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Detecting Modmerge'd games


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Games with Siege of Dragonspear from either Steam or GOG need to have a program called Modmerge run on them first to make them available to be modded. The nice thing is that this is pretty easy to detect and work around. On these platforms, the SOD content is distributed as a zip file in dlc/sod-dlc.zip. Among other adjustments, Modmerge unpacks the zip and then renames it (to sod-dlc.disabled) so the engine won't pick it up, meaning we can detect games that need Modmerge with a simple file check:

ACTION_IF ((FILE_EXISTS ~dlc/sod-dlc.zip~) OR (FILE_EXISTS ~sod-dlc.zip~)) THEN BEGIN
  FAIL ~Modmerge is required before mods can be installed on this game. Check the readme for more information and a link to download Modmerge.~
END
Stick this in your ALWAYS block and you're good to go. For lone components, you can also use REQUIRE_PREDICATE.
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Hm...are you sure?

I have such a game but not that file. Chances are that I deleted it after I ran modmerge and now all the unpacked stuff is in my sod-dlc folder? It has been a while so I am not sure anymore, but I often do such clean-up of unnecessary files.

But maybe I am a weird person and not the average user.

 

Maybe it makes sense to check for one of the unpacked files, e.g. SoDAreas.bif?

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I think CamDawg's code snippet is alright. If sod-dlc.zip can't be found, then it has either been merged already (and is detected by GAME_INCLUDES ~sod~) or doesn't exist to begin with.

However, I think GOG places the DLC into the root folder of the game, so we should check that path as well.

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Hm...are you sure?

I have such a game but not that file. Chances are that I deleted it after I ran modmerge and now all the unpacked stuff is in my sod-dlc folder? It has been a while so I am not sure anymore, but I often do such clean-up of unnecessary files.

But maybe I am a weird person and not the average user.

 

Maybe it makes sense to check for one of the unpacked files, e.g. SoDAreas.bif?

I think the first version of Modmerge did it slightly differently. This is from my before-and-after Steam version that I checked today. If anyone has SOD from GOG, I'd like to verify it works the same there as well.

 

Checking for SoDAreas.bif would be fine if I was just looking for an SoD game; what I want here is to avoid installing on a game that needs Modmerge.

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Hm...are you sure?

I have such a game but not that file. Chances are that I deleted it after I ran modmerge and now all the unpacked stuff is in my sod-dlc folder? It has been a while so I am not sure anymore, but I often do such clean-up of unnecessary files.

But maybe I am a weird person and not the average user.

 

Maybe it makes sense to check for one of the unpacked files, e.g. SoDAreas.bif?

I think the first version of Modmerge did it slightly differently. This is from my before-and-after Steam version that I checked today. If anyone has SOD from GOG, I'd like to verify it works the same there as well.

 

Sorry - my mistake - of course it is checked that the file is no longer there.

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Hmm, but does the modmerger actually remove the file from the location ?

Cause that's kinda destructive... cause you might as well just find any file the dlc extracts into the game folder and that would be it... <gameinstallfolder>\sod-dlc/25CREANI.BIF .

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The merge operation is reversible. modmerge renames sod-dlc.zip to sod-dlc.disabled and creates a backup of the original chitin.key, so that they can be easily restored. It will be time-consuming to remove all SoD-related files from the various game folders though. It's probably more feasible to reinstall the game via game manager/client if you need a clean game.

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The merge operation is reversible. modmerge renames sod-dlc.zip to sod-dlc.disabled and creates a backup of the original chitin.key, so that they can be easily restored. It will be time-consuming to remove all SoD-related files from the various game folders though. It's probably more feasible to reinstall the game via game manager/client if you need a clean game.

A clean install would be best, yeah. Looking at files, most of it is a pile of biffs in /sod-dlc with a handful of new files in /movies and /music, but the problem is that about 20 of the original biffs in /data have also been updated. There's also no backup for the tlk file, but I don't think that ultimately has an effect here.

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a pile of biffs

Sigh. And here I was *almost* ready to get back into modding until I read that unfortunate phrase.

 

Yeah, we need a better group name for biffs, like a murder of crows, clowder of cats, or parliament of owls. A horror of biffs? An insanity of biffs?

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