56 replies to this topic

[Miloch]

Yeah Jarno, were you going to finish this

no

Well good way to pretend you're helping with something but actually not...

[cmorgan]

I have put in a call to the shop (they are still waiting for the graphics card) - as soon as they get it, it can be shipped back. And s soon as I get it, I will set up the test. I have been collecting the mods on my storage, so if i can do an install and then copy the pre-set-up mods into place, it should be ok.

[Miloch]

I have put in a call to the shop (they are still waiting for the graphics card) - as soon as they get it, it can be shipped back.

But wait a second. What sort of machine are you playing DA on if you don't have one that can handle BG2+mods?

I will see if I can do a test too if the BWS 8.2 comes out soon. Because I don't really feel like manually downloading every mod ever contrived and it seems like the BWP is always a step ahead of its own setup program (not slamming it, we all love it of course, it's the bee's knees, the dog's bollocks, just an observation).

[Jarno Mikkola]

Surprise, surprise.
Well, perhaps I should explain myself...

As you should know, the BWP has just been updated, and as I do not have a setup already made for the whole thing, and I have no access to my home computer in the few days ahead, I have no ability to recreate the try out, or the files needed for it, within the next few days, as I did it already without removing the randomness... I am not saying I couldn't do it after that.
But I am not going to pretend I am going to be able to do it before you or somebody else is.

Edited by Jarno Mikkola, 11 November 2009 - 01:18 AM.

[cmorgan]

I have put in a call to the shop (they are still waiting for the graphics card) - as soon as they get it, it can be shipped back.

But wait a second. What sort of machine are you playing DA on if you don't have one that can handle BG2+mods?

A crap-tastic laptop borrowed from my brother. Win-dex 4.8, dual-core processor, integrated audio and graphics processor, Vista x64. The game should not run at all - it is below minimum spec (I have a long post about it at G3 I will link here). Suprisingly, at lowest resolution with everything graphically disabled and set on the lowest possible textures, etc, it runs fine - stutters in battles, but frankly I am ok with it as a temporary solution because I am loving the storyline and character interaction. I am truly suprised it is not a slideshow. But it works!

No way I am going to mess around with BWP installs on my brother's laptop - it takes forever to do anything at all, and I am avoiding adding anything to his system I can avoid. (Same reasoning on not using my wife's MacBook Pro - no sense messing with other people's stuff). I am using it as the passthrough to set up the mod materials on the 1TB storage drive, but that is a wireless connection, so slower than blazes...plus, only one local drive to work with, limited space, and none of the backround programs to use (winmerge, etc.). Plus, as a loaner, it could vanish at any second - and BWP installs are a serious time committment. I don't want to be halfway through, then have to clean everything out, reset, and hand it back to him.

Edited by cmorgan, 11 November 2009 - 09:08 AM.

[the bigg]

Win-dex 4.8

My new comp has 4.1 - I'm afraid of getting DA:O now
(I'd get a 5.4 if I don't consider Aero Performance, so it might end up working by chance).

Edited by the bigg, 11 November 2009 - 09:53 AM.

[cmorgan]

I think you will be able to - if your processor is at 5, you can do it, I bet, just as long as you use minimum graphics. There is no way thismchine meets the specs (doesn't even have a graphics card) and it runs it, it just looks like garbage Processor, etc. all rate 5.1 and they work fine. You will have a better performing game than I will!

[Miloch]

Win-dex 4.8

What the hell is Windex? (I don't think you're talking about the glass cleaner...)

I've started this but it's going really, really slow on an external USB drive. But at least the downloading/extracting/copying/random-removal is done and it's actually installing now. I think it's been on the Fixpack still for like an hour now. Hopefully the second one goes at least marginally faster with the newer WeiDU.

