Okay so all the early adopters have downloaded launcher 5.3 but it looks like I'm the only person who has noticed the potential in RT's work on this.
I'm guessing that maybe it's my fault for not explaining in detail what the new version can do for us that 5.2 couldn't. Time to explain then...
Mod.Ini Files If you haven't played with these you won't have seen what they can do. The end plan is for them to help the user setup the command line differently for each mod and avoid using the registry (allowing you to swap between retail, Tom's Old Build and SCP with a couple of mouse clicks).
What they can do at the moment though is fairly useful tool. The mod.ini is what sets up the mod tab of the launcher. The first thing it does is give you a nice piece of eye candy. For each mod a 255x112 BMP can be loaded to save you from having to squint at the mod's name in order to figure out what you set the launcher up for last time.
The box below contains a short description of the campaign and below that are two links that can be used to link the user to the campaign website and their forum.
The mod.ini file can also be used to allow you to use Multimod without the hassle of having to type in all the mod names yourself. Why is that useful? Let me give you a demonstration of how I have things set up on my system.
I have my folders set up like this.
Freespace 2
-Data
-FS1Port
-Inferno
-Media_VPs
-SCP_Multiplayer
-ShroudingTheLight
-SolAHistory
I've set up the mod.ini files so that STL uses multimod to look in the FS1Port folder and the -Media_VPs folder (For the nebulae as well as the media.vp files). SaH is set up to look in Inferno and media.vps and all the others (apart from data) also look in the media vp folder.
This was very little hassle to set up and for you it's next to no hassle cause you can download my files from
here so all you'll have to do is put the mods in the folders provided.
Now to show you why I went to all this trouble.
Suppose I want to play multiplayer using Tom's Old Build. No need to move media VP files. I simply choose no mod and run it. My media VPs aren't in my Freespace2 folder any more so it won't ever see them.
Suppose I want to play Inferno, SaH or STL or the port. I simply choose them. No need to waste space duplicating the port VPs to the STL folder. No chance of the custom tables in any campaign meaning I need to remove it or disable it before I can play Inferno or the port. This means that other campaigns can easily base themselves on the big hosted campaigns and use custom tables. In fact if they're sensible enough to use modular tables they get the effect of any upgrades to the main campaign instantly.
Now lets say I've noticed a crash in the main campaign. I suspect one of the media VP files is to blame. I simply click no mod and they're all turned off and I can try the mission without them.
If you're developing a campaign and have the same problem removing the media_VPs section in the mod.ini has the same effect but doesn't make you have to turn them all back on again if you decide to play a quck game on Transcend.
Quite frankly I'm f**king mystified why people are ignoring this feature. It's so useful that I'd hate to have to go back to 5.2. The only way to do what I've posted above is to manually type in the -mod < names > manually or to spend a lot of time pissing about with moving folders around. Wasn't that supposed to be what the -mod option was designed to end?
The Future Even if nothing else is changed with the launcher I still think that it's being criminally underused. The features are there to make mod delivery much less painful for newbies.
Here's my idea for how we could do it. When you download the launcher you get a set of mod.ini files like mine for every campaign there is. When you click on one you get something like this.
Clicking on the website button takes you to the website where the mod is available for download as a rar or zip file. The zip contains a folder with the same name as the one from the mod.ini pack. In the folder is the mod along with a new mod.ini that removes the "this mod is not installed" warning.
No more questions from newbies asking where to get mods from. The launcher would provide links to everything we've done. We'd get less problems with people asking where to install mods too. We simply tell them to extract to the Freespace 2 folder and everything else is handled automatically.
Maybe we could even automate the delivery so that in addition the website button we get a download one that automatically downloads and unzips the file to the correct place. That sort of thing sounded like a fantasy before because it sounded like a centralised server for mods would be needed but in this way all that needs to be updated is the mod.ini file and that would only need updating when the website the mod was hosted on was changed.
Even without automated delivery I still think this would be one of the best things to happen to the easy of use for mods since the -mod switch was intoduced.
