azrapse

Here is the seventh version of the Mod Mixer. Download the zip file. You can extract it to anywhere. It will hopefully find the path to the game by itself, although I have only tested with the Steam edition. It requires .NET 4 to work. (Get it from Microsoft, if you don't have it and the installer doesn't automatically install it for you) How to use: - Put your favorite mods under the Carrier Command: Gaea Mission game folder, like usual. - Run the Mod Mixer. - Put a checkmark on the mods you want to try to combine. - Click on the Combine button. The program will create another mod folder called _MixerMod_ that will be the result of merging all selected mods together. If there are any error during the merge process, it will appear in the result list below. Have a look at it and check if everything is okay. If you find some "Incompatible" lines, note which mod is causing problems and either disable it or move it to lower priority. - When the merging is completed, click on the Start Game button to launch the game with the combined mod. Please report here any problems you encounter. Thanks! Special thanks to: Thygrrr - For finding out the PAK file format. Newtie - For finding out the dbexport.bin file format. Disorder, Species1571, Crotaro, Gnrl_Grad, atroublestarter - For having the patience of downloading, testing, bug reporting and making suggestions for this tool. EDIT: Version 1.08 - FIX: Regression bug making the program not escalate to admin. Version 1.07: - ADDED: The DbExport.bin database files can now be combined. If several mods modify the same values, the values from the mod with highest priority will prevail. - ADDED: It now remembers the window size and whether it was maximized. - FIX: You cannot launch the game game with the combined mod until some mod(s) have been successfully combined. Version 1.06: - The program now shows an UAC request to access the game folder. Version 1.05: - Fixed the wrong layout of the Advanced button. Version 1.04: - Problematic files are now highlighted. - Added a window for advanced options. Version 1.03: - Fixed a problem not recognizing new added mods. - No longer attempts to merge binary files. This functionality will be added to the database binary file in the future. For now it uses the version of the highest priority mod. - Starts the game from the game folder. This was causing a problem with the non-Steam version. - Fixed a problem regarding the program crashing when clicking a column header in the mod list. Version 1.02: - Remembers your mod selection and priority. - Asks for the game folder if it cannot find it by itself, and remembers it.

Sorry. For some reason I wasn't notified of your post. Which mods are you mixing? I will have a look when I can. :)

It's something related with the database, indeed. They have changed the directory structure for the xml files in the packed game data files, and I need them to identify the structure of the database file. I need to have a look to the new structure of the xml files. However, as QuietMan says, all of that will be in vain, because soon all mods will use xml files instead of the binary database file. So I'm not sure if it is worth the trouble.

Oh. I have not tried the latest version of the game. Has it broken something in the mixer?

When you are on foot, there is no time limit, as far as I know. You just need to cross the bridge (a couple of shooting puzzles there), turn right after the long slope down, then down again and you reach the docks, and the final cutscene appears.

Are you running the right direction?

I totally and 100% share your opinion. Back then we didn't have the hardware to run our dream games. Today people have devices 1000 times more powerful than back then, and they use them to play multimillion versions of Duck Hunt and throw angry birds through the screen.

32GB and 4GHz? No way man. :D It's a 32-bit game, it cannot even address more than 4GB of RAM (and I bet it doesn't address more than 2GB at any moment). It runs on my 8GB RAM 1.9GHz i7 with 4800 series AMD card at the top framerate my monitor supports. I bet it would run great even if I removed half the RAM. It's entirely a different story if your computer comes with a lot of bloatware that drains the RAM. My laptop came with so much shit there that I spent a whole week uninstalling useless memory hogs from ASUS, some of them didn't want to get removed, and by doing so it left the Windows 7 it came with quite unstable. That's the reason it's now running a freshly installed Windows 8 (that took me a week to find all drivers for, by the way...). And I guess you were joking about the ION being a luxury. If graphic cards would be cars, the nVidia ION is a pogo-stick... :)

