Using ota contents from other sources than original hpi's

[cghislai]

hi

Im trying to make a PKGBUILD (package build script) for Arch linux.

As someone already provides a "spring-ota' package, containing data from original total annihilation, i though it would be nice if ta3d could use the same package. It contains 3 zip archives : otacontent.sdz(http://pastebin.com/m7488364d), tacontent.sdz(http://pastebin.com/d254342f5) and tatexture.sdz(http://pastebin.com/d4f8f2c9f).

It would be nice if you can make use of them, i guess theyre pure copy of totala hpi files. it would be nice to be able to specify a data dir at compile time, so the file can lie in their folder.

[zuzuf]

Currently you cannot specify data dir with cmake, but you can run cmake and then edit the config.h file, there are 2 defines at the end of the file: the first is the path to data (system installed archives, TA3D's translation files, gui, etc...). Currently TA3D can read file from the real file system and from HPI archives (it doesn't read zip files), so the only way to read external files not in an HPI archive is using the real file system.

I had a look at those zip archives. Basically they contain the same structure TA/TA3D use except for textures and anims which are in BMP/TGA format here and in GAF format for TA/TA3D. TA3D is able to read TGA/BMP/JPG/PCX but currently it won't look for that type of file when loading anims/textures. Also I didn't see any unit/weapon model or specification, they may be in other archives, but without these, TA3D won't be able to start a game.

Currently we provide a tademo package in our repositories which contain TA demo archives plus some extra data (TA 3.1 patch archive, ...) which allow playing TA3D.

Since we're planning to create our own set of textures/cursors/... , compatibility and easy to use file formats can be very convenient, so we'll probably add some interesting features that should help (for now, every time we want to test some new texture/anim we have to rebuild the associated GAF file ...)

PS: when making a package from SVN code, make sure you build from a version in tags, otherwise the WIP flag is set and TA3D won't show "normal" servers.