AmberDiceless--I am not that computer literate, but I was able to check my hacks with hack diff per your niffty tutorial in the last thread--would you consider posting another--my problem is mistyping command lines and if I'm not 100% sure what it is, it is kind of pointless. I would really appreciate it. Thank you :)
Sure, I'll just update that post for FT. :)
0. If you haven't already, download the hackdiff tool from
here and the diff report for FT
here.
1. Copy hackdiff.exe and ftdiff.txt to whichever Downloads subfolder has your hacks and mods (I recommend not scanning ALL your CC; it takes forever if you have a lot, and it choked the tool when I tried it.)
2. Open a command line window in that folder.
3. Type in at the prompt (don't copy and paste) the following command, exactly as it appears, and hit Enter:
dir/s/b *.package > hacks.txt
(This will create a file called hacks.txt with a listing of all the .package files in your hack directory and any subdirectories it may have.)
4. Now type in the following:
hackdiff -i ftdiff.txt -l hacks.txt > report.txt
(This will cause the tool to check each hack in the report you just created against the diff report to see if contains code that has changed, and save the results to a file called report.txt.)
5. Close the command window, remove hackdiff.exe and ftdiff.txt from your hack directory to a secure storage location to keep things tidy, and open report.txt in Notepad or your word processor of choice to see which of your hacks are borked.
(Optionally, I find it makes things much easier if I use Edit/Find And Replace to change the first part of the directory paths in report.txt to a blank space. i.e.:
Find: C:/Documents and Settings/Owner/MyDocuments/EA Games/The Sims 2/Downloads/ (or whatever your specific Downloads path is)
Replace with: [one blank space]
Then hit "Replace All" and you'll then have just the specific paths and files left. For instance,
Hacks/Squinge/randomalienpregnancy.package
instead of
C:/Documents and Settings/Owner/MyDocuments/EA Games/The Sims 2/Downloads/Hacks/Squinge/randomalienpregnancy.package.)
How to read the report: Any hacks which are listed with specific code changes most likely do need to be updated. (In some cases, after a review of the code, the creator or another modder may conclude that the hack will work as-is. Leave that call to the trained professionals. Even a mod which appears to work correctly may be doing borked things to your game in the background.)
You should be able to safely ignore mods which return only a "Name Unsupported" error
if the instance number listed in the error is NOT 0x12F or 0x130. Errors in 0x12D may also cause issues, but they should be limited to harmless and obvious pie menu glitches, so there's no harm in trying the mod anyway.
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