Well, here it is. This is a combination of both my thoughts and the thoughts of TShyper, regarding the extended tiberian sun engine, or ETS. My comments come first, then Luke’s. As he says – we do not have anything against ETS or C&CVK, and would both give quite a lot to be able to do the things done in ETS. We just feel that ETS could have been so much more, and so much better than it is now.
The truth is, and the main thing we have against it is, that ETS has made anyone with basic hacking skills (if you can even call it hacking at this level) obsolete in terms of modding. ETS will not accept the fact that some people may want to edit it, in order to get mods to run separately from TS, for example change rules.ini to Mymod_Rules.ini. This can be done – but every time a new ETS comes out, it overrides all the old settings, meaning you have to start again. The solution of “multi-mod support” is a joke – I have tried getting it to work with 4 separate mods, with no success whatsoever. And this is just for renaming files. Think if you made lots of changes - a long time would be spent re-doing what you allready have.
Essentialy, the whole point of ETS is to make things easier for modders, and for a great many it does (saying that...does it...?). But only if they want to stick to the boring, same system they used in the dark ages - files replacing the TS ones rather than running seperatley, forcing users to stick to a pre-defined set of rules. Features that are good for the many are killers for people wanting seperate exe's. It cannot be done while using ETS.
I would go on, but to be honest I would be repeating Luke's words - all of which I agree on by the way.
Oh, and for those "if you don't like it don't use it" commenters - I do not use it, and neither does Luke, for the reasons above. You may feel we are being harsh, and that we have no right to moan about it - you could not be more wrong. ETS is a project for the community, and you know, we
are the community. Maybe not a large part of it, but we are here,and while we are here, we deserve a voice as much as anyone else.
I do want to know how everyone else feels about the things we have brought up - just how many agree here? And if you disagree, please try and make a good argument. I don't want "lol, u noobz" type arguments.
And now for Luke:
QUOTE
First off, I am not putting ETS to shame, I think is brilliant that somebody has finally got around to editing the Tiberian Sun executable, but this is about the problems ETS causes in some areas, namely the Executable Editing section of the Tiberian Sun Modding Community.
The first problem is ETS working with edited Tiberian Sun executables, it doesn’t, this needs to be addressed for mods that already use a edited EXE and that are still being updated on a variable basis. It is not like getting there EXE to work with The First Decade, as a simple few bytes are changed in order for it to work. However, the problem lies with the ETS Installer, where it replaces the users / mods EXE with the edited version made by you, this then means that the mod creator then has to edit everything again in order to use the new functions included in the latest ETS release, This is no problem if it is a simple Res Hacker job on the Icon Group or Cursor Group, but when it comes to lots of string changes to files names, flag names, dialog messages etc. via a Hex Editor then is becomes a problem, consuming time that the mod creator might not have. For an example, I work on C&C Tiberian Odyssey and C&C Tiberian Sun Squared, both include a lot of edits with a Hex Editor, file names, offset changes, a added segment to house the new changes, so applying ETS to their EXE’s is troublesome and requires me to redo everything and even more troublesome when there are errors.
Changing the way ETS is ‘applied’ would be a solution to a majority of the problems; I know you use the VPatch system in NSIS install the new executable, but it does not really ‘patch’ the Tiberian Sun executable, it mealy replaces it, so a new method for installing ETS is needed. An option could be to patch it byte wise, but there comes a problem of verifying the executable to make sure it is really a original Tiberian Sun 2.03 executable, one way would be to make it look for a series of bytes that, in a sense, could never be changed by us ‘simple hackers’, something like a section of code that is used to load up the mix files and that only appears in that area in the 2.03 executable.
Now down to the actual hacks themselves, I’m not going to put your down because I can’t hack myself, heck, I can only follow a few commands myself, but its what’s getting done I am not really happy about. I know you are working on two projects at once and hacking areas that are very similar on both engines makes it much easier on your part, but it’s not getting the vital areas addressed that the community need, things fully working 3rd and 4th sides, working Orca Transport, fully customisable super weapons, more armour types etc. things are needed by most mods, and the stuff like the ‘Mod support’ what really is not needed compared to the above things. Don’t get wrong, AA Combat most of the other hacks are brilliant, but the essential modders nightmares need to be addressed. As for the TFD support, you use NSIS, what allows almost the extendibility similar to that found on a programming language, so you could make a function that searches for the TFD registry key and determines if it should install a version of ETS with the no-cd applied, this could also be used to make it find the correct installation directory, to rule out conflicts, I am using something similar for C&C Tiberian Odyssey, for the release installer.
This post has been edited by Creagor: May 3 2007, 09:02 PM
ETS - Thoughts and feelings towards it., Mine and TShyper's anyway.
May 3 2007, 08:56 PM
Flame Tank
