Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Cross-Platform Development => Topic started by: Frankie on February 17, 2006, 10:17:21 am

Title: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: Frankie on February 17, 2006, 10:17:21 am

FS2Open is awesome. Unfortunately, large amounts of the user-created content is tied up in Windows-only installers. Is there a way to extract those files on OSX or other *nixes?

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: Taristin on February 17, 2006, 12:00:21 pm

Have you tried to open the program installers in something like linux/osx versions of winrar? A lot of the time they're just self installing archive files.

Otherwise, I don't think you'll have much luck, until an OSX/Linux version of VPview is made...

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: karajorma on February 17, 2006, 12:21:26 pm

It's not VPView which is the problem. It's the fact that many things use installers which are specifically designed for windows to install generic VP files which everyone can use.

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: Shade on February 17, 2006, 12:42:09 pm

Probably no way to access then unless you have a means to emulate windows and run the installers there. It's a good thing to bring up, mods really should be released as a simple zip/rar/whatever as well, what with the SCP being as cross platform as it is by now.

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: taylor on February 17, 2006, 12:55:07 pm

Linux users have WINE if they need it, but OS X users pretty much need a commercial package I believe.  As Raa said most of them are WinRAR archives so you can extract them with unrar under Linux and rename them with a .rar extension for OS X and StuffIt Expander can handle the rest.  Something like TBP is a true Windows installer though so you would need Windows or a Windows emulator to get access to that.  TBP is going to move the cross-platform installer (java based), and that was planned for 3.3, but it just didn't work out that way.  The next release of TBP will be cross-platform, even if I have to distribute the damn thing myself.

As far as VP archives go, those are accessable in Linux and OS X as well.  In CVS (or the source tarballs) you can type "make tools" and get a set of tools, including cfilearchiver and cfileextractor.  These are CLI based tools, which is rather alien to many OS X users, but they aren't difficult to use.  cfilearchiver will create a VP archive out of a directory structure and cfileextractor will extract files from a VP archive (or just list the files).

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: karajorma on February 17, 2006, 01:17:52 pm

There's always Polonius (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,35420) for dealing with the VPs of course.

I've got no idea what condition it's currently in though.

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: WMCoolmon on February 17, 2006, 05:03:43 pm

Right at this instant, it works under wxWidgets 2.6.2 in Windows.

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: karajorma on February 17, 2006, 05:09:16 pm

And it doesn't work on Linux and MacOS?

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: WMCoolmon on February 17, 2006, 05:38:40 pm

Well, the wx2.4.5 version you linked to should work under Linux, considering I developed it entirely under Linux and only ever did a Linux release...

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: Mr_Maniac on February 18, 2006, 06:03:22 am

Well... The only "Problem" with Polonius is, that it doesn't like unicode-Builds of wxWindows...
Luckily, in Gentoo, both versions are installed...
2.4.x unicode and ansi
and
2.6.x unicode and ansi...

Title: Re: how to extract mod files from exe installers?
Post by: Christoph_Berg on February 19, 2006, 08:50:55 am

Yeah... Would be very nice, if the whole unicode problem could be resolved.