AngelLoader v1.11.0 - now works better on Wine! (updated 2025/07/24)

bob_doe_nz on 25/1/2025 at 03:23

Thank you for your continuing work into making AngelLoader. And for putting in SS2 support and tabbed game sections when I asked years ago :)

FenPhoenix on 25/1/2025 at 03:31

You're quite welcome :)

PABastien on 26/1/2025 at 04:30

Hey I have kind of a dumb question, because I don't know if it's feasible. Is it possible to add the ability to say, right click and "create a desktop shortcut" that maintains your parameters (like deactivated mods) That you can launch directly?

FenPhoenix on 26/1/2025 at 06:31

Quote Posted by PABastien

There was discussion on this starting (https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149706&page=26&p=2509828&viewfull=1#post2509828) here and continuing through (https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149706&page=27&p=2510881&viewfull=1#post2510881) here and (https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149706&page=27&p=2510933&viewfull=1#post2510933) here.

As you can see, there were some question marks and I ended up kind of ambivalent. The request was for the shortcut to open AngelLoader normally and then start the FM automatically (the requesters wanted AL to remain open as it normally would). My response was basically:

* That would change AL's global state (it would forcibly select the FM the shortcut is asking for). That means that shortcuts steal your current FM rather than just being nicely self-contained and not changing anything.
* Making the selection temporary would solve that (assuming you didn't go and change it again yourself before closing it), but then how do I know you don't want the new selection to stay? Either way you end up with your global FM selection changed in a way you may or may not want.
* If you have a shortcut for, say, The Black Parade, but then you also want to play another FM in between TBP sessions, then you still have to open AL yourself and navigate to the other FM every time you want to play it, because the TBP shortcut will steal your selection. Unless you make a shortcut for the other FM, but then that's basically the same as just pinning the two FMs in AL and switching between them there.
* If the shortcut were to simply tell AL to open, start the FM and then quit, then that would dodge all of these problems, but then you wouldn't have AL open during your play (so you can't take notes or look at the readme or what-have-you).

So there's difficulties.

PABastien on 26/1/2025 at 06:53

Fair enough. Thanks for letting me know.

Taffingtaffer on 1/2/2025 at 17:47

Hi Fen, I've just finished converting my backlog of FMs with your new tool and I was looking into using tags. Could you make it possible to disable/delete AngeLoader premade tags in a future update?
For example, some campaigns get a "campaign: long" tag attached along with "misc: campaign". I like the idea of indicating a FM is a campaign and its length at the same time, so that "misc" tag feels redundant.

FenPhoenix on 1/2/2025 at 19:49

You can delete tags manually (although it's clunky I admit, I should improve that).

Tags usually come from an FM's fm.ini file, so whatever is in there is whatever is in there. AngelLoader does add the "misc: campaign" tag during scans if an FM has multiple missions, but that's because tags like "campaign: long" (which are, and must be, added by the author - "length" is subjective and not auto-detectable) may not exist, and AL is trying to be helpful by at least marking campaigns as such. That way if a user wants to filter campaigns and they haven't gone and manually added "campaign: whatever" to every FM, they can at least still find them.

Now I could make it so AL only adds the "misc: campaign" tag if there's not already a "campaign: whatever" tag. Two things though:

* It's possible that "campaign: whatever" and "misc: campaign" may both exist in fm.ini in the first place (nothing's preventing that). So even if AL didn't add "misc: campaign" it might still end up in there sometimes. Now it could auto-remove it in that case, but now we start getting into territory I don't want to go. Imperfect or not, the author put the tags there, and I don't want to presume to judge them "wrong" and "correct" them.
* When an FM is scanned, currently tags are only added and old ones are never removed. This is to prevent overwriting a user's added tags when the FM is scanned. That's another point against removing anything in the scan - maybe the user wanted the separate "misc: campaign" tag and then we'd be removing it.

When you say "disable or delete premade tags" I'm not sure exactly what you mean here - doing this would be disabling the vast majority of tags that might ever be encountered. It would disable author, contest, genre (action, crime, horror, mystery, puzzle), language (English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish), series, and misc (campaign, demo, long, short, other protagonist, unknown author).

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Taffingtaffer on 2/2/2025 at 01:05

Quote Posted by FenPhoenix

When you say "disable or delete premade tags" I'm not sure exactly what you mean here - doing this would be disabling the vast majority of tags that might ever be encountered. It would disable author, contest, genre (action, crime, horror, mystery, puzzle), language (English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish), series, and misc (campaign, demo, long, short, other protagonist, unknown author).

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Sorry, I should have been more specific. ^^"

When I started customizing the tags with my own categories, I went straight to FMData.ini and batch-replaced the misc category for something more descriptive ("vibes", to specify is a FM has rain, snow, water, the time of the day...), and removed the misc tags you listed from any FM; some would be moved to another category, others completely deleted.
Then I realized the misc category and the tags campaign, demo, long, short, other protagonist, unknown author persisted, despite having no FM with those tags attached. The same goes for the tags of the genre category (action, crime, horror, mystery, puzzle).
That's why I presumed those were "premade tags" internal to AL code. I understand respecting authors tagging when scanning, I just wanted to tweak things to my liking.

If no such baked-in tags exist, it might be on me for editing FMData.ini tags like a brute. It still fascinates me, though; those tags must come from somewhere else if FMs have already been scanned and FMData.ini doesn't hold the information.

FenPhoenix on 2/2/2025 at 03:44

Oh, you mean the tags exist in the menu and the tags suggestion box. Yeah, there is a set of premade tags that are always there (they're hardcoded in the source code): that's taken from FMSel which has the same set. If you just mean you want to hide those from the menu and suggestion box, then sure I can add that option, no problem.

Muleke on 2/2/2025 at 22:19

Hey there, Fen!

I am a Brazilian professional game translator and have been using AngelLoader since last year. I would like to know if, after I translate AL into Brazilian Portuguese, you could add the translated .ini file to it through an update, so that the language can be selected in the Settings menu.

Cheers, and thanks for all your hard work! This tool is beyond amazing!