TTW Needs a Decent Patch Program

Post by **JaxFirehart** » Fri Sep 21, 2012 11:20 pm

The closed alpha has started and I have no idea how long it will take before it is ready for a public beta. The main thing I need, though, is a decent patch program.

ClickTeam Patch Maker is what we used in the past, but it is inefficient and ugly.

IndigoRose Visual Patch would be my ideal choice, I worked with the demo and successfully wrote a very nice patcher, but the demo did not allow patches to be distributed. Unfortunately, it is $400 (though I managed to get a sales guy to discount me $100) and I can't afford that.

Does anyone out there know any decent programs or have the experience to create a patch from scratch?

Post by **Blade** » Sun Sep 23, 2012 9:06 pm

xdelta3 should do the trick along with a script to run it automatically since its a command line program. I've pretty much written such a script to use xdelta3 and command line bsa tools to build a TTW beta install from a download size of around 80Mb rather than the multigigabye files needed now and that is mainly data for the fallout3/falloutnv esm merge. There are still a few kinks in it though with the bsa building part (mainly creating lists of files within the bsa's that need renaming, copying and/or patching), but as far as I can tell the patching part works fine. To be honest I haven't tried using binary patches to patch the bsa files directly since it seemed more efficient to rebuild them from resources the user already has.

I've attached a copy of my work so far, this succeeds (as far as I can tell) in building TTW apart from building Fallout - Meshes.bsa correctly which I need to debug.

Post by **JaxFirehart** » Sun Sep 23, 2012 10:34 pm

A program exists, BSAOpt, that can extract and rebuild .bsa diles flawlessly and more efficiently than any other program (even bethesdas bsas are smaller after using BSAOpt). I asked the creator about command line options and he never got back to me, if you can figure out how to get BSAOpt's command line stuff working that would be perfect.

Post by **Blade** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 10:48 am

I've looked at the source for BSAopt that is available on github, but it doesn't appear to contain the latest code for the command line features even though a testing version of 1.64 is availble that allegedly has such features. I can find the main function in the program, but my knowledge of c++ is limited so I don't think I can add the command line stuff myself without seeing how initial support for it was implemented. I think the main problem with my scripts as they currently stand is that they don't do compression on the bsa so the meshes bsa file ends up too large.

Post by **sesom** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 11:45 am

If I understand his wiki correctly NIFOPT from the same author could be the solution. It has a built in bsa compressor (I assume it's the same as bsaopt) and with the options -skipprocessing -passthrough it leaves the NIFs alone and copies other files (dds, wav, mp3, ogg, ...) to. Take a look at the usage examples in the wiki.

Post by **Blade** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 3:09 pm

NIFOpt hasn't been updated recently to support some of the filetypes NewVegas uses such as ogg and dlodsettings files. As a result the bsa files it would build wouldn't work for voices or lod. I think I've mananged to enable support for compression in the bsapacker convolution hacked out of FOMM though so meshes seems to work okay without needing BSAOpt in command line form. I've attached an updated packer and script, if you replace the packer in the bin folder in the package I uploaded perviously along with the ttw.vbs script it should now build a working TTW 1.03 installation. Someone confirming it works on a 32Bit windows install would be nice since I only have 64Bit here.