EB2 Dev Blog discussion

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well since I am mentioned I thought I'd clarify:

We have basically two kinds of "programmers". Those who do useful work on the mod itself. And me.

Me, I sort of run the tools department. The tools are about replacing the game itself for creating various binary blobs that the mod needs, wherever possible. Well that's not quite true. What the tools really are about is two things:

• Make sure that the mod actually will work out of the box when it is installed.
• Pruning and refining the mod so we apply as much of the tools (and resulting binary blobs) during development as well. This causes the team both joy and grief: joy when it works (far better than the game engine and bugs get caught), grief when bugs in the tools mess up the workflow. This is also about eliminating old cruft from the mod which we no longer use (or should use).

If that all pans out according to plan, the idea is that you can install the mod and get something quite close to installing an official expansion package instead of a copy of a development tree snapshot. Which should hopefully mean that the mod works out of the box, and installation is reasonably fool proof.

Now there are currently two big obstacles in this path (quite possibly more but right now these two are so big they kind of obscure any other ones that exist as well). One is in the form of a bunch of bytes from a largely reverse-engineered CAS (animation) file format as part of the animation packs used by M2TW. The other is the format of the skeletons in the skeleton packs, which is largely (if not almost entirely) unknown stuff.

So what am I working on when I have the time? On improvements to the existing tools to speed up building of the binary blobs (and also to make building an installer easier).