Is sidenc#.mix still needed?

Millennium · Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 9:49 am Post subject: Is sidenc#.mix still needed?

I'm currently in the process of cleaning out the mix files. RA2 still contains two mixes that seem to contain files that were only needed in TS (sidenc01 and sidenc02) for the interactive campaign briefing screens. Are those files still needed anywhere in RA2 or does the game at least check for their presence at some point? Ie will I break anything in some corner of the game if I remove those files?

Blade · Cyborg Commando **Joined**: 23 Dec 2003

Remove them and then try playing a single player campaign. Why are you messing with the shipped mix files? First rule of modding is don't f**k with the standard mix files unless you have a very good reason.

Millennium · Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 11:12 am Post subject:

I'm trying to make a standalone version pretty much and I don't see the point of keeping all these files in, in addition to copyright violation. Things like SHIP.shp or the ancient TS/TD unit voxels or a ton of glitchy cameos... that's just eating space I think.

While we're at it, sno/tem/urb.mix don't seem to be doing anything either. Something tells me they must be there for the game to work, but the files in there probably don't - resized TS ammo crates (blurry unused in-game), the TS wake trailer anim for hover vehicles (in TS anim palette and unused in favour of the proper RA2 one in conquer.mix) and a TS cloudring animation labeled as wake (wrong palette and unused)...

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GenesisAria · Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 11:42 am Post subject:

ts ammo crates exist in the campaign. they got lovely magenta spots on them too lul. (for example, the einstein lab map)
i still keep ts anim palette, cuz like, some animations have purples in them and the ra2 anim pal don has purples. lol. see chronobeam.
the old cameos are all fine if you use the ts cameo palette... (many of those voxels aren't even ts, probably a lot of placeholders when they were designing the units for ra2 in early dev, starting off with the ra1 base, light, med, heavy, etc. although they did that for ts too...)

my favourite useless asset, is the teapot ifv turret.

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Millennium · Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 12:05 pm Post subject:

I've just checked and snow maps seem to be working fine without sno.mix. Now testing if the game even reads the mix...

Edit: Well it does get read. I guess it's for placing theater-specific files (maybe only shps?) that don't have a NewTheater prefix instead. Ie NewTheater buildings (as in snow.mix) only get read for their specific theater because they have "A" as second letter of their filename, but if you'd place them into sno.mix, they'd get displayed in snow theater regardless of prefix. So, if I'd put different versions of AMMOCRAT into sno, tem and urb.mix, I'd get the tem.mix version in Temperate theater, sno.mix version in Snow theater and urb.mix version in Urban theater. I... guess I just uncovered the entirely unused pre-TS version of handling theaters... presumably that is the "old theater" to which the "New" in the NewTheater art.ini tag refers... interesting!

Update:
Voxels don't seem to get read from sno/tem/urb/des/lun.mix, so no theater-specific voxel units, only SHPs get read, however ANY shps get read - including cameos and animations, so you can have those theater-specific. I'm not sure if sidebars or other more system-related stuff can be theater-specific too?

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GenesisAria · Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 6:14 pm Post subject:

Theater specific sidebars... now that'd be cool.

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Krow · Commander **Joined**: 30 Jan 2010 **Location**: Malaysia

Millennium wrote:

Voxels don't seem to get read from sno/tem/urb/des/lun.mix, so no theater-specific voxel units, only SHPs get read, however ANY shps get read - including cameos and animations, so you can have those theater-specific. I'm not sure if sidebars or other more system-related stuff can be theater-specific too?

Are you just assuming or has this been tested? Some proofs would be nice. And I doubt the sidebars would work. IIRC they use the exact filenames, what differentiates them are the different side** mixes.

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Millennium · Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 10:26 pm Post subject:

Tested it with SHPs (unit, cameo and animation) and VXLs, not with sidebar files. Doubt they'd work though, the load order for those is different.

Also disclaimer, all testing was done using just sno.mix, so it's possible the others could be different, but why should they?

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Blade · Cyborg Commando **Joined**: 23 Dec 2003

I still don't really see the point in this, RA2 and YR aren't freeware so any "standalone" distribution would definitely be copyright infringing anyhow. I actually think even doing so with the freeware games would be infringing, but it seems to be tacitly allowed by EA (or they just don't care), so it seems to be the done thing. If you want a standalone thing, just have your mod installer copy the files from an existing RA2/YR install into your mod's path and override from there.