Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => Modding => Topic started by: Buster's Uncle on March 01, 2021, 02:16:34 PM

Title: AceEdit
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 01, 2021, 02:16:34 PM

Wanna be a GOD to faction modders?

https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=123


1.) Download.
2.) Fix to a. work on contemorary OSes, and b. add a field for progenitor dialogue/any x-fire faction options I'm not remembering.
3.) Profit!


THIS was an indispensable utility for those of us faction modders with a creative bent and no head for #s.  Stopped working circa XP/W7, I don't recall which.  -Coincidentally, I've not made a custom faction in about that long.

It would also be very nice to be able to point newbs using that [poopy], [poopy] malware, Facedit, at it.  It would be a draw that inherently grew the SMACX modding community. ;nod



...Hook me up, and there's a custom faction in it for you, made to your exacting specifications, and w/ very nice art...

Title: Re: AceEdit
Post by: bvanevery on March 01, 2021, 05:22:19 PM

The first problem is there's a Visual Basic runtime .dll missing.  Someone said to get past that problem, you need to download from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24417 .  Unpacking it is funky, but it did seem to install on my Windows 10 system.  Unfortunately that didn't immediately make it findable to the .exe, so more fiddling may be needed.  I'm going to try rebooting in a minute here.

I ran the compatibility troubleshooter on the .exe.  It recommended applying Windows XP SP3 as the compatibility setting.  This agrees with your claim that the .exe died in the Windows 7 era.

I don't find any public discussion of the tool, other than some ancient forum hits here.  There's no source code just lying around, that I could find.  Checked GitHub explicitly too, didn't see anything there.  Modifying the functionality is going to be deuce difficult without source code.  Higher than my pay grade.  But I figured I'd at least see if I could get the thing running on Windows 10 with some compatibility settings.

Rebooting didn't help.  I tried running the vbrun60sp6.exe installer as Administrator.  It acts like it's copying stuff into C:\Windows\System32 but I don't see any files actually showing up.  I suspect the copied files are diverted and trashed for security reasons.  Also tried making a shortcut to it, setting it for Windows XP SP3 compatibility, and then running as Administrator.  No difference.  Doesn't seem to actually modify System32.

Then I tried unpacking the Visual Basic redistributable into the ACEdit directory, using 7-Zip.  Easy enough, but now I realize this is for version 6 of VB and not version 5.  There's a msvbvm60.dll provided, but what's actually needed is msvbvm50.dll.  Off to search the internet more.

I'm finding references to the Visual Basic 5.0 runtime around the internet, but getting an intact archive is taking some doing.

Title: Re: AceEdit
Post by: bvanevery on March 01, 2021, 06:28:28 PM

Ok I got it to run.  Here's the cookbook:

• Use 7-zip to unzip ACEdit20e.zip into a directory.
• Obtain Msvbvm50.exe from somewhere on the internet.  I am not responsible for how you do this, and I specifically disclaim all the horrible things that can happen to you, such as downloading a supervirus.
• Use 7-zip to unpack the contents of Msvbvm50.exe into a directory.
• Copy all the contents of that directory into the ACEdit folder.  I have no idea if all those files are necessary, but that's what I did.
  
• Run ACEdit.  I didn't need to enter any compatibility info.

Superficially the editor looks a lot like the standard facedit.exe.  Just uglier.  What does it do that the standard editor does not?

Title: Re: AceEdit
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 01, 2021, 06:37:10 PM

Works.

-Or used to.  Facedit doesn't.  It makes a terrible mess.

Title: Re: AceEdit
Post by: bvanevery on March 01, 2021, 06:51:04 PM

Mess?  I don't understand.  I did use Facedit once.  I found that it was changing comments in ways that I didn't want, interfering with my diff sense of "what has been changed".  So I quickly went back to hand editing all my faction.txt files.  I never tried to use it for graphical modding, as I've never done that.

Title: Re: AceEdit
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 01, 2021, 06:54:07 PM

It puts Yang on everything - that's not much of an exaggeration.  It's been over 12 years now since I gave up on the POS, but piece it is.

Title: Re: AceEdit
Post by: scient on March 21, 2021, 01:00:42 AM

Decompiled source. I haven't tried to recompile it or desire to set up VB IDE but skimming through I don't see why it wouldn't compile. Looks like it's pretty small and simple code base.

Safe link for Msvbvm50.exe, use 7zip to extract:

Code: [Select]

https://download.microsoft.com/download/vb50pro/utility/1/win98/EN-US/Msvbvm50.exe

Title: Re: AceEdit
Post by: bvanevery on March 21, 2021, 02:51:42 AM

You found an official MS link for the .dll ?  I was at that for a fair amount of time, and utterly failed.  Maybe it helped to be looking for msvbvm50.exe, which I didn't know initially.

Title: Re: AceEdit
Post by: scient on March 21, 2021, 06:22:39 AM

Yeah, when searching for that specific file name it was in a MS forum support post someone had a direct link. Figured I'd share it rather than the sketchy dll download sites.