SS2 Blue Mod Manager

[674462012051fMarvin]

Here it is. Windows users don't really need to update.

voodoo, I'm uploading the images again. Seems you only linked them and I set them to expire, so the OP is rather empty right now.

Code: [Select]

#Version 1.15#
~ Improved compatiblity on OSX and Linux systems using Wine.
~ Fixed notification when archives are present in the DMM folder during startup.


[6744620120b21JDoran]

What would be great would be if the first menu system supported 'profiles'. So that, for example, there could be profiles named:

Original game (base game and original patches plus whatever is deemed necessary for any trouble-free playthrough)

Recommended modded and patched game (includes SCP 4, the mods from The Newbie Modding Guide (https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=4447.0), plus newer mods such as Repairman, Wormblend Many, Droid Immortality, etc)

and so on. Then, when the user selected an option, then the appropriate mods and files would be enabled. This would (mostly) stop people from using incompatible mods and other related problems. And the user should be able to create a profile when using his/her own selection of mods. I think this might be a good feature to add to the ss2bmm.exe menu system.

[6744620120cefvoodoo47]

yes, this would be useful - the question (for Marvin) is, can it be coded in?

[6744620120f64Marvin]

It would be a hack job since the manager wasn't built with that in mind but it is certainly possible. However, this would be limited to saving and loading your own profiles for the current folder setup. The manager is completely oblivious to the inner workings of each mod, so without adding individual mod profiles to the downloads and reading them in the manager, it's not possible to enforce a pre-built profile unless a master mod list is kept on the server and the user is not allowed to change any filenames, similar to what SS2 tool does.

I once thought about adding download support to SS2BMM, so going with your idea, you would check on first start of SS2BMM if the mod folder is empty, then suggest a profile, download the respective list of mods (a small list which is easy to curate) and install them immediately. Again, this is not at all what bluemess had in mind when he started and would likely require a major rewrite, something I do not have enough time and knowledge for.

I wanted to resume work on the program after sorting out my current RL issues, so I'll take your idea into consideration.

[6744620121127Kolya]

I think saving and loading profiles with locally available mods is all that is desirable anyway. If you can write that at some point, it would be great. No hurry.

[6744620121228Marvin]

Sure thing.

[674462012145fJDoran]

Just having profiles work with pre-installed mods would be enough, I think (no auto-downloading and installing of mods).

But as a further suggestion, how about if when a profile was loaded, then if one or more of the required mods was not installed, then the program would say so (and probably refuse to 'start')? That way, when someone created a new mod, then they could also add a downloadable profile, so that when you loaded the profile into the menu, then you'd get a message warning you if a required mod was needed, and the message would give you the names of the required mod(s) (and ideally the URL to the mod's download page), so you could download and install it/them yourself. Then reload the (same) profile, and you'd get no error message since all of the mods were installed, and you could just then click "Exit and Start Game" as normal.

That way, it would be up to the user to download and install the needed components, but the profile would contain the names of the needed files, and where the user could manually download them from.

[6744620121582Kolya]

That brings up the requirement for unified mod names (or IDs) again. Currently there is nothing that identifies the mod to the manager.

[67446201216aavoodoo47]

considering the total number of SS2 mods (less than 200?), doing ids wouldn't be impossible. and once done, a lot of things would be much easier to do.

[6744620121a73Olfred]

What about just picking the topic ID as the mod ID? Maybe with a seperation for submods.

[6744620121bcfKolya]

There may be mods that don't have a dedicated topic, eg WIP stuff. I guess you could use the message ID. But what if someone posts a later version in another message (or thread)? Somehow I'm not comfortable with this.

[6744620121d35voodoo47]

yeah, if adding some sort if (ini?) files to the mods that would act like ids, I'd probably just go with simple numbering, starting with 0001 (pretty sure we are not getting anywhere near 9999 in this corner of reality, so four digits ought to be enough).

sometimes it's better to not be too smart about things.

[6744620122119Marvin]

There may be mods that don't have a dedicated topic, eg WIP stuff. I guess you could use the message ID. But what if someone posts a later version in another message (or thread)? Somehow I'm not comfortable with this.

Exactly. It could theoretically be done, but it's highly unlikely a stable solution could be found where both the site and the mod manager do not have to be kept updated and in synch all the time. I'm not saying it should never be done, but I find it unlikely that the result justifies the effort. After all, the same thing can basically be accomplished by a list of URLs and two screenshots as seen in the newbie guide.

