Porting WeiDU mods to Linux - initial thoughts

[ronin69hof]

With WeInstall, if the file name is setup-bg2fixpack.tp2 then I had to run WeInstall setup-bg2fixpack. It wouldnt let me just run WeInstall bg2fixpack. I got bg2 to install with wine but had to downgrade to an earlier version (cant remember which) and I find that with cedega it runs alot better than with wine. The audio install for the NPC's wasnt that bad just time consuming.

 

The only thing really annoying is the mods that put the .tp2 in the mod directory and not in the main bg2 directory.

 

oh... another thing wine runs my processor up to between 90 and 100% and cedega only uses about 70-80%.

 

ronin

[the bigg]

With WeInstall, if the file name is setup-bg2fixpack.tp2 then I had to run WeInstall setup-bg2fixpack. It wouldnt let me just run WeInstall bg2fixpack.

I am sure it works for me . Are you using the version from the WeiDU-Linux archive or an other one? Also, are you using a case-sensitive file system? If so, you're bound to have troubles with upper/lower case, unless you remembered to turn everything to lowercase via tolower. Is tolower shipped with WeiDU-Linux? I can't recall...

I have all IE games on the FAT partition, and can shrug the case problems off my shoulders

[ronin69hof]

With WeInstall, if the file name is setup-bg2fixpack.tp2 then I had to run WeInstall setup-bg2fixpack. It wouldnt let me just run WeInstall bg2fixpack.

I am sure it works for me . Are you using the version from the WeiDU-Linux archive or an other one? Also, are you using a case-sensitive file system? If so, you're bound to have troubles with upper/lower case, unless you remembered to turn everything to lowercase via tolower. Is tolower shipped with WeiDU-Linux? I can't recall...

I have all IE games on the FAT partition, and can shrug the case problems off my shoulders

 

I am using an ext3 filesystem and using WeiDU-Linux v196. I ran tolower in the main BG directory and your right, I'm an idiot WeInstall bg2fixpack works fine.

 

ronin

[ronin69hof]

The self-executable mods are also a pain in the ass, is there any easy way to extract them in linux (key word in that sentence is easy). wine chokes on them alot, for example, wine had no problems with DefJamv3 but wouldnt do BG2fixpack.

 

ronin

[the bigg]

The self-executable mods are also a pain in the ass, is there any easy way to extract them in linux (key word in that sentence is easy). wine chokes on them alot, for example, wine had no problems with DefJamv3 but wouldnt do BG2fixpack.

Download the Mac version

 

Wine can run NSIS installers (E.G. DefJam uses NSIS, like most PPG mods and some SHS mods), but evidently it doesn't work with self-extracting rar (BG2Fixpack uses SFX-RAR, like all G3 mods and some SHS mods). If a SFX-RAR fails to work, you can install the rar utilities (E.G. with automatix if using Ubuntu), and then "unrar x BG2fixpack.exe"

[ronin69hof]

cool, thanks, I had forgotten to put the "x" in the unrar command.

 

ronin

[the bigg]

Heh, I remember about when I did "unrar e OSX-bg1npc-v12.rar" rather than "unrar x OSX-bg1npc-v12.rar" by mistake... I decided to trash the install and redo it from scratch rather than cleaning up all those 2500+ files

[ronin69hof]

f&%k... too many mods, now the game wont start and I forgot to back it up before I started

 

guess I get my backup from my Microshit box.

 

ronin

[the bigg]

More on .bat scripts.

 

If the file names used contain a character not in the [a-zA-z0-9_-] set, it needs to be escaped in either of the following fashions:

 

md music\mxm#am

 

should become either

 

mkdir music/mxm\#am

or

mkdir 'music/mxm#am'

 

Also, you need to do the obvious command changes (which you'd have already done on the Mac version):

copy -> cp

move -> mv

md -> mkdir

rd -> rm -r

del -> rm

 

sox, tisunpack and oggdec are fine as such (except that they don't need the path, etc).

 

Finally, snd2acm works, if you call it via "wine snd2acm.exe". However, it's as slow as hell (took me over 20 minutes to convert the 4 WAV files from the Amber mod to ACM).

[Meira]

Hmmm.... Since it takes that long to convert the acm files would it be more practical to distribute them uncompressed in the Linux version? In Amber's case that means about 5mb larger download and I don't think that will translate to 20 min longer download time. Unless your connection is really slow, that is.

[the bigg]

5 Mb over 30 Mb is Not An Issue . Moreover, I'm using an unusual configuration (NTFS file system), and as such it's possible that NTFS is the cause of the crappiness, and if I used the native ext3 file system it'd have been much faster.

 

Just to prove that, I've removed the NTFS partition and moving everything to ext3

Unfortunately, I already completed my install, so I can't test if using ext3 solves the crappiness.

[the bigg]

To confirm my suspicions, now that I've moved BG2 from NTFS to ext3, snd2acm is working at a decent speed (IE, the progress bar advances by approx. 4 hashes a second). As such, anyone who wrote that program should spend a little time investigating better hard drive access routines

[Guest erik]

A simple shell script wrapper for snd2acm.exe neatens things up.

 

knan@viconia:~/bin$ cat snd2acm
#!/bin/bash
wine /home/knan/bin/snd2acm.exe $*

 

(what's being used for snd2acm on mac, btw?)

 

 

And no need for newbie-eating automatix for unrar ... enable multiverse in synaptic and apt-get install unrar is enough.

[the bigg]

I think a wrapper is a bit excessive, when you can simply put `wine' in front of snd2acm.exe in your sh.

 

IIRC, there's a native mac version of snd2acm.

[Guest erik]

Don't know. Feels better stylistically to install it and a wrapper once and hide it away in a $HOME/bin directory with tisunpack, weinstall and the others, then just assume snd2acm is available as a plain native command.

 

No big deal