PBW now supporting SE5.

[geoschmo]

Hey wait! *smacks head* I so stoopid. When you load a saved game it doesn't even take you to the screen where you select a version. I kept thinking it did, but you only see the version select screen when you create a new game. So probably I was correct when I said the savegame contains a pointer of some kind to the mod folder. So the mods would have to be on the server, but we mayhaps wouldn't need command line options.

Though this has the potential to be way ugly. It would mean that the mod folder would have to be named the same on the PBW server as it is on everyone's pc's. With SE4 I could call the mod folder whatever I wanted and just point to the correct folder with the command line option.

And as you say Ed new versions of mods would need different folder names or all games using the mod would have to upgrade at the same time. Yuck!

You know the built in mod selector for SE5 seemed like a great feature at first, but I'm thinking now maybe not so much. By locking it into the game itself, it kind of limits our flexibility in this area.

Here's a question. What happens if you try to run the host turn for a mod savegame and don't have the mod folders on the host machine. Will the game run at all?

Geoschmo

[Phoenix-D]

If the mod folder isn't named exactly the same, SEV shrugs, then loads stock instead.

This can have rather..odd..results.

So it looks like the savegame just has a pointer that says "look at this mod folder".

[Ed Kolis]

No, actually new versions of mods should NOT have new folder names; otherwise they will be automatically savegame-incompatible because the folder name (which is SE5's key to the mod) is different. The only time new versions of mods should have new folder names is when they are going to break savegames already. Captain Kwok knows about this; he designed the Balance Mod so that it always goes into the Balance Mod directory, not Balance Mod v0.98 or whatever, because then no one could upgrade their games. (Well, they'd have to manually rename the folder. ) I suppose once Kwok releases a version of the mod that is not compatible with old savegames, he'll rename the folder to something like Balance Mod v1.x, and keep that until he reaches v2.0 or something.
The alternative would be to have a separate directory for every mod version on PBW, and force players to go around renaming their folders or making shortcuts in their GameTypes directory for backward compatibility with old savegames... Dunno about you but I prefer the forced upgrading between compatible versions personally

[se5a]

maybe we should twist aaron's arm to add a line in the Mod_Definition file for it too look for.