Issue/Request with regards to the installer

posted on May 10th, 2009, 4:25 am

FO Team, would it be possible to have the installer ONLY delete the actual FO files when you apply an update?
I ask because I just applied the latest patch, only to find out that several ship + weapon odfs have been deleted, and I stupidly failed to make backups. Sure, I can recreated them, but they won't be the same, which leaves me with a small defeated feeling...

Is this at all possible? I imagine just running the deletion with a list of target files would be simple, considering you can get the list with the dir command in windows.

Thanks for your time,
Aerolite

posted on May 10th, 2009, 1:46 pm

the patch installer usually deletes and copies a new odf folder to the fleet operations. make a file compare between the odf files of 3.0 and 3.0.5 and you will see why this is the case there won't be any changes to future patches to that, as fleet operations patches aren't incremental but always full patches. if you like to patch up a modded version, i recommend to install the patch files to a different directory and then make a file compare and apply the changes manually to your files

posted on May 11th, 2009, 5:24 am

Yes, I understand the need for non-incremental patches, however I feel that there are better solutions than simply emptying the odf folder. What I mean to say is that, instead of wiping the odf folder clean, why not ONLY delete all the FO odfs?
In other words, instead of running a command like "del *.odf", why not run something like:
"del bor_adap_matrix_romA.odf
del bor_adaptionmatrix_fix.odf
del bor_adaptor_00.odf
etc..."
I'm not sure how flexible your installer system is, but could you not automate this from a list of all known odf files? If one doesn't exist (say, because the latest update is being applied to v3.0.0), you could just skip over it and continue with the others. By doing this, you guys can remove all FO related odfs, and still preserve any additions made by users.

Is this feasible??

PS: Yes, I know one could install the update to a temp dir, then copy the files over, but if this was to be implemented, it would stop accidents (such as mine) from happening.

posted on May 11th, 2009, 7:45 am

wiping the whole folder is much faster than telling the system to delete every file one by one. and even the installer would behave this way, it's still not out of the question that it deletes/replaces some odf files that you modified from the original fleet operations installation.

posted on May 11th, 2009, 8:30 am

usually adding a new odf like a starship or a station requires you to change an official FO odf (like the yard to make your new vessel buildable). As those odf changes would be lost either way, its not much difference if we pull of arround 6000 single delete commands or just empty the whole folder. Programming rule one should always be in affect: backup your stuff before updating

posted on May 11th, 2009, 8:50 am

Modified FO files are collateral damage in my books, since you're right in that there's no way to check them efficiently. My main concern is with completely custom odfs, which in my opinion should not be deleted along with the rest.

Well, I've learnt my lesson in that I'll be keeping backups of my FO mods from now on (yes, I should've been doing this from the start, fail on my part), so this is really incase people make the same mistake as I did. I'll leave it with you to consider in any case.