Hack Diffing Tool! "Really Working This Time" Edition!

[J. M. Pescado]

Ugly little command line tool for quick and easy scanning for immediate hack conflicts for new patches and expansions. If you can't understand the directions, this is too awesome for you.

UPDATE 03/06/06: "Really Working This Time" Edition!

hackdiff.zip

Hack Diffing Tool v0.2b
Made by: Flying Fish Systems (J. M. Pescado & Doctor Boris)

Special Thanks To:
Dizzy & disaSims2

Congratulations to: Draklixa!
In Memoriam: Dizzy

INSTRUCTIONS:
hackdiff -d OLDOBJECTSPACKAGE NEWOBJECTSPACKAGE > diff.txt
THEN:
    hackdiff -i diff.txt -f HACKFILEPACKAGE
OR
    dir/s/b *.package > hacks.txt
    hackdiff -i diff.txt -l hacks.txt
If you can't understand this, this tool is too awesome for you!

FEATURES:
Scans old and new objects.packages from patches or new xpacks for differences
in BHAV/BCON/OBJD/OBJf/TTAB/TTAs/STR and spits out an index, then reuses index
to scan hacks.

SIDE EFFECTS:
May cause computer damage, incontinence, explosion of user's head, coma, death,
and/or halitosis.

WARNING:
Do not open, crush, dispose of in fire, put in backwards, short-circuit, or mix
with non-awesome hacks - may explode, leak, or catch fire, resulting in injury
and/or death.

[twojeffs]

Excellent. This will certainly speed up the process (and the utter tedium) of manually checking them all.

In the words of her Ingeness: Thank you, this is great!

[syberspunk]

Awesome! I was going to ask you if I could get a copy of the tool, but didn't t hink to check here. Yay!

I'll try this out when I actually get my copy of OFB, hopefully later this week/soon.

Ste

PS. Anyone know if Crammyboy's still floatin around? And... whats with this

In Memoriam: Dizzy

Is there something you know that we don't? Has dizz officially gone AWOL or are they simply MIA? It did seem like dizz was losing interest. I'm hoping that dizz will resurface when OFB gets a wider distribution.

Ste

[Inge]

I hate EPs.

[J. M. Pescado]

Is there something you know that we don't? Has dizz officially gone AWOL or are they simply MIA? It did seem like dizz was losing interest. I'm hoping that dizz will resurface when OFB gets a wider distribution.

My reports indicate that Dizzy was found dead in his home late November or maybe December. The cause of death was not known at the time, but believed to be foul play.

[Inge]

Pescado what are you talking about?  No one knows why Dizzy has disappeared and he *didn't* seem to be losing interest, he was working on a project when he vanished.  Yes he could have got ill or died, but we don't know.  If you have suddenly found out something that the rest of us haven't been told yet then please tell us properly.

[J. M. Pescado]

That's all the information I happen to have right now. I can dig around some more if you want.

[Inge]

Well, are you sure you're not just getting the chinese whispers version?  I've been asking around a lot, and telling people I haven't seen him anywhere since November and that I am worried.  Now it's possible that speculation has been sparked by this and you're getting the result.  Really I think what I am asking you to make clear is, are you getting some sound information from a source close to him, or are you just hearing distorted rumours finally coming full circle?

[J. M. Pescado]

I consider my sources to be reasonably sound: Their information has always been reliable unless they've been intentionally deceived by someone, so unless Dizzy has faked his own death, he's probably dead. The fact that this information fits established facts suggests that it is true.

[Inge]

Ok but bear in mind that none of his fellow contributors at VS knew recently.   I often take this sort of info with a pinch of salt, when I ask myself how such info would be made available.

For example, supposing I were to vanish tomorrow.  In my case, I have my own forums and Peter happens to be a co-admin.  He would probably eventually (when he felt calm enough to post messages) post something saying what had happened to me.

Now if it had happened a year ago, before Peter had joined the Sims community, I can't think how anyone would ever be able to find out why I was missing.   It's not like my ISP would divulge any details.

So in order for anyone to know what happened to Dizzy, one of the following would have to be true:
1) They knew his phone number or address, and someone else in his family replied with the information when they called
2) They knew his full real name and saw something in the newspapers
3) He had a family member or real life friend who was also in contact with the simming community and posted the news.

All the above you would have expected to be discovered earlier in the disappearance rather than later, and become hugely talked about in the community quite quickly.  Like when Jack Woods was involved in the hurricane.

[J. M. Pescado]

All the above you would have expected to be discovered earlier in the disappearance rather than later, and become hugely talked about in the community quite quickly.  Like when Jack Woods was involved in the hurricane.