If sales are an indicator for the possibility of a sequel, I guess the chance is really low. I believe CC:GM has sold most units during launch, when people didn't know about its broken state and they got burnt of it; and during Steam sales, where people dare to try a game reviewed 66 and with a long collection of complains in the forums only because the price is so low and they might have nostalgia of the original. Had it been more successful, I agree this game could be improved and expanded in almost every way, facet and focus. See it just as a proof of concept of "How would a game from the 80's live on in the 2010's with a facelift and a few extra gameplay features thrown in?" The game is, at heart, a game about driving mantas and walruses and fighting with them against the defenses of islands. That is what the original was, and that is what this one is. I think this game succeeded at being a remake. Nobody can deny that it does worse than the original at anything. What the game has failed at is at incorporating a truly modern strategic game (and launching with many bugs, some of them still there). Even when the Strategic mode is called so, it has little of strategy in it. Defense islands in front, factories and resources behind. That's it. If you feel for it you can believe yourself a Napoleon if you slice in two the enemy's network to maim it's production. Well, I don't think it will bother him much. He actually cheats all the time. He is never short on fuel, he actually doesn't have to fight and spend his units and weapon on taking islands (it's just a timer and then a die roll to determine whether an island is taken or not). The game plays a "simulation" of the enemy carrier except when you are near him in the same island. In fact, all islands other than the one you are currently visiting don't even exist in the computer memory except in a compact form that isn't much more than Name, Defense level, Type and Owner. The rest is just dice rolls that the game does in the backstage, like a Game Master would do with most NPCs in a pen-and-paper RPG game. It's not a strategy game if both players aren't following the same rules. You cannot outsmart your enemy if your enemy doesn't need to be smart in the first place. The Strategic mode is there to fulfill an entirely different function; it provides a non-linear, open ended campaign, as opposed to the Campaign mode, that provides a linear, scripted campaign. In the end it's not much different than taking Starcraft linear campaign, then resuffling the missions at random and laying them around in a 2D map so that you can take them one by one at your own will and pace. The island randomized sounds nice, but I have yet not seen a terrain generator that makes better-looking environments than those that are handcrafted. The islands in this game look superb (despite most graphic-wh§res complain about in the forums), and they show different interesting layouts. I fear a random generator would end creating a big amount of bland, repetitive islands. I really hope for an expansion, but I think BIS attention will be elsewhere. If not on their beloved son Arma3, probably on the DayZ standalone (because zombies is what all cool kids play today) or the weird, super-niche Take On Mars.

I think I played it with 0011. There were definitely some pathing problems there. Not all the time or everywhere. It's particular places. It's totally clear to me that the pathing issues doesn't reside on the walrus AI, but on the maps themselves. I guess they use some kind of Google Maps-like topographical information that lists the data about inclination of the ground, presence of a road, obstacles to avoid, connections between the ground and bridges, etc... and the walruses use this to blindly drive around. They don't seem to look out of the window and see that they are going to drive off the bridge; instead they just follow their topographical map to the letter. So someone has to go and fix these maps. I have not tried XCOM: EU. I tried, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the fist XCOM in MSDOS. I found the interface too clumsy, and it took me well 15 minutes to get my six guys out of their ship, just to die immediately afterwards because some alien hidden in the other end of the world sniped at them with some bad ass weapon. I guess my skin was much thinner back then, and that lead me to exit the game and chant the magic words cd.. deltree /y xcom ...and never looked back. :P Maybe it's time to give it another chance.

Yes. That mission is the part that suffers most in the whole game of bad pathing. Whoever in the dev team that had a look and fixed the pathing information on the islands, please go again to Thermopylae (that is huge, by the way) and make sure the routing information for the roads that affect this mission is as clean as possible. :S

If you are talking about the Thermopylae mission during the campaign, as far as I know, you cannot configure the walruses or mantas you get to play with. They are given preconfigured. So the blueprints you have bear no relevance at all towards your chance to succeed at that mission. I found that mission the most challenging in the whole game, even more than the manta chase later on. In that mission you are followed by some allied walruses with different weapon setup. Make sure that you don't lose them needlessly because you will need them later on. In particular, the mission seemed to bug a little bit for me every time I was told they were sending a "repair gun" walrus. It took usually forever, and it was dropped way behind from where I was already. It was so far away that it didn't follow me, so I had to backtrack and get close to it, so that the AI would pick up my trail, or something, and start following me. The repair walrus is most important to the success of the mission. It keeps you going and you will need strong anti-air, and strong anti-tank firepower in the later stages of the mission, near the command center. Make pauses to repair all your walruses, but not for too long! The mission has a timer that even carries on past checkpoints! After losing, the game might reload a checkpoint where you already have zero chance to win because there is too little time left. Or you have lost too many walruses and have no chance to survive the final showdown at the command center area. If you see that you cannot really win, reload from a previous checkpoint. I really had a love/hate relationship with this mission. I loved it because it reminded me a lot to the oldschool style of gaming, where you can actually lose (gasp!) and have to restart and redo the whole mission. By the time you beat it, you have improved so much as a player that the strategic mode's combats are a piece of cake. This punishing but rewarding gameplay reminded me a lot to my other all time favourite game, TIE-Fighter. I hated it because it's probably the buggiest mission in the game. The pathing problems, while tolerable in the rest of the game, here they show their ugliest face. Thermopylae has a lot of problems with pathing through and near bridges. Also, walruses happily get stuck on the roadsides, so I had to leave my vehicle, walk all the way there and board the stuck one to drive it out of the hole with lava it had got into. This with the clock ticking down. Also, by the end of the mission, you reach the command center that is protected by an energy shield. Well, all my walruses (except the one I was driving) happily charged against the shield and blew to pieces, offering zero help in the final combat... Luckily I won with probably 1% health left and in flames.

