David on 25/2/2005 at 21:35

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With everything that was going on with trying to break T3ED during beta testing one of the things we never got round to was exporting maps for playing on non-editor installations.
I've just had a look now and I'm a little flumoxed.

IBT files are not generated when you Export for Game, fair enough as playtesting never uses them as user.ini has LoadFromResourceBlockFiles commented out.
There is a perl script in the Utility directory called dumpblockfile.pl which I did wonder if it created the IBT file, but a cursery glance at at the file doesn't seem to suggest so, although my perl is completely non-existant, so I could be missing it.

Anyway, unless I've missed something in the editor, or one of the perl scripts or something, we're left with a dilemna.

Without the IBT files a person would need to download the 330MB editor package to play FMs (youch!). However, the "upside" is that each FM weighs in at 7MB or so (based on Castle1.gmp and Castle2.gmp) rather than 40-50MB (figures from the top of my head, no Thief3 on this computer).
Naturally the 7MB excludes custom content not shipped with the editor, whereas the 40-50MB could.


I was wondering if any of the devs (Krypt, null etc) recalled how to create the IBT files.

:eek:

Komag on 26/2/2005 at 09:08

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I think we're better off without making ibt's. The "OM"s range from 15-38meg, average being around 24meg, for each part (each part of the two part missions, each city part, etc). The correlating gmp's range from 3-5meg, average about 4meg. So the difference is about 20 meg each.

That means that after only 16 or so full size FMs, we'd "break even" on the downloading of gmp's with an obligatory 330meg editor download vs downloading ibt's only. After that, we're saving tons and tons of bandwidth by only having to download gmp's.

Ibt's might be neater to deal with, but I'm sure we can come up with a Darkloader type program to neatly handle the gmp's and any odds and ends that would come along with them (readables, new models, textures, etc)

Also, we could host a stripped down "content pack" download that takes out editor-specific stuff, such as the new exe's and other stuff, so that only the content is delivered. That would cut out a few dozen meg perhaps. This content-only download would be unzipped in the main gameplay Thief 3 directory of both players and editors (we editor folks will have already unzipped the full editor package into our separate Thief3Edit folders we set up, but that's not the one we'll actually play FMs from). That way, it's a set standard and the Darkloader program could handle it the same for everyone.

From time to time, as the community creates new textures, models, animations, etc, we could round up the best of it and add to the "canon" content by making available extra "packs". FMs could say that they require the "Ancient Egypt Pack" or the "Eastern Europe" pack or whatever, in addition to the standard content pack.

This would be MUCH preferred to hundreds of FMs that include much of the same content, wasting all our hard drive space, hosting bandwidth, and downloading time.

Raen on 26/2/2005 at 10:45

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The difference between loading a block file and a game file is about 3 1/2 minutes (unblocked) compared to 20 seconds (blocked) - so you'll want to generate block files if the batch was included with the tools.

New Horizon on 26/2/2005 at 18:37

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Hmmmm. :( One would hope that all the necessary tools would be in there....if not...yikes. That could be pretty crappy to have to load for that long. What does dumpblockfile.pl do? Pardon my ignorance...I'm not language savvy

Fafhrd on 27/2/2005 at 00:11

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anyone (other than me) actually tried RUNNING dumpblockfile? My attempts with it haven't generated an IBT, but whatever it is that it does, it does a fuckload of it, and doesn't seem to actually make any new files. I may be running it wrong, however.