Feature suggestion: Support for TTW

[ajventer]

A Tale of Two wastelands is a very popular mod that allows users to play Fallout 3 on Fallout New Vegas's engine. ModOrganizer2 has special support for this mod. Currently however it has some incompatibilities with this lutris setup. 1) The installer seems to not be able to run with wine - it's possible to work around this however by running the installer on a windows box and replacing the FNV install dir in a wine bottle with the one created on windows. If a work-around is possible, this would be a great advantage however. This however means NOT using the FULL MO2 support in the installer as the user has to install TTW without MO2 awareness (see the official install guide video for the process and why this isn't compatible) - and then ONLY use MO2 for subsequent mods. This method has other difficulties as well (key being maintaining identical windows path in the subsequent bottle to both game installations) 2) It uses a custom-patch set of binary patches - and the MO2 installer's insistance on replacing NVSE can actually cause problems when using this method to set up MO2 after the fact because it replaces NVSE with one lacking the custom TTW patches, forcing the user to RE-copy the patched one over the FNV version.

I am currently attempting some tests using the following manual method to see how this actually works and if there are other issues to address:

• On my one and only windows system I installed Fallout 3 in steam, FNV from GOG and TTW on top, all on the otherwise empty D-drive (this is a work-around, the windows came with my work laptop and I never use it so it's drive is super small, but to do the TTW install I needed a bunch more space, I had to create a new partition just for this purpose)
• In a local wine bottle, add a directory drive_d and set it up as "drive d" to maintain drive name parity
• Install FNV to this bottle, in drive d, using wine with the real executable NOT the lutris installer, in order to get the same path as on Windows, and the proper registry entries.
• Now remove this FNV install directory.
• Archive the entire contents of drive D from the windows machine, SCP to my gaming machine and extract into the drive_d drectory, replacing the former content. Use this installer to set up modorganizer in a different directory but pointed at the same winebottle prepared above
• re-extract the archive to undo the changes made to the nvse installer.
• Run MO2 and choose the TTW mode instead of normal FNV mode.
• Try the Tale of Two Wastelands labled launcher NOT the NVSE launcher.

I will report on how well this works/fails once I have the whole setup done and can test it further. I completely manual version of this approach WITHOUT MO2 had worked well before, hoping this will allow taking it to another level. A key reason is that FNV's engine is MUCH more stable than Fallout3's engine - and serious crashes and game breaking bugs are more easily fixed in fallout 3 by playing it in TTW than trying to fix the original game.

[ajventer]

Test results:

• The FNV/pure wine installer still hates custom paths with spaces in them, and in fact to make the installer work at all I had to symlink the installed path of the TTW/FNV directory '/games/TTW/drive_d/FNV/Fallout New Vegas' to a path already in the search DB '/games/TTW/drive_c/GOG Games/Fallout New Vegas'

• The install of MO2 took a lot longer than usual - I have no idea why that would be. Could be just my computer was unusually busy with some background process ? Either way, noticed it, worth a mention.

• The switch from TKG wine to Proton 5. surprisingly, did not do a "upgrading wine prefix" message on first launch, unless the underlying wine versions are identical - this is odd, it did however lead to errors from rundll32.exe - but this happens with straight new vegas as well and doesn't seem to cause any actual errors.

• On initial launch, TTW crashed during the load screens. This could be a consequence of the changes to NVSE made by the lutris installer ? This issue turned out to be config files. TTW installs custom config files with essential tweaks, copying these from the windows machine into both the base config dir AND the mo2 profile was an essential step I'd missed before. I also re-extracted the archive of the FNV directory, to ensure the original NVSE files would all be restored. It is also important to replicate the custom load order it sets up exactly as the initial load order.