I have tried installing it in my little Asus 1201n laptop with Windows 8 32 bit. It starts without any problems and you can do stuff in the game. I have not tried much else, because the Atom processor and the nVidia ION card basically beg for death while running this game. But that wasn't the point. :)

Welcome to the purgatory of being a Carrier Command player. :D

Your vehicles are basically remotely controlled units. You control them by yourself from your commander chair. They have simple serviceable robotic AI able to navigate the simpler terrain, shoot clear targets or fire back at attackers. But they won't win battles for you, or go climb the Everest while you have a nap. You have to win the combats by controlling them. You have to negotiate the complex terrain by driving them. This is not Command and Conquer or Starcraft RTS game, where you select all your units and send them to the enemy base and they win, while you are looking elsewhere. The main point of the original was to be a game about fighting a war by controlling vehicles remotely. And the main point of this one is the same.

Actually that is a really good suggestion, Disorder. There is no reason why the mods would need to stay in the game folder, because the files are copied anyway to the combined mod folder when they are merged together. Also, now that program makes use of a zip library already to open the PAK files, it could even support zipped mods to allow for easier "installation" of mods: just drop the zip file in the game folder and the mixer will identify them. I will look into it.

By the way, I uploaded a new version correcting a problem with privilege escalation. Has anyone tried the database merging feature successfully with their favorite mods?

It's not that different. At least this scripting version of C, that doesn't have pointers, pointer arithmetic or all that stuff that makes C harder. It's just a different syntax of that of pascal. Quite straightforward translation between both languages.

As I said in Nemesismod thread, I have to bow before you two not only for the help that you provided to me while writing the mixer, but also for spending a lot of effort to make both of the biggest mods in the Carrier Command scene compatible with it. Thanks for the support. :)

I do really feel honored that two of the greatest modders of the game spend a lot of time changing their mods to accommodate them to the tool I wrote... I salute you, gentlemen. :)

Hi, everyone! Sorry for taking longer than expected, but between vacations and some other project, I have been quite busy and away from Carrier Command. Finally I added the functionality of merging together all dbexport.bin files that every mod might include. If two mods modify the same row of the same table, but different cells, they won't collide. However if both of them modify the same cell, only the highest priority mod's value will be kept. The merge should "theoretically" work well, as the file format of the merged file generated I believe is right. I would gladly thank if someone can actually test merging two mods with dbexport.bin changes and confirm that both are being kept. :) Several other minor fixes and suggestions have been included. Version 1.07: - ADDED: The DbExport.bin database files can now be combined. If several mods modify the same values, the values from the mod with highest priority will prevail. - ADDED: It now remembers the window size and whether it was maximized. - FIX: You cannot launch the game game with the combined mod until some mod(s) have been successfully combined. The download link in the first post has been updated for the new version. I have added to that first post a Special Thanks section, because I honestly believe that this mod would have been impossible to make without the help or previous work of the people mentioned there. Thanks everyone!

Hi. Now that my modmixer is nearly done, I was thinking on an idea for a mod, but I don't know if it would be even possible, because I have not even started browsing the code files... So I ask you experts, because maybe you have evidence already of the impossibility of this. My idea would be having multiple enemy factions. Currently we have the blue guys and the red guys. Would it be possible to add another faction, let's say, yellow, with another carrier that behaves exactly like the enemy one we have now, but that also attacks the red guys? I mean, they would start with some yellow islands, move around conquering neutral, red and blue islands, and in case of meeting a rival carrier, fight it (be it realtime if it is the player's carrier, or algorithmically if it is the red carrier). Any idea of the feasibility of this? Thanks!

Okay. Both are good suggestions, Species. I will see them done when I get a moment.

Actually, I don't know. The game specifically loads 4 mantas and 4 walruses into the carrier (and it calls them "assets"). I can see that in the code. And what we can see, we can change. I also can see some UI glue code that relates each of the graphical unit buttons with their corresponding unit. I guess we could modify the amount of mantas and walruses loaded, and add new buttons for them and wire them to their units. I actually have not touched anything with the UI so I don't know if that is moddable or is also hardcoded. Unless we totally rework the model and animations of the carrier to graphically accommodate 8 walruses and 8 mantas, we would need to reuse every "physical" docking slot for two vehicles, and they would glitch into each other when both are docked. I would look bad, but the alternative, editing the models and animations, is a huge amount of work. All of this is in theory, as always. You never know when you are going to find a sudden hardcoded roadblock that renders everything impossible.

If it is not hardcoded in the binary program, it would at least require extra UI controls to display the status and select those extra vehicles. Are you thinking on a variable amount of mantas/walruses? Like having a collection of them of arbitrary size? Or maybe you mean being limited to the 8 vehicle count, but being able to use 6 slots for mantas and two for walruses, for example?