' one of those.
A look into the zip in question will probably tell you which language would need to be 'replaced'.
But most of the time it would be probably 'english', I guess.
tolsen64 on 27/9/2011 at 04:35
My excitement turned to disappointment today. Today I launched an installed mission from the new loader. The game launched and played okay. but weird things were happening.
Sometimes after launching the game, the game would minimize and I would see that the loader program had crashed. The message said something about "windows composition is disabled". I'm guessing that because this is a WPF application and launching an old program in full-screen disables the AERO interface, this is what was causing the crash. Only a guess but sounds good to me.
So I figured I would "hide and wait" for the game to exit as the current loader currently does. This stopped the loader from crashing when the game was launched. But upon exiting from the game and the loader re-appears, the title bar is completely black. The Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons are gone as well.
I googled the issue and found that this is a "(
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/adb33d21-0ca2-4102-aa66-9b4d1cb23a5b/) nasty bug" in the Windows Ribbon. But, one of the answers was to use an alternate Ribbon called "(
http://fluent.codeplex.com/) Fluent". It looks MUCHO better! Don't know why I didn't discover this before.
I'm really happy with the coding and how everything seems to work solid. But now I'm going to take some time and swap out the Ribbon. As always, I'll keep you updated here on my progress.
Beleg Cúthalion on 12/10/2011 at 12:46
Quote Posted by tolsen64
Although I'm now using the 7z.dll for unzipping, I don't think any mission authors should use 7z compression. [...] If I want to view a text file that's say the 100th file in the archive, it has to read the first 99 files before it can read the file I want. That makes getting the mission info from a 7z file time consuming to say the least. non-solid zip files should be the standard.
Snobel just pointed me to this because I mentioned that my yet-to-come T3 FM is zipped up using 7z. The thing is, with 7z the archive is app. 230 MB big. Using zip format it becomes almost 280 MB. I don't like the idea of shipping bigger files "just" because of a readme file issue. Don't you think there's a way to indicate that extracting from a 7z archive without installing the FM takes longer? If there's a way to make sure the readme file is the first one in the archive, this information could be spread among FM authors using 7z and we'd have both the smaller file size and not-so-long extraction time.
About the language thing: Garrett Loader was able to check all existing languages and suggest the one to be installed (if corresponding with GL's set up language, otherwise it would mark English for instance but leave a drop-down menu to manually select). You probably cannot find out whether a file actually contains the language that is written on it – well, Google can... – but language handling has already been rather sophisticated, so, at whatever stage your work might be, you surely can have a look at what the others did. I'll try your mission manager as soon as my FMs comes closer to beta stage. That is, if I find the time. :p
tolsen64 on 13/10/2011 at 13:02
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
Snobel just pointed me to this because I mentioned that my yet-to-come T3 FM is zipped up using 7z. The thing is, with 7z the archive is app. 230 MB big. Using zip format it becomes almost 280 MB. I don't like the idea of shipping bigger files "just" because of a readme file issue. Don't you think there's a way to indicate that extracting from a 7z archive without installing the FM takes longer? If there's a way to make sure the readme file is the first one in the archive, this information could be spread among FM authors using 7z and we'd have both the smaller file size and not-so-long extraction time.
I have played with 7z in trying to make an archive file that has the readme file at the beginning. Even if I zip the readme file first, and then add the mission folder to it afterward, the readme file gets moved somewhere down the line (it's no longer the first file). Doesn't seem to be alphebetical either as I've named it "aReadme.txt" and ".Readme.txt" but it still gets shuffled somewhere in the middle of all the files that came afterwards.
I've even tried to add a comment to the 7z archive, but so far have been unable to do so using the API or the 7-Zip program. The API says the comment is read-only and the 7-Zip program says "not implemented".
The new loader will support installing missions that use 7z, it just won't display Mission Title, Author, Release Date, What game it's for (T1, T2, etc), or any readme files inside the archive. The user would then need to identify which game to load it into so that it doesn't get loaded into the wrong one.
Perhaps a standard of naming files could be adopted that contained the game code as the first part of the name followed by an underscore and the mission title and maybe even the version number. Something like T2_CreatureClash_v1.1.7z. At least then, a loader could identify the correct game and get a mission name.
As for the language, i'm giving the user a choice when language files or folders are found. Upon loading a mission, the user is prompted with a list of languages found in the mission folder after unzipping. The user then selects which language to install.
If you haven't read through the entire thread here, note that the loader currently up for download does not support 7z archives. I'm currently working on a new loader to replace it. Many of the feature requests I received for the loader were impossible to implement in the existing code so I began re-writing it from scratch. There are a few screenshots earlier in this thread if you haven't seen them. I need to add a new screenshot showing the new ribbon. I'm getting close to having something ready for a private beta. Having only about 1 hour per day to work on it, it's slow-going.
snobel on 14/10/2011 at 15:47
I've just learned that the 7za command line tool has a switch, "-ms=e", that will force the use of one solid block for each file extension.
Trying it out on a ~70 MB mission file using 'on 'off' and 'e' for the solid option, the 'e' archive size is within a few kilobytes of the fully solid version, and the time for extracting the readme (a .txt file) is within a few miliseconds of the non-solid version.
So it looks like the perfect compromise if the dll supports that option, and if mission authors can remember to use it...
tolsen64 on 15/10/2011 at 03:01
Quote Posted by snobel
I've just learned that the 7za command line tool has a switch, "-ms=e", that will force the use of one solid block for each file extension.
Where did you find that? The only thing I can find is references to "-ms=on" and "-ms=off". Which might be the same thing?
snobel on 15/10/2011 at 09:30
Command line tools are (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/files/7-Zip/9.22/7z922_extra.7z/download) here.
You've got the right switch, could it be that the documentation you've read is somewhat dated? I called it from within the mission folder like this:
Code:
>7za a -ms=e ..\BigMission.7z *
Btw, using the command to do the opposite of what you describe, i.e. zipping the mission excluding the readme file, then adding the readme...
Code:
>7za a -x!ReadMe.txt ..\BigMission.7z *
>7za a ..\BigMission.7z ReadMe.txt
...the readme gets a block of its own, and can be extracted immediately. Doing it this way is probably better for compression.
Whatever the solution, it would probably be a good idea to provide a small "TafferPacker" utiliy, to ensure it is done right.
tolsen64 on 11/11/2011 at 07:03
Haven't updated in a while so...
have been working on it when I have a spare moment. Pretty close, can load all types of missions. But now I need to know what fan missions have ogg files in them so I can test the decoding of them to wav files.
Thanks!
PsymH on 11/11/2011 at 18:42
My FM "The Mirror of Return" uses ogg files.
