AngelLoader v1.10.2 (updated 2025/05/09)

[FenPhoenix]

How do you mean? AngelLoader takes care of folder name truncation for you when you install. In fact it generates a truncated name as soon as it finds a new FM archive, and if two truncated names end up the same, it adds a number in parentheses to the end to distinguish them (all this is exactly the same behavior as FMSel)

[FenPhoenix]

v1.0.13 is out.

Changelog:
-New languages:

• German (thanks Maitre Malterre)
• Italian (thanks Ramone)

-RichTextBox improvements:

• Mousewheel scrolling now happens in evenly-sized chunks rather than "lines" (where a "line" could be as short as fine print or as tall as an entire image), making scrolling a much more pleasant and predictable experience (fix contributed by Xanfre)
• Fixed cursor flickering when the mouse is to the left of a non-left-justified line of text (the right-arrow cursor will now appear in that case) (fix found with the help of Xanfre)

-Size column text is now aligned right
-"Show junk" checkbox has been replaced with a button whose tooltip is more descriptive (Show FMs marked as "unsupported game or non-FM archive")
-Fixed: when choosing to play an original game and another loader was set up as the FM selector in cam_mod.ini, AngelLoader wouldn't set itself as the loader and therefore the other loader would run in that case, rather than just going straight to running the original game with no loader
-Fixed: when installing an FM, the progress box might close and reopen between tasks, rather than just changing its display data, causing a noticeable flicker effect

[Garrett TMT]

thx for the new version :3

At the moment I only use the angelloader for my FM's

[FenPhoenix]

Happy to provide a service

[Stingm]

I know I shouldn't ask but have you had a chance to look into shock 2 support yet?

[FenPhoenix]

Sorry, been busy with all the fixes and minor features and polish. SS2 is earmarked to at least give a look at for 1.1

[FenPhoenix]

v1.0.14

Just some small RichTextBox polishing. No other issues have cropped up, so might as well just release this minor update.

Changes:
-RichTextBox: Optimize new scrolling for high-resolution mouse wheels and trackpads (Xanfre)
-RichTextBox: Fix the mouse cursor flicker exhibited when entering reader (middle-button auto-scroll) mode (Xanfre)

[vincentlancon]

Impressed Mr Fen. This is truly a successor to DarkLoader, no offense to the others who have tried.

[Dahenjo]

I'm still waiting for v1.0.783 which I'm hoping will fix the cat nagging.

And happy birthday, Fen!

[Fraser]

Oh wow. I've been ignoring T1 and T2 missions for about a decade because it was getting so clunky on newer Windows computers.

This new loader ought to make life much easier.

Many thanks, Sir Fen. Your YouTube walkthroughs are fab, and now this.

[jolynsbass]

I just discovered this new loader, and I am getting back into thief after a 7 year(!) hiatus... But, I've been a regular returner to the game since it first came out in '98. Loving the ease of AngelLoader - thanks!

Question: Can there be an option to sort or filter by tag? Or at least search/filter by comment? The reason I ask, is that, in my experience with it so far, I have no way to effectively use tag data, such as "Beauty Contest", or "20th Anniv Contest", despite being able to add such helpful info. I'd love to be able to click a "Filter by Tag", type "contest", and see all of the missions that were tagged as being contest missions. (or "horror", or "campaign" etc.) I realize I've got my work cut out for me in tagging everything... but I'm the kind of guy who would definitely spend the effort to tag it all!

[FenPhoenix]

You can filter by tag; there's a tag-looking button up top on the filter bar. It opens a window where you can choose tags to filter by, with options for "must include all", "must include any" and "must not include". It's a little bit clumsy tbh and doesn't actually let you text-search for tags the way the add/remove tags tab does, but it's there and I've got it noted to improve that. Glad you're finding it pleasant to use otherwise!

[Mat99]

Fen, any chance to implement and force the Fixed-Font to display with, when readme files are on *.TXT format? (Courier New would be great).

It's annoying to see that disorderly mess and disorder in 95% of missions. Yes... the files are "broken" already in archives, because people don't know what they are doing ;) But maybe such Loader's behaviour will at last force them to properly create/edit that files? (or maybe not :) However the others will have a well displayed text in *.TXT that they have fixed/improved for themselves :)

[FenPhoenix]

Can you be more specific about "mess and disorder"? If you mean that some missions have one too many or one too few tabs in the

Name:
Description:
Release date:
Etc:

section, then fixed-width doesn't fix that, I just tried. If you mean something else, I'll need more details so I know what to look for.

