Anniversary Edition/Framework: Difference between revisions

The Anniversary Edition Seven introduced a revised framework which installs into the directory Oni/AE/, separate from any previous Editions, which installed into Oni/Edition/. Following is a rundown of what the Installer is doing, from start to finish. To learn how to make your own mod in the package format used by the AE Installer, see [[Making a mod package]]. To understand the material below, you should first be familiar with Oni's data files on a general level, so [[OBD]] is recommended reading.

When first running the Installer, you will be required to initialize the AE. This is a one-time process that uses [[OniSplit]] to break the .dat/.raw(/.sep) files in Oni's [[GDF]] into their constituent resources, yielding thousands of .oni files. These files are stored in temporary folders, one for each level. Next, the Installer performs what is called globalization. When developing Oni, in order to save memory, [[BWest]] put in each level's data files only the characters, textures, sounds, etc. that were needed. Since we have far more RAM these days, we can make this data available in all levels in order to allow more versatile modding. To do this, the Installer moves many of the .onis that it exported to each specific level's folder into the folder for level 0, discarding duplicates in the process (since many of the same resources were duplicated throughout the original levels' data).

 

There is a major exception to this globalization, however. Each level's [[AKEV]] and all child resources (e.g. all environmental textures), as well as the levels' title, fail and win screens, and [[LSI]], are <u>left</u> in that level's folder. Not only would globalized environmental textures gobble up memory unnecessarily, but if a modder replaced an environmental TXMP that had been globalized into level 0, it would show up in all levels, which can have undesirable aesthetic side effects. So, what data <u>is</u> globalized? Primarily, all characters, their animations (even the ones for specific cutscenes), all sounds, all particles, and any unused textures that were not connected to AKEVs.

 

Finally, the Installer recombines those re-shuffled folders of .oni files into the .dat/.raw(/.sep) files for each level, saving them in AE/AEInstaller/vanilla/. Note that no data has been altered yet, just the resources reorganized.

When one package overlaps with another in some way, such as two packages that provide new textures for the same character, which one will take precedence? The answer is that the Installer goes in ascending order by package number, so if five copies of the same .oni file are encountered one after another in five packages, only the last-encountered one will be used. Thus, a package numbered 11111 will override package 11110 wherever their files conflict, when they are both installed. Note that this is on a file-by-file basis, so package 11111 could be used intentionally to override only certain files in 11110, say, to improve or fix them. On the other hand, this might be an undesirable interaction. It's the responsibility of the modders to be aware when there's an unwanted interaction and to mark their mod as being incompatible with the other one.