[Dario FF]

Quote

Great. I've got a little brother who absolutely loves playing the Sonic games, but I don't want to lose my save file. Probably not quite what the program was intended for, but until there's a really awesome mod that catches my eye, that'll probably be what I use it for.

As long as it gets used I think it does its purpose. However, noone here has reported any issues(other than DinnerSonic in the other thread) and I keep seeing the Downloads counter go up... So I'll assume the silence is good and it means it works.

The Dragon Road demo will be obviously released to be used with this(and CPKREDIR obviously), although not mandatory. Pretty much the reason I've coded this application for so people can get used to it. Back when we released the Windmill Isle demo, some people had a hard time on figuring out how to merge the mods, even if it involved some really simple INI editing. Well now anyone can figure that out easily by using this. At least I hope so.

This post has been edited by Dario FF: 11 July 2012 - 02:27 PM

[Korama]

Kharen, on 11 July 2012 - 01:58 PM, said:

Great. I've got a little brother who absolutely loves playing the Sonic games, but I don't want to lose my save file. Probably not quite what the program was intended for, but until there's a really awesome mod that catches my eye, that'll probably be what I use it for.

Yeah, you can do that.
Also be aware that CPKREDIR can expand environment variables. So, if several users share a PC, and have their own user accounts, you can use the common variables %USERPROFILE% and %USERNAME%, for example, to keep things separated.

Example:
Let's suppose the Dragon Road demo has been released. It uses save file redirection, so you'll find the line "SaveFile=Saves\sonic.sav" in its mod.ini.
This will cause all users on the PC to share that same sonic.sav file - not necessarily what you want. So you could change that line to "SaveFile=Saves\sonic.%USERNAME%.sav", for example, which would automatically be expanded to "sonic.Joe.sav", "sonic.Dave.sav" or whatever the user names are.
But keep in mind that you have to make sure those files exist before you start playing. Just make copies of Dragon Road's original sonic.sav file and rename them accordingly to sonic.Joe.sav etc.

%USERPROFILE% expands to the account's home folder, normally C:\Users\<username> (eg. "C:\Users\Joe"). You could use that as well, like this: "SaveFile=%USERPROFILE%\DragonRoad.sav".

This expansion is done by the ExpandEnvironmentStrings Windows API function and if you want to get an overview of the existing variables, just open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and enter "set".
But the most useful ones are only USERPROFILE, USERNAME and perhaps APPDATA.

This post has been edited by Korama: 11 July 2012 - 03:02 PM

[Overlord]

Maybe on creation/installation of the mod, that file should be created automatically by the installer?

[TheUltimaXtreme]

Okay, I'm going to assume it doesn't work with pirated copies, because past installing CPKREDIR, it's giving me the "Unable to start (0xc0000142)" error.

[Dario FF]

It should work regardless. My bet is you just have an outdated version of the game. This isn't really related to SonicGMI, but more to CPKREDIR.

This post has been edited by Dario FF: 12 July 2012 - 07:42 PM

[TheUltimaXtreme]

I just want to try out the Windmill Isle demo, if only to test mods in general. I'm gonna assume the CPKREDIR files included in that are older than the current SonicGMI revision?

EDIT: Lo and behold, my guess was right. The old files included with the Windmill Isle demo installed and ran without a hitch, albeit, a bit longer to install, and load times are a bit worse, but fine nonetheless.

This post has been edited by TheUltimaXtreme: 12 July 2012 - 07:51 PM

[Korama]

If you find a CPKREDIR bug, then please post in the CPKREDIR topic.
I have no interest in supporting pirates and pirated versions, of course. But it looks like you discovered a genuine bug. The new savegame redirection patch fails on older versions of SonicGenerations.exe. I'll try to fix it.

[Dario FF]

It's not exactly a bug that affects anything else than outdated versions right? Because I wouldn't like my submission to fail. (Although I can reupload it of course)

[TheUltimaXtreme]

It's nothing major. I'm not sure whether the older CPKREDIR files have negative effects with SonicGMI's current EXE, or as to if it's causing a fault in the save files. I'm not planning to use save-changing mods anyway, but if it causes an issue, that won't be good.

I'm wondering if it's specifically a fault of the older SG EXE, and as to how the new DLLs are coded, as well as if it's due to the files included with the GMI 7z using calls removed from the SG EXE to make it work without Steam.

This post has been edited by TheUltimaXtreme: 12 July 2012 - 08:35 PM

[Korama]

Dario FF, on 12 July 2012 - 08:17 PM, said:

It's not exactly a bug that affects anything else than outdated versions right? Because I wouldn't like my submission to fail. (Although I can reupload it of course)

No, as I said, it's just that it can't patch the savegame functions. If you enable the log file, it tells you as much. And if you disable save file redirection in cpkredir.ini, it'll start fine.

If you want specifics: to support all versions of SonicGenerations.exe, I don't use hardcoded file offsets, else I'd have to maintain a list for each file version. So I look for unique signature byte sequences and derive my target offset from them. Turns out that the newer versions of SonicGenerations.exe have 8 additional bytes right at the savegame stuff, which made one of my checks fail.

But I already fixed it, so all is well.
I'll release an updated cpkredir.dll soon.

[Hinchy]

Dario, could you please publicly release your No HUD modification? You always show it off in things like screenshots and ini examples but you've never offered it for download. The closest you've done is point someone to the files required, but when I put that in my mods folder and tried to set it up myself, the game just crashes.

[Dario FF]

It isn't finished at all, but if you want it...
http://fbe.am/9z5
Only works if you have English selected.

This post has been edited by Dario FF: 13 July 2012 - 03:45 PM

[Dario FF]

Shameless bump, but I want to ask something.

Seeing as this thing is still on its release candidate, I'm trying to think of what needs to be fixed before a final release. The downloads counter is at about 400, so I guess people used it and liked it, not to mention the 1,5k downloads of the Unleashed mod(Google Drive downloads not counted) that included it.

What I'll likely fix is remembering stuff like the main window's size, columns, and such. Additionally a command-line option to boot a particular INI, if people want to do shortcuts to different games(vanilla, and your own mod pack). What I want to ask though is, does anyone think it needs any extra features? One thing I can think of is trying to detect whether any of the mods overwrite files in the other ones, but then again I can't really fix the problem that comes from users NOT turning off other mods that they should...

[Ell678]

The ability to detect conflicting mods may be useful in the future. Freelancer's mod manager had this feature, and when combining mods it is very useful. Depends how big Generations modding becomes though!

[iGamr]

Kind of simple, but allowing us to sort the mods by name, author, or version number would be nice.