Does anyone know the current status of the BWS?

[jastey]

Roxanne: Not understanding how to consider e.g. the changed number of subcomponents for Gavin is one thing, yes, but I also lack patience and motivation to maintain such a manually-to-update system. (I burned out maintaining the mentioned linklist years ago, and I can't go back).

 

lynx: Ah, I see. Maybe one way would be to externalize the download of the mods - it was meant to be service (and great while it lasted) but maybe we need a BWS light that "only" deals with the installation process, a tool where the knowledge of the installation order and dependencies is collected.

I have no knowledge to work on anything like this, though.

I might be able to understand how to introduce dependencies into a running system, with enough documentation and help. But maintaining changing version numbers is a no-go, I am sorry.

[Jarno Mikkola]

I have tried (with the help odf the existing descriptions) to add some new mods that are hosted on github to the BWS and I failed bitterly. (And that was for EET where dependencies etc are still pretty easy/straigh-forward compared with the old game...).

What did you starft the BWS with ?

As you use a .bat to start the BWS, and the "update" one removes all your changes as it re-extracts the files in the archive and reloads the BWS's own files... so you actually did nothing to it.

[Roxanne]

For stuff on github, that's exactly the case. If it did name guessing for normal links, it could never detect when a download isn't working, saving the 404 html page instead. Then, if it doesn't have graceful error handling or it happens too late, the whole build process could break.

 

It's horrible from a QA point of view. But none of the proposed changes has made it upstream yet either, so my help may have been in vain.

It may be possible to migrate a number of older and abandoned mods in an already fixpacked version to github (provided that we would know exactly which mods fall into that category).

A large number of newer and/or recently updated mods are now there as well.

The problems will be those mods still maintained and for which the authors have chosen whatever download source that may cause trouble.

I just have done a quick check for the EET-compatible mods (assuming this is the most up-to-date selection) but even there we find those mods from links that require the described checking.

Any possible alternate road I tried to evaluate for a future BWS always leads to a point where it would require a significant reduction in scope of what the tool once did.

 

In its current state, BWS has become a kind of expert tool. You can still use it (I just did an install last weekend) but you need to do some *half-manual* operation, i.e. let the tool do some basics for each BWS step (e.g. download mods - unpack mods etc) but after each step, do a verify and manually correct/add things it missed. Doing so for an *all-you-can-safely-install* EET-game took 26hours (including SCS) of which about 3h were doing manual actions, the rest was letting the tool run. Still better than doing it all by hand and of course very much depending on your own actions to be correct. (And probably it will only be useful for *BWS* veterans who have at least some basic ideas of what is going on in the whole install process).

[Roxanne]

Roxanne: Not understanding how to consider e.g. the changed number of subcomponents for Gavin is one thing, yes, but I also lack patience and motivation to maintain such a manually-to-update system. (I burned out maintaining the mentioned linklist years ago, and I can't go back).

 

lynx: Ah, I see. Maybe one way would be to externalize the download of the mods - it was meant to be service (and great while it lasted) but maybe we need a BWS light that "only" deals with the installation process, a tool where the knowledge of the installation order and dependencies is collected.

I have no knowledge to work on anything like this, though.

I might be able to understand how to introduce dependencies into a running system, with enough documentation and help. But maintaining changing version numbers is a no-go, I am sorry.

Would such an *installation only* tool not be something similar to Leonardo's BWP. My vague understanding is that the install process of the BWS is somehow similar/based on BWP's - only BWP has a far longer update cycle and thus is outdated most of the time. And it does not support EE.

[lynx]

First, updating versions isn't that much work, it's the dependency and component complications that can make it tricky. You release mods several months apart, so I think it just seems more tedious now due to the backlog.

 

Roxanne: old mods don't change, so there's no need to migrate them until someone works on them again. If you wanted to remove their patching from bwpfixpack, it would require some sort of check with the author (as almost nobody uses licenses here, so meh).

 

One thing that shouldn't be extremely hard though, is making bws not stop the build if a patch doesn't apply, but skip it. It would take care of obsolete patches interfering. But again, if nobody wants to test, it'd be a waste of time.

[Jarno Mikkola]

One thing that shouldn't be extremely hard though, is making bws not stop the build if a patch doesn't apply, but skip it. It would take care of obsolete patches interfering. But again, if nobody wants to test, it'd be a waste of time.

You mean to say that, you don't know that that's there already !

What the problem they face is that as they want to provide newer mod versions to the GitHub ... but they don't know how exactly do the WHOLE process and get it approved.

[lynx]

No, it's not. BWS has a check if patching works at all, but that's it. The main patch code is in the fixpack, which just tries force applying them, nothing else:

https://github.com/BiGWorldProject/BiG-World-Fixpack/blob/master/_ApplyPatches.tp2#L421

(it's even simpler than I thought, this is easy to change/fix)

[AL|EN]

update revision numbers and download names every time a mod gets updated.

As i wrote at SHSForums, there is no really need to do such updates. http://www.shsforums.net/topic/56670-big-world-setup-an-attempt-to-update-the-program/?p=595213

Old BWS was always 'one man army' vision, and by dresing it is very hard to be use by modders who wants to contribute to the project/update their mods.

The "check if patching works at all" idea is very good, for BWFixpack, "patch --dry-run" can be used with checking of exit code.

I had several ideas to improve key aspects of BWS-like tool, but for various reasons, it's nearly impossible to implement them for the current BWS.

[Roxanne]

[lynx]

Cool, so the instruction can be further simplified.

[Kaliesto]

So at this point if I'm understanding correctly is there will have to be a new BWS, but doing away with archaic features that caused issues for some modders. When can we expect such a new program to surface this year?

 

Or

 

Is it a matter of changing how the BWS operates if possible?

[Jarno Mikkola]

So at this point if I'm understanding correctly is there will have to be a new BWS, but doing away with archaic features that caused issues for some modders. When can we expect such a new program to surface this year?

 

Or

 

Is it a matter of changing how the BWS operates if possible?

Actually it's just a case of getting a competent GitHub edit's to the project ... as Alien can still accept them when he has the time around. As you can see from the latest commit.

[cixo]

 

 

A few months ago, I did a "BWS demo" in Python with the goal to showcase the possibilities of the language to solve BWS's issues... Since BWS isn't supported anymore, I don't think we would need to go for feature parity with BWS.

super news but new bws no bws features? no installing eet? no conflicts? whats the point?

 

 

 

I haven't received any proposition to help so I focused more on getting some personal stuff together.

aks beamdog forums!

[GrimLefourbe]

Well, I said feature parity which means we probably wouldn't have to do everything that bws does. And bws does a lot more than installing eet and solving conflicts. Anyway there's no plan to make anything out of it as of now.

[Kaliesto]

 

So at this point if I'm understanding correctly is there will have to be a new BWS, but doing away with archaic features that caused issues for some modders. When can we expect such a new program to surface this year?

 

Or

 

Is it a matter of changing how the BWS operates if possible?

Actually it's just a case of getting a competent GitHub edit's to the project ... as Alien can still accept them when he has the time around. As you can see from the latest commit.

 

 

Do you know if Jaka has gotten around to implementing the new updates for the mods lately? I know there has been a lot of changes lately from a few modders, and I think Southern Edge from Lava is the newest one out right now.

 

Personally that's all I really need to know if BWS is still getting support.