If anyone has further suggestions for diffing the files automatically, now's the time to share, because I don't plan on spending a whole lot of time going through one folder after another doing it manually. PSPad does a great job with individual files but I don't think it has a batch mode. I'll try CSDiff and maybe a few others but I don't know if they do either. I could also copy the files to the Linux machine I guess, but I'd need some input on the exact syntax to produce what the bigg needs.

I'll be really pissed if I do all this work and the bigg decides to slack some more on putting out v212 .

[the bigg]

What the hell is Windex? (I don't think you're talking about the glass cleaner...)

http://www.microsoft...ence-index.aspx

If anyone has further suggestions for diffing the files automatically, now's the time to share, because I don't plan on spending a whole lot of time going through one folder after another doing it manually. PSPad does a great job with individual files but I don't think it has a batch mode. I'll try CSDiff and maybe a few others but I don't know if they do either. I could also copy the files to the Linux machine I guess, but I'd need some input on the exact syntax to produce what the bigg needs.

WinDiff - CMorgan should have detailed instructions.
If you prefer command-line stuff, do this:

diff -raiNq --ignore-file-name-case <211.00 dir> <211.x dir> > differences-install
grep -i '\(WARNING\|ERROR\)' <211.x dir>/*.debug > errors-install

I'll be really pissed if I do all this work and the bigg decides to slack some more on putting out v212 .

[Miloch]

I've started this but it's going really, really slow on an external USB drive. But at least the downloading/extracting/copying/random-removal is done and it's actually installing now. I think it's been on the Fixpack still for like an hour now.

Well two days later, the first install is only on SCS.

Obviously, installing to an external USB drive doesn't help, but it actually isn't that slow during disk access times - rather during CPU working times. It's almost like there's some sort of memory leak in OCaml's regexp or something. Maybe I should've piped it through some sort of OCaml debugger for Windows, if there is such a thing, though that would slow it down even more I'm sure. When WeiDU tries to do a query that would only return a few files (like ~^spwi32*\.spl$~), it takes bloody ages. Like hours sometimes - at least after several successive mod installs. Of course, with each new mod it's got more and more unbiffed files to comb through, but still... why should it go through *all* of them if it knows the first several characters? It's not exactly a top-of-the-line machine either, but it's a P4 2.0Ghz processor with plenty of RAM and pagefile and nothing else running. I guess I'll just let it keep going... at least I've got another machine or two to work on.

[the bigg]

The filesystem doesn't understand regexp - thus, even if I were looking for ^sw1h01\.itm$ it'll still need to fetch the full file list and loop through all files in the override to see which names do match.

A twin install of BWP takes CMorgan the better part of a 24 hour day (and he has a fancy rig with a 10.000 RPM Raptor), it's no wonder that it'll be frighteningly shittier when working on a 4200 RPM disk accessed over USB. Incidentally, I would've run the two installs simultaneously, to ensure that CPU-heavy sections of install #1 would parallelize with disk-heavy sections of install #2.

[Jarno Mikkola]

I've started this but it's going really, really slow on an external USB drive. But at least the downloading/extracting/copying/random-removal is done and it's actually installing now. I think it's been on the Fixpack still for like an hour now. Hopefully the second one goes at least marginally faster with the newer WeiDU.

If you, or someone else can upload the changed .tp2 files(so they do not randomize the items etc.), I probably could make an install this week end if I get my computer back...

[Miloch]

If you, or someone else can upload the changed .tp2 files(so they do not randomize the items etc.), I probably could make an install this week end if I get my computer back...

Ok, but I can't guarantee you'll have the same mods or versions as I did, though I took everything from the latest 8.2.x BWP "Expert" and added iiItem onto it for testing purposes (not usually in BWP but it should install it if it's there). Though I didn't install the handful of conflicting mods or crap mods that aren't available any more. I doubt any of them use advanced WeiDU commands like RANDOMising stuff.

You'll probably have to change the paths when you extract these at least - these are from Test2/BGII - SoA/ on my install.
 randseed.rar   110.28K   145 downloads
My first install is "finally" on Divine Remix and the second one is on NEJ (I started it only recently). Regexp is a real bitch on this install. And I don't know if it's entirely because of the external drive, because it doesn't even seem to be accessing the drive until it actually does some writing. WeiDU should forbid modders from using regexp unless absolutely necessary (stupid I know, but there has to be some way to cut down the cruft). It wasn't necessary in Aurora until we added the randomisation and the subcomponents, and even then it's used relatively sparingly. SCS alone must've called the same regexp like 5-10 times in a row - probably took like a day just for that. I'm sure DavidW knows what he's doing, but still... might be some room for optimisation or something.

[dabus]

I have an P-M 1700, 1 GigaByte RAM, IDE-Drive (so this is a few years old) and an external 3.5 SATA USB Drive. I don't really know how fast the SATA is, but it's not that fast. It took me about 14 hours to get through a full-fledged expert install. And I did start WeiDU for every component, so it took some extra time to startup WeiDU. I think this was with v8 or 8.1, so it may take a bit longer right now, since new components are available.

Since my laptops performance should be par with your PCs, I guess that there's really something wrong with the USB-drive...

[Miloch]

I guess that there's really something wrong with the USB-drive...

It is something like this - only about a year old. I don't know how fast it is (they don't seem to want to tell you there) but I think it's 7200rpm or so. The transfer rate is 480 megabits per second. But I don't think it's the speed. This seems to have something to do with it, since it seems to be a newer BWFixpack "fix". Not only does it lag it insanely just to copy 54 files to the same location, but it's copying them pointlessly and for a bunch of different mod components. I'm also wondering if launching WeiDU separately for every component is actually quicker than running the BiG World Install.bat. Maybe there is some issue with the batch files and memory not being cleared between every separate mod? Because it seems to get progressively slower with every mod installed, and I don't remember individual mods like SCS, Aurora, etc. taking this long to install, even on an external drive.

[the bigg]

I'm installing scsII with both 211.00 and a tweaked 211.x to see if this speeds up anything.

I'm using this thing to artificially inflate the override:

<<<<<<<< itm_list
>>>>>>>>

OUTER_SET files_per_type = 10000

ACTION_DEFINE_ARRAY types BEGIN itm spl cre END

SILENT

ACTION_PHP_EACH types AS key => type BEGIN
	PRINT ~DUPping %type%~
	
	SILENT
	COPY ~itm_list~ ~override/%type%_list~

	COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP - GLOB ~.*\.%type%~ ~tmp~
		INNER_ACTION BEGIN
			APPEND ~%type%_list~ ~%SOURCE_FILE%~
		END
	BUT_ONLY
	
	COPY_EXISTING ~%type%_list~ ~override~
		READ_2DA_ENTRIES_NOW ~%type%_file~ 0
		COUNT_2DA_ROWS 0 rows
		PATCH_IF EVALUATE_BUFFER ~%type%_file~ = 0 BEGIN INNER_ACTION BEGIN
			FAIL ~empty set: %type%~
		END END
		i_mod = 0
		FOR (i = 0; i < files_per_type; i+=1) BEGIN
			READ_2DA_ENTRY_FORMER ~%type%_file~ i_mod 0 file
			INNER_ACTION BEGIN
				COPY_EXISTING ~%file%~ ~override/%i%.%type%~
			END
			i_mod += 1
			PATCH_IF i_mod == rows BEGIN
				i_mod = 0
			END
		END
		BUT_ONLY
END

Now I suppose I should re-enroll in my old Maths college and prove the Riemann hypothesis while I wait for scsII to do its thing.

[the bigg]

My tweaks proved to be useless, so I'm scrapping them.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Well, now that I have my computer back, I started the installs, the first one is done, and the second one just started... and I noticed that when I overwrote the 1sylm-setup.exe, I forgot to run it, and so the BiG World Install used the old WeiDU.exe's, and I had to restart.
CtB just installed on the second game...

Edit: results... the TETHYRFORESTPATCH mod fix from the BWP Fixpack, doesn't get installed in the WeiDU.exe v21108 because it gives this:

...
ERROR: Failure("Unknown macro: ADD_AREA_REGION")
PLEASE email the file SETUP-TETHYRFORESTPATCH.DEBUG to Hoppy
Automatically Skipping [Tethyr Forest Patch] because of error.
Saving This Log:
...

It does install in the regular v21100, so I don't know what's off.

Going on to install Generalize biffing mod on the second install now, so it'll be done soon.

Edited by Jarno Mikkola, 20 November 2009 - 04:48 PM.

[Miloch]

Edit: results... the TETHYRFORESTPATCH mod fix from the BWP Fixpack, doesn't get installed in the WeiDU.exe v21108 because it gives this: ERROR: Failure("Unknown macro: ADD_AREA_REGION")

I thought the bigg fixed that around v21104, though maybe that was only for some other macro.

Going on to install Generalize biffing mod on the second install now, so it'll be done soon.

Eh, didn't he tell you not to install the biffing last time? I don't want to see you f- up this one again, because my install still has to go through Aurora and some other insane crap, and that's only for the first one.

The filesystem doesn't understand regexp - thus, even if I were looking for ^sw1h01\.itm$ it'll still need to fetch the full file list and loop through all files in the override to see which names do match.

Question - does FILE_EXISTS_IN_GAME have to do the same thing? Because it seems to take a stupidly large amount of time just to determine if one file is present or not.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Hmm, as you can see from this report...  report.htm   723.38K   165 downloads ... the WeiDU.exe v21108 was successful to install all the major mods, and the minor except the TethyrForestPatch(-3a) mod, what's shocking is that the dialog.tlk and all the major files are the same in length in both installs.

[./CHITIN.KEY] loaded, 1532517 bytes	   [./CHITIN.KEY] loaded, 1532517 bytes
	[./CHITIN.KEY] 533 BIFFs, 108326 resources [./CHITIN.KEY] 533 BIFFs, 108326 resources
	[dialog.tlk] 339216 string entries 		[dialog.tlk] 339216 string entries
	[./Autorun.ini] loaded, 1452 bytes 		[./Autorun.ini] loaded, 1452 bytes
	[./baldur.ini] loaded, 3484 bytes 		 [./baldur.ini] loaded, 3484 bytes

The only difference is the speed at which the WeiDU.exe v21108 does things... and that indeed the mentioned patch doesn't install.

I have also send Hoppy a PM that notes the situation for the TethyrForestPatch thing, but yet haven't heard anything...
Now, I could make a report from every debug file out there, but I think that's a bit silly, so I would ask for advice on which once to make... so I'll just attach this one for now:  BiG_World_Debug.zip   3.53MB   164 downloads Zipped to make it 46 times smaller. Yeah, it could be good if someone could tell me how to remove the same data from the thing...
From what I can see from all that is, the only difference is the WeiDU.exe version numbers, and the small difference on when the WeiDU.exe's were updated(cause I did it manually on the v21108).
EDIT: Yeah, now that I know, the 'BiG World debug Patch file from v21100 and 21108' has all the differentiated lines:  BiG_World_debug_Patch_file_from_v21100_and_21108.txt   150.67K   188 downloads

Going on to install Generalize biffing mod on the second install now, so it'll be done soon.

Eh, didn't he tell you not to install the biffing last time? I don't want to see you f- up this one again, because my install still has to go through Aurora and some other insane crap, and that's only for the first one.

Well the bigg requested me to uninstall the Gen_Bif cause he wanted to see the difference the between the two WeiDU.exe's... or actually make sure there wasn't any... or so would my suspicions say on the matter.

Edited by Jarno Mikkola, 21 November 2009 - 04:49 AM.