[67446201222b7voodoo47]

then my recommendation would be to leave it alone - there is just no way things can be made people proof, no matter the effort.

the simpler the manager is, the better - lets make sure it will never turn into a horrifying abomination that is the FO4 mod manager (which probably ended up this way exactly because a lot of people had a lot of good ideas, and also implemented them all. like, ALL).

[6744620122491JDoran]

I still think support for profiles would be good, even if it's purely used to store the order and activated/deactivated state of all the mods needed for a given profile. That way the user can get a given mod working with other mods, and then save a working profile, so (s)he can easily get back to this state after trying other mod setups and profiles. Please consider this, Marvin, if you're looking for more features to add to the menu. It doesn't need the ability to download more mods, or to suggest mods to download, or to import/export profiles from other users, just for the user on a given PC to create profiles of their own setups and use the profiles themselves.

[67446201225feMarvin]

As I said, this was never off the table, the previous discussion was about enforcing pre-built mod profiles which is not possible without ID-tagging all mods on the website. Your idea is much simpler, and I'll look into it as soon as I can find enough time.

[6744620122735JDoran]

Thanks mate.

[6744620122a54voodoo47]

I was thinking about this some more, and I may have a workable suggestion.

lets play analyze the situation - what does it mean when someone says "your mod load priorities are wrong"? the answer is actually very simple - it means that mods that fix/tweak/modify the vanilla resources (without enhancing them) have been assigned a higher priority level than mods that enhance visuals (or other things). and while there is a lot of stuff in the second group, the first one is actually tiny - it's only gamesys mods, plus fixed objects and SHTUP.

so as long as the manager auto-pops the/any gamesys mod (as we know, only one can be active at a time) into the lowest slot, Fixed Objects into the second lowest slot, and SHTUP into the third, all will be well for 99% of people* - because for the rest of the mods, priorities actually don't matter**.

that means you don't really need profiles, you need just one - any gamesys mod at the bottom, then Fixed Objects, then SHTUP, and the rest is whatever. and this should be fairly doable - Fixed Objects and SHTUP will probably need a unique identifier of some sort, but adding some sort of text file to two mods is not exactly a big deal.



*excluding nutcases that just grab 50+ random mods and jam them into their SS2 installs. there is no magic pill for that.
**not completely true, as pumpkin heads and santa hats really should have the very highest priority, but we can afford to ignore those two.

[6744620122bccMarvin]

Makes sense, but just off the top of my head, I can already give you a not too bizarre counter example: Switching between German and English translation where you'd keep the German translation at lowest priority, put SCP on top and then the German text at highest priority. Maybe it would be better to have a one-time popup if you exit the manager for the first time with a non-conformal mod order.

[6744620122d6avoodoo47]

not quite sure what do you mean, but as long as SCP (a gamesys mod) is kept at the lowest position, things should be ok. which was the point of my previous post - as long as SCP/other gamesys mods, Fixed Objects and SHTUP are kept at the lowest positions, things will be fine for 99% of people.

[6744620122f20Marvin]

This:
https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=1634

That mod has to have the lowest priority as SCP replaces and fixes a lot of objects and textures which would otherwise get overridden.

[674462012313evoodoo47]

that doesn't sound right (translated stuff should override whatever was originally there), but I'll check.

//ok, quickly ran through the first level, I have no idea why the translation should have lower priority than SCP - this will only result in having some assets in english instead of german. so as far as I can tell, SCP should still have the lowest priority.

however, we could argue about SHTUP - here, it's either the language pack having higher priority than SHTUP, which will result in maximum number of assets being translated to german, but part of them being lowres because of this, or SHTUP having higher priority than the language pack, which equals maximum assets being hires, but not everything being translated. both are not optimal.

also yeah, the first ghost indeed does not exists long enough to play the german dialogue fully, so this will probably get fixed somehow.

[6744620123594sarge945]

I would like to make a feature request.

So in the mod manager, it would be great if we could assign categories for mods, and enable/disable whole categories of mods. So we could have all our graphics mods in one place, all our patches etc in another, and stuff like that. Would make it easy to, say, play the vanilla game with just graphical updates by disabling all but the graphical category

I think the DMM folder structure should be changed, to allow categories to be added. So instead of having DMM/Mod, it would be DMM/Category/Mod

[67446201237c9voodoo47]

this would be quite useful if having 100+ mods loaded was a common thing, but as the normal max is about 20, it's basically just increasing complexity (a bad thing) for very little benefit. also, I don't think it's doable without manually giving an unique identifier to EACH mod available here (as mentioned earlier, the manager has no way of knowing what's what without it). ouch.

remember, even the current very simple and clean manager can be hard to figure out for some people.