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airbreather / StepperUpper

Some tools for making STEP happen.
MIT License
9 stars 2 forks source link

Improve Pack File Maintenance #10

Open airbreather opened 7 years ago

airbreather commented 7 years ago

Use Case

I've been pretty vocal about how terrible it is to have to maintain the XML file for pack editors / creators. No two ways about it, this is a HUGE pain in the ass.

Proposed Solution

This is probably going to be an ongoing thing...

The easiest thing I can do, I guess, is to make a way to build a <Files> section out of a bunch of *.meta files produced by ModOrganizer.

This might actually be a use case for making a GUI of sorts, more so than actually running the application itself, since it's actually something that really lends itself to being an interactive process and not a "fire and forget".

_...now I'm thinking about Workflow and its designer..._

airbreather commented 7 years ago

Possible improvement: "inserts" / "modifications" for Mod Organizer files, such as loadorder.txt.

Ideal would be for STEP Extended to just say "copy STEP Core's versions of the files, then insert FooExtendedMod before BarCoreMod, disable BlahCoreOnlyThing, enable BlahExtendedOnlyThing, ..." where "disable" means toggle the first char from + to - (vice-versa for "enable") and all the inserts / deletes ignore leading + / - chars if present.

Also means that plugins.txt could again start off as a copy of loadorder.txt.

This would help dramatically for things like "My Tweaks".

airbreather commented 6 years ago

2.0.0.0 helps with a lot of the tedious aspect of this. "ModOrganizer/mods/Foo" doesn't show up nearly as much as it used to, and nested folders within archives are supported much better, so the XML files are much closer to describing the contents of the mod archive, as opposed to how to set up the mod.

It's still a long way to go before I can call this closed, though.