Getting fan ages from MOUL or Drizzle

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Getting fan ages from MOUL or Drizzle

Postby Korovev » Tue Aug 10, 2021 9:47 am

I was wandering how Drizzle’s conversion of MOUL files (which seems to fail currently) will/could handle those fan ages that are being released there (Vothol, Tre’bivdil, etc.); if the conversion were to import those ages, wouldn’t it compete with the UAM channel? On the other hand, it could mean they wouldn’t need a separate release for PotS.
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Re: Getting fan ages from MOUL or Drizzle

Postby Sirius » Tue Aug 10, 2021 2:08 pm

Korovev wrote:(which seems to fail currently)

It does again ? Guess I'll have to put more time into Drizzle in the near future. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime. (I'm also planning to make a proper Drizzle33 that works for both DI and offline "At Some Point"(c), haven't gotten around to it yet.)

Korovev wrote:if the conversion were to import those ages, wouldn’t it compete with the UAM channel? On the other hand, it could mean they wouldn’t need a separate release for PotS.

Very good question, I haven't thought seriously about this until now. The answer is UAM, 100%.

Drizzle's conversion tool is a marvel of its time and works great on "frozen" games, but to be honest ? It's absolutely not robust to change. It also operates only on PRPs, Python/SDL scripts still have to be redistributed through the Offline-KI and converted manually.
Now, of course I'll keep updating Drizzle as long as I can to support conversion of MOULa Ages, because it's required for a bunch of reasons (mostly working around copyright infringements). As a byproduct, this means manually converting any PRP in the advanced tab will keep working. But keeping the conversion working on a quickly-changing game is a tedious process, so fan Ages are best left out of the mix.

UAM on the other hand is tried and true, and has several benefits - such as keeping older versions available and being available 100% of the time. It's also fairly easy for authors to export a PotS version of their Age. It's better to entrust this to them than me :lol: (or whoever maintains Drizzle, really)

(...Drizzle is one of the last surviving softwares from the early Uru days, actually, and was mostly written by a single person. And that shows in the code. The UAM part works flawlessly, but the converter itself relies on an old, undocumented and outdated PRP library. It's also riddled with PRP-specific fixes, and is mutually dependent with the Offline-KI. We can't really get rid of it either. But well, so far it works and upgrading it is still a possibility.
And it even has a few neat features not available anywhere else, such as the distiller ! ...)
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Re: Getting fan ages from MOUL or Drizzle

Postby Sirius » Sat Aug 14, 2021 2:15 am

Korovev wrote:(which seems to fail currently)

I updated MOULa this morning, rerun the conversion through Drizzle32, everything appears to be working fine for Cyan's Ages (aside from a few missing book textures, which are on my TODO list). If you or anyone else spots error, feel free to correct me. Fan Ages themselves appear to still cause issues, but so far all of them are available in PotS I believe, so I'll address this later.
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Re: Getting fan ages from MOUL or Drizzle

Postby Korovev » Sun Aug 15, 2021 2:05 am

Right, I was getting a series of “Console: stderr:” errors, but I tried with a fresh copy, and I can get to the Pod ages. All good!

Sirius wrote:UAM on the other hand is tried and true, and has several benefits - such as keeping older versions available and being available 100% of the time. It's also fairly easy for authors to export a PotS version of their Age. It's better to entrust this to them than me :lol: (or whoever maintains Drizzle, really)


Yeah, that’s a cool feature, especially with a few ages like Serene; a separate export may also allow for a few adjustments, if one wished so.
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Re: Getting fan ages from MOUL or Drizzle

Postby Sirius » Sun Aug 15, 2021 3:25 am

Indeed. Some Linking Books, for instance, may only be available to PotS/MOULa depending on whether the Age is available on the Shard.

That, and it's best to let Korman figure out how to generate the files. Again, Linking Books are a good example, since Linking and instancing work differently in PotS and MOULa. Wall climbing ala Gahreesen, once available to Korman, would also require a completely different setup depending on the game version, that Drizzle can't guess by itself.
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