To Many Mods? Need To Combine Some?
 

Hello All,

I’m one of those people in our community who use a large combination of little mods here and there to spice up different aspects of the game to my own personal liking. The problem is I can't use a lot of the nice big mods out there because they have a lot of conflicting files with mods I already have and want to keep.

Anyway instead of trying to contact the author's of the mods and try to get them to combine the mods for me I’ve started to search for a simple program that would allow me to do this by myself easly. I wanted to take 2 conflicting files and convert them to .txt and then use an editor to visually see the differences and then combine those changes into one file so I can use both mods at the same time. I’m sure there might be some mods out there that edit the same string of code and I still won’t be able to use them both, but for other mods this might come in handy.

I stumbled across a few editing programs I have yet to test out and I thought this might be something I should post on the forums for mod authors who might be interested in simply making different versions of their mod to be compatible with other popular mods. Also, some authors might already know of some good programs that can perform this task they might want to recommend to me and others.

To get an idea of what I’m looking into here is an example program.

ExamDiff
http://www.prestosoft.com/images/edscreen.jpg

Website: http://www.prestosoft.com/ps.asp?page=edp_examdiff

Wolfy

Great find! Thanks.

I use this program in replace of the Windows Notepad. It allows you to open 2 files and compare the diffrences. It's a programmers wordpad on steriods ....

http://www.context.cx/

Ohh I soo wanting this.


Thank you very much!

BTW, what would happen in cases where the codes/writings were just placed elsewhere? or the file was so badly scrambled after several mixes by modders?

That's the common problem I had to face when building up IuB upgrade

I would think that as long as all the mods you are trying to combine don’t modify the same part of code you should be fine, since you will just be tweaking different values all over the file. But when it comes to editing the same value, I’m not sure that would really become that much of a problem because you would just choose which mod you want to adjust that part of the game. Example you wouldn’t want to modify the deck gun reload time to be both 5 and 10 min... That doesn’t make any sense, you would only need to have the value you would like to have. The only problem I can think of is having specific lines of code for a mod to work. Like I said I haven’t tried doing this but I don’t think there would be that many problems when trying to mix mods.

Wolfy

I'f you're looking for something powerful, and more importantly, free, take a look at Vim. It's built into most versions of Unix and linux, but you can download it for Windows as well.

http://www.vim.org/

It's a very powerful text editor with sytax highlighting. But it can also to a diff from explorer. You just have to highlight both files, right click, and select Diff with Vim.

Hope it helps.

The ExamDiff is an excellent idea! Tried it and it is very handy (and free too). :up:

For my bug fixes and personal advanced damage version I used the MS Word document comparison feature. It was like trying to kill a mosquito with a somewhat innacurate bazooka. :-j

Guys this really looks like a very helpfull tool , but for us that never use a thing like this i think it's a litle dungerouse if we do no how to use it...Is it not??? :hmm: :up:

Another diff program but free
 

Just want to let you know that there is an excellent open source diff program. Its called WinMerge and is available at sourceforge.
http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/

I just it at work every day before I need to check in code that I have no clue what I changed ;)

Thanks for the link redsolo,

Im going to try that program out it looks really good. If you could visualy compare the differences between two files and then also merge them that would be very useful. :yep:

Wolfy