• With this in place however, it still crashes almost instantly with this error: 01c0:err:winediag:MIDIMAP_drvOpen No software synthesizer midi port found, Midi sound output probably won't work. 01c0:fixme:gstreamer:source_query_accept (0x16e3b6f0) stub wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0A12EE95 at address 00682307 (thread 0160), starting debugger... 0208:fixme:file:RtlDosPathNameToRelativeNtPathName_U_WithStatus Unsupported parameter Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x0a12ee95 in 32-bit code (0x00682307). Register dump: CS:0023 SS:002b DS:002b ES:002b FS:0063 GS:006b EIP:00682307 ESP:0032ead0 EBP:0032ead4 EFLAGS:00010206( R- -- I - -P- ) EAX:011f4418 EBX:00000001 ECX:00000000 EDX:011f4a80 ESI:00000000 EDI:fffffffe Stack dump:

[ajventer]

NOTE: TTW has two installer modes, the default mode re-encodes all OGG vorbis files, this takes many hours to run. The alternative mode leaves them as is, which on windows merely means FO3 sound quality isn't as good as FNV quality (as far as I can tell) but is much faster. I used this second mode to create mine.

On the off-chance that teh above is actually caused by a sound-file format issue which can be fixed if the re-encoding is allowed to run (and is so, would also explain why my FO3 crashed regularly) - I am now running a version with the encoding on, this can easily take the whole weekend. But once I have one I will continue testing. In the meantime, feel free to use anything useful out of my reports thus far.

Additional side-note. I disabled the Linked "My Documents" folder in the TTW test bottle to prevent the TTW save files from interfering with my working New Vegas install's save files/config files. This is a good idea for anybody attempting something similar.

[ajventer]

With the full re-encoded installation, and the FO3 install files present, - the game reliably loads to the main menu, and I was able to start a new game. I am not yet able to say conclusively if teh FO3 files are needed, nor can I say conclusively that it is stable enough to play yet. More testing is required. I will report once I know more.

[ajventer]

Next finding: with these steps the game now seems to run, but once out of the vault there are a LOT of missing mess pictures all over the place. I'm not sure what is causing their absence - at this point I have not installed any graphics mods, it's actually possible that installing some may fix the issue - but as of this moment their absence is significant. Mostly likely suggesting a load issue of some kind with Fallout 3 assets.

UPDATE: Fix found. The previously mentioned custom configs created by the TTW installer do NOT get inheritted if you just copy them into the profile directory (I was wrong about that) copying and pasting their content into the ini editor in MO2 (Fallout.ini, FalloutPrefs.ini AND falloutCustom.ini) fixed the missing mess issue entirely.

I am proceeding to do a crash test - I want at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted playtime without a CTD before saying the game is stable.

[ajventer]

Okay then: ultimate results of my testing: it is imminently possible to use MO2 to mod TTW on Linux. It is also quite a mission to get it set up - but nearly all this difficulty is due to the the fact that, currently, I have not been able to run the official TTW installer under wine (the window appears but all GUI elements are missing - so can't enter paths or hit okay or anything). If the installer can be made to work - then it would be fairly easy to set up - possibly even automated.

But with the system set up - it seems to be fully stable, and working well with a range of mods ranging from graphics engine mods like new vegas reloaded to gameplay overhauls like Project Nevada (with TTW patches).

[rockerbacon]

This would be a considerable amount of work to get done and I sadly do not have the time, only reason I managed to move everything to MO2 is that I was on vacation.

I also do not own both games so I can't properly test things as I develop even if I had the time.

I will keep this enhancement open and I'm glad to help anyone willing to open a pull request.

[ajventer]

Fair enough - either way, if somebody else is wanting to try it, the documentation of my processes above may be helpful to them. I am playing TTW via this system with a few mods loaded in right now and it's working quite well.

[monyarm]

Okay then: ultimate results of my testing: it is imminently possible to use MO2 to mod TTW on Linux. It is also quite a mission to get it set up - but nearly all this difficulty is due to the the fact that, currently, I have not been able to run the official TTW installer under wine (the window appears but all GUI elements are missing - so can't enter paths or hit okay or anything). If the installer can be made to work - then it would be fairly easy to set up - possibly even automated.

But with the system set up - it seems to be fully stable, and working well with a range of mods ranging from graphics engine mods like new vegas reloaded to gameplay overhauls like Project Nevada (with TTW patches).

Actually if you install gdiplus with winetricks the GUI elements show up.