Stele 8: release time...

[DaciaJC]

Imagine you had to upload 1.1GB from your computer to a webserver!

Let's see, at 0.13 Mb/s, that would come out to be ... 18.8 hours.

Point driven home.

[anubis88]

Damn, seeing the title i was sure i'd find a ticking clock with good news

[Hotseat_User]

Anubis, remember that in some way it is such. They are thinking about the issues of the release, which means, that there aren't "that" much other things to fix. As usual, the EBII team wants to provide the best thing possible one can get.

In regard of the questions I've the opinion, that these are wise ones. Even as something in my head is just singing 'release, release, release --- nooooooooo matter whaaaaaat...'

I'm just looking forward and appreciate their work when it's done.

[Arjos]

If we can help by donating or whatever to get faster, better hardware; let us know :)

[Cybvep]

All these problems are technical issues. How do they relate to the progress you made in the creation of the mod? Can we expect anything from you this year?

[Brennus]

I take my helmet off in admiration to you for such a difficult task! Very best of luck!

[Barabbas]

That the word release is part of this threads title is good enough news!

Please keep up the fantastic work, I look forward to it with great anticipation!

[Tellos Athenaios]

All these problems are technical issues. How do they relate to the progress you made in the creation of the mod?

There's no direct relationship between the two. Some team member designed a better way of building installers for EB 2 and wrote installer code and some build scripts/tools to coordinate it... Meanwhile the other team members gave some occasional feedback...

[Tellos Athenaios]

Let's see, at 0.13 Mb/s, that would come out to be ... 18.8 hours.

Point driven home.

Yeah. Can you imagine the incredible patience of the people who did the EB 1 installers? Not quite 1.1GB, granted, but 786MB can't have been much fun either.

[LusitanianWolf]

Your effords are much admired! Thank you for all the patience you spend on this!

[Bucefalo]

I´m impressed of how much planning is going into this mod, i mean i know modding is a lot of hard work, but there are small details (like making an installer, checking compatibility, using vanilla files or create new ones, duplicate files or useless ones etc.) that many mods don´t dedicate enough attention, usually because they are so busy trying to get the mod finished.

It is encouraging to see that you have thought over these details so much, and i definitely think you deserve to put a big warning saying "Skip reading the installation instructions at your own risk". It is enough that you put effort into making the readme clear enough for the less computer savy person to understand, that i think people which don´t bother reading the instructions shouldn´t have any right to complain about it.

Anyway, thank you for the update and all the work you put into this mod. :)

[I_damian]

Who else immediately skimmed the post for blue link text before reading anything? Srsly though I can only imagine how much of a pain in the arse it all is. Before EB, when all there was was RTR which I hated, when I got confident enough to mod the game myself, I spent a few days making my own personal mod for RTW, changing every single units' stats so they didn't chain rout so often and battles lasted more than 3 seconds, and added in about 3 units to the Roman roster to represent the auxiliaries they recruited, changed a few other things, and just those couple of things took me like 3 days.

[Blxz]

I would say number 5 was the only one I had never thought of. Too large for the installer. Interesting. All the rest seem like standard things to deal with, and I would assume many of them might have already come up just within the team itself. 32-bit and 64-bit OS's, etc.

Although I also didn't think much about having both steam and standard versions instealled at the same time. Is there that much difference? Couldn't you just do a system check for steam, if its installed ask the player if they want to install to their steam version. If 'Yes' then install via the steam path if 'No' then install normally. I am sure I have seen a mod do that already for me.

Otherwise, nice. I really liked the previous Stelae so this is a blast from the past!

[Tellos Athenaios]

I would say number 5 was the only one I had never thought of. Too large for the installer. Interesting.

Installer compilers like InnoSetup and NSIS have a limit of 2GB payload or thereabouts (before compression) because they read all the data into a memory block (memory mapped) then perform the compression and write out the result as a data section of a PE32 executable (the installer you run).

EB 2 is currently significantly larger than 2GB and certainly will grow bigger still.

Although I also didn't think much about having both steam and standard versions instealled at the same time. Is there that much difference? Couldn't you just do a system check for steam, if its installed ask the player if they want to install to their steam version. If 'Yes' then install via the steam path if 'No' then install normally. I am sure I have seen a mod do that already for me.

You could, but what about issue 10? More importantly: as you can see there are a number of “issues” which point to “location” as being one of the tough nuts to crack for installers. Suppose a user has installed Kingdoms in “C:\Program Files\SEGA\Medieval II - Total War\” and also in “C:\Program Files\Valve\SteamApps\medieval ii - total war\”, what does this scenario imply for your installer logic? This one tickles all location (related) issues you can think of...