PBW now supporting SE5.

[shinigami]

Um, since the game pulls the mod data from the save, why would there need to be a command line option for it? My mod saves have always loaded fine without having to pick the mod first.

[geoschmo]

shinigami said:
Um, since the game pulls the mod data from the save, why would there need to be a command line option for it? My mod saves have always loaded fine without having to pick the mod first.

Ok, that's what Fyron said too. I was making some assumptions abotu how it worked, perhaps I was incorrect. I have actually not played anything but stock SE5 myself.

When you play a mod version you don't have to select the mod version when you load the game up? You can select stock SE5 from the load menu and then your modded savegame file and it will use the mod data files from the savegame file? If that's the case then perhaps we don't need any mod support on PBW. But if that's the case how do you change the mod of a savegame after it starts? Can you not do that?

Geoschmo

[Ed Kolis]

You do not need to select a mod when loading a savegame. SE5 automatically loads the mod when you attempt to load the savegame.
The downside of this is, you're right, you can't change the mod being used in a savegame without actually modifying the contents of the mod data folder. This means that in order to upgrade a game to a newer version of a mod, the newer version must overwrite the older version, forcing everyone on PBW to upgrade their copy of the mod. I suppose it's something that we'll have to live with until Aaron implements a "mod override" in the UI or command line somewhere. But it really shouldn't be all that bad - it SHOULD mean less confusion when mods are upgraded, as all games will be upgraded simultaneously! And if the new version of the mod is incompatible with the old, well then it ought to get a new folder name!
Still, great work at getting SE5 supported! It came as a complete surprise!

[geoschmo]

Ed Kolis said:
The downside of this is, you're right, you can't change the mod being used in a savegame without actually modifying the contents of the mod data folder. This means that in order to upgrade a game to a newer version of a mod, the newer version must overwrite the older version, forcing everyone on PBW to upgrade their copy of the mod.

I'm still a little fuzzy on how this works. If the mod data is included in the savegame file, why would changing the contents of the mod data folders have any effect on a game at all once it's started? And if changing the data in the mod folders does have some effect, that tells me the game is touching the data folders during host processing, which means we will have to have the mod data folders on the server for the mods to work. Perhaps the only thing the savegame file actually contains regarding the mod is a pointer to which data folders it is using, not the actual data itself?

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

Hey wait! *smacks head* I so stoopid. When you load a saved game it doesn't even take you to the screen where you select a version. I kept thinking it did, but you only see the version select screen when you create a new game. So probably I was correct when I said the savegame contains a pointer of some kind to the mod folder. So the mods would have to be on the server, but we mayhaps wouldn't need command line options.

Though this has the potential to be way ugly. It would mean that the mod folder would have to be named the same on the PBW server as it is on everyone's pc's. With SE4 I could call the mod folder whatever I wanted and just point to the correct folder with the command line option.

And as you say Ed new versions of mods would need different folder names or all games using the mod would have to upgrade at the same time. Yuck!

You know the built in mod selector for SE5 seemed like a great feature at first, but I'm thinking now maybe not so much. By locking it into the game itself, it kind of limits our flexibility in this area.

Here's a question. What happens if you try to run the host turn for a mod savegame and don't have the mod folders on the host machine. Will the game run at all?

Geoschmo

[Phoenix-D]

If the mod folder isn't named exactly the same, SEV shrugs, then loads stock instead.

This can have rather..odd..results.

So it looks like the savegame just has a pointer that says "look at this mod folder".

[Ed Kolis]

No, actually new versions of mods should NOT have new folder names; otherwise they will be automatically savegame-incompatible because the folder name (which is SE5's key to the mod) is different. The only time new versions of mods should have new folder names is when they are going to break savegames already. Captain Kwok knows about this; he designed the Balance Mod so that it always goes into the Balance Mod directory, not Balance Mod v0.98 or whatever, because then no one could upgrade their games. (Well, they'd have to manually rename the folder. ) I suppose once Kwok releases a version of the mod that is not compatible with old savegames, he'll rename the folder to something like Balance Mod v1.x, and keep that until he reaches v2.0 or something.
The alternative would be to have a separate directory for every mod version on PBW, and force players to go around renaming their folders or making shortcuts in their GameTypes directory for backward compatibility with old savegames... Dunno about you but I prefer the forced upgrading between compatible versions personally