Well, there is always the rather gruesome and distasteful autoerotic asphyxiation death, which certainly tends to go unmentioned.

And who is Jack Woods?

[Inge]

If Dizzy was found dead my guess of cause would be something like a brain infection or tumour.  His last couple of days online he didn't seem to be as sharp as usual, and his last post was just weird.   Sometimes people pick a nickname that refers to a health condition they have.

[Inge]

Duh!!!  Well back on topic I went to use this and was having some difficulty composing the command line.  I didn't know what to put for the path to the new Objects.package.   Well, after struggling with it for about 10 minutes, it dawned on me I don't have such a path as I DON'T HAVE THE EP YET!!

* Inge punches herself in the head

[J. M. Pescado]

* J. M. Pescado points and laughs.

Silly Inge.

[syberspunk]

Oh my lord...

Can I just highlight the following:

If Dizzy was found dead my guess of cause would be something like a brain infection or tumour.  His last couple of days online he didn't seem to be as sharp as usual, and his last post was just weird.   Sometimes people pick a nickname that refers to a health condition they have.

Duh!!!  Well back on topic I went to use this and was having some difficulty composing the command line.  I didn't know what to put for the path to the new Objects.package.   Well, after struggling with it for about 10 minutes, it dawned on me I don't have such a path as I DON'T HAVE THE EP YET!!

* Inge punches herself in the head

Hrm... I hope this isn't a sign of anything. I'm afraid stupid is a "health condition" and it seems to be contagious. As in <- I'm with and my apologies if you might have caught it from me.

Wow... I would have thought that only I might be capable of doing something like that. Only... maybe I would cover it up with a little white lie and say I had difficulty testing it out on the NL object.package and an older one, like say from Uni or something.

Ste

[Inge]

Well,  none of us is immortal.

[J. M. Pescado]

Well,  none of us is immortal.

Yes, but if you kill me, I'll come back from the dead and get you.

[syberspunk]

Necromancy is bad, m'kay...

Ste

[dizzy]

What? No source code?

[J. M. Pescado]

What? No source code?

If you reaaaally want it. Lemme go find where I stuffed it and I'll get back to you. I warn you, though. What I do to sourcecode is not as pretty as what happens to sims code.

[dizzy]

Oh, okay. Well, then never mind. 

[J. M. Pescado]

Oh, okay. Well, then never mind. 

Heh, yeah, in contrast with my Sims code, my C sourcecodes are known for being illegible masses of cryptically indecipherable gibberish.

[Inge]

I am not going to say thank you, even though I was impressed with this tool, because I don't want my post deleted.  However, I finally forced myself to deal with the commandline input (I cheated and made a series of three batchfiles called FirstBit, NextBit, and LastBit).   After I got past that hurdle, the thing spoke to me in a quite friendly way "Hello my dear, you might like to have a look at this BHAV in that file".  So it was not an altogether unpleasant experience.   

It didn't however work out that some of them I had already updated or hadn't even made before FT came out.   Is it possible to make the app do something intelligent with comparing last modified date of the hack with the time of creation of the directory containing objects.package?  Or probably simpler, allow a date to be passed on the commandline so you can tell it you only want to know about hacks that have not been modified since that date?

[J. M. Pescado]

It didn't however work out that some of them I had already updated or hadn't even made before FT came out.   Is it possible to make the app do something intelligent with comparing last modified date of the hack with the time of creation of the directory containing objects.package?  Or probably simpler, allow a date to be passed on the commandline so you can tell it you only want to know about hacks that have not been modified since that date?

The BHAV scanner is intentionally agnostic and does not read any of the data, so that it won't vomit if EAxis introduces an unknown format. Also, it doesn't do file dates because I don't know offhand how to retrieve those, and also because file dates are frequently misleading due to time zone issues. Besides, you couldn't possibly have updated something for FT *BEFORE* FT came out. I tend to mark updates by annotating directly onto the output file, putting a mark on the line of each BHAV as I examine or update it to indicate what I did to it in brief.

Finally, I often misuse this tool to search for a specifically modified BHAV. If, for instance, I don't know if a specific one of my 200+ hacks has modified a BHAV already or not, I can manually create a diff file by entering B <GROUP> <INSTANCE> and then scan my directories, and it will then find out if I have modified this BHAV in a hack already so I don't create a conflicting hack.

[Inge]

If I have renamed some of the files to .xackage or something so they won't load into the game, can hackdiff still open them using a pattern of \MyHacks\*.?ackage