EDIT: Hang on, it looks like DarkLoader displays plaintext readme files with a fixed-width font. Wow, that's super embarrassing for me... I'll have to add the option now, because certainly a whole ton of missions will have been designed with DarkLoader's behavior in mind.

[FenPhoenix]

Okay, the fixed-width font option is in, to be released with version 1.1 (which is almost ready). It still doesn't solve every formatting problem, but it's something, and it does match DarkLoader, so hey.

Speaking of new versions, some musings about other language translations... I'm very grateful to the people who have offered translations thus far, but I think I need to do something slightly different going forward. At the moment, I take the translation .ini files that people give me and provide them right in the download package as an official part of the distribution. But any time I add new text (which if there's a new feature there's usually going to be new text), I feel like I have to impose on people to translate them, and then inevitably a new bit of text will pop up right after I've asked . I don't wanna bother people or delay a release if I can't find someone to update the translation, etc.

So, maybe I could release new versions without bundled translations and just maybe have a list of language files that people can download, to be marked as whatever version they're for? And/or I could release with whatever the latest translations are and just have a few un-translated strings, which would seem unprofessional but at least most of it would be there?

[Mat99]

Can you be more specific about "mess and disorder"?

Choose one mission randomly and check the *.TXT (if it contains it), I bet You hit the "ten" :)

fixed-width doesn't fix that, I just tried.

Yes, I know. That's why I wrote "files are 'broken' in the archives". 'Broken' is a bad word, but I can't find better :) They were... hmm... "aligned"/edited/created when Proportional-Font has been used (not Fixed-Width-Font) and that's why we have a mess :) For example Windows' Notepad has Proportional-Font setting by default from years - Arial I believe. Unaware users don't even change this, because... the font (by display) is pretty for them - end of story :) They are not aware of the consequences.

You can't repair it just by switching to Fixed-Width-Font, because they are already 'broken' and need to be reedited/improved AFTER switching to FWF. I think some clever automatic parser could handle with the process but... I don't want You to do it! Forget about it at least for now ;) Now I/We want to just display *.TXT as Fixed-Width.

EDIT: Hang on, it looks like DarkLoader displays plaintext readme files with a fixed-width font. Wow, that's super embarrassing for me...

GOTHA! :P

the fixed-width font option is in, to be released with version 1.1 (which is almost ready)

Fabulous news!

It still doesn't solve every formatting problem,

And it never solve them... (it is not serve for that purpose) unless the users will start write and edit such texts properly (in technical way). If they choose Proportional-Font by mistake (or not - because their display-font is the prettiest on the world ;) it will always be mess after editing...

[SlyFoxx]

Congratulations Fen. But I do have a question. Can I leave R Soul's NDL files in my Thief installs while using AL?

[FenPhoenix]

Congratulations Fen. But I do have a question. Can I leave R Soul's NDL files in my Thief installs while using AL?

Yes, absolutely. AngelLoader keeps its own files in its own app folder and doesn't conflict with any other loaders' data files or dlls or what have you. In fact, unless you choose to import data from another loader, it doesn't even know about them.

[FenPhoenix]

AngelLoader v1.1 is out!

Changelog:
New features:
-Added support for Thief 2 1.27's new multiplayer mode. If you have Thief2MP.exe in your Thief 2 folder, you can choose to optionally play an FM or original Thief 2 with this executable.
-Plain-text readme files can now optionally be displayed with a fixed-width font. This matches DarkLoader's behavior.
-Top-right tabs can now be individually shown and hidden using a drop-down menu. The expand/collapse button has been moved to the right side to accommodate this slight layout change.
-Better reader mode for RichTextBox (thanks Xanfre).
-Added ability to scroll the FMs list horizontally by tilting the mousewheel (thanks Xanfre).
-The tags filter window now has a search box.

Bugfixes:
-"Disabled Mods" column now takes disable-all into account when sorting.
-If you had an invalid tag in the tag-search textbox and then selected a valid tag from the menu, it would reject it.
-Improved handling when certain settings are missing or malformed in Config.ini.

Other:
-"Comment" and "Disabled Mods" columns now sort content-first for a better user experience.
-Improved speed of certain file I/O operations (cold startup is now faster, and a few other places are as well).
-Significant speedup in sorting the FMs list (this also improves startup time).
-Redesigned Settings window with a more vertical layout, and made it resizable. This is to allow for more complete support of autosizing elements to fit translated strings, and to allow arbitrarily many elements per page without the fixed-size restriction of the old window. I don't make such large UI changes flippantly, but I hope you'll understand it was for a good reason.
-Some dialogs with a "Don't ask again" option and a Cancel button will now ignore any change to the "Don't ask again" value when Cancel is clicked, in order to be more in line with what a Cancel button should do (ie, it should leave everything unchanged).
-Decoupled languages from the main distribution - they'll be separate downloads now, so I can release new versions with new text without waiting on new translations.

Other musings:

System Shock 2:
System Shock 2 is still not supported. From the GitHub issue:

Obstacles:
-Some SS2 FMs have their data in a subfolder within the archive (it wreaks havoc with the scanner to try to support this)
-Of these, some even have readmes in the base dir but the rest of the data in a subdir (this is yet another thing the scanner can't handle at the moment)
-Some FMs are "addons" which contain valid .mis files and even a few folders but don't constitute a complete FM, but we have no way to detect this with the scanner (it will see valid SS2 .mis files and think it's a complete FM)

Given the above, and also the fact that FMs often mention "placing them in the install folder", it seems SS2 FMs are really made with the expectation that the user will manually extract them, and don't really care if their archives are loader-friendly or not.
Thus, we would have to decide: do we want to allow installing and uninstalling SS2 FMs from within the loader? If so, we would have the problem where "addons" would be counted as full FMs, and could be installed (but would be installed into their own folders rather than into the folder of the FM they're supposed to be adding onto), and I would have to deal with people being confused about that. Alternately, we could disallow install/uninstall and just make the user install the FM manually, but then I would have to deal with people probably constantly asking why you can't install and uninstall, and me having to tell them to do it manually. Either way, eurgh.

The fact that all other loaders support SS2 is the only thing keeping me saying "maybe" out of shame, but I'm not happy at all about how messy it is. Zip files with nonstandard directory structures, missions that come in multiple files with "addons" and "quickfixes"... ugh. I don't wanna.

Proper high-DPI support:
Currently, AngelLoader runs in DPI-unaware mode, which means Windows just scales it like a bitmap, meaning it exhibits slight blurriness at other than 100% scale. I have my eye on proper support for DPI scaling. The only reason I haven't done it is because (tech speak ahead) WinForms DPI support is imperfect in Framework 4.7.2, and seems to be improved in Framework 4.8, but I want to wait until .NET Core 3.0 comes out later this year, because if I'm going to ask people to download a newer - and fairly large - framework version, I want to only do it once.

[FenPhoenix]

AngelLoader v1.1.1 is out. This is mainly a bugfix release, but there's a pretty important bug fix in here, so I recommend you upgrade.

Changelog:
-Fixed: if "[FM]" was not the very first line in FMData.ini, the whole read would fail. Not a likely case by any means, but not a good result for such an easy trigger. Sorry. I should have been more vigilant.
-Fixed: it was theoretically possible to get an extraneous alert dialog after a scan attempt in extremely rare cases
-Fixed: the Apps key (the "mouse menu" key between the right-hand Windows key and right-hand ctrl) would in some cases bring
up the wrong menu when used with the FMs list focused
-Settings window now opens faster, and canceling no longer causes a noticeable delay, unless the language has to be changed back
-Small, "every little bit counts" improvements in startup time

[mcmike1489]

Cool, thanks FenPhoenix! The multiplayer add-on should also work with AngelLoader as well.

[xx Bla xx]

Hi, I have a problem since using Angelloader: Some books looking really strange. Like they were burned. So they aren't readable anymore. Does anyone know the reason for that?

[FenPhoenix]

Can you post a screenshot?

[xx Bla xx]

Not really. Neither can I make a screenshot ingame nor can I upload one. The text is on the right spot but really unclear and the backgroundpaper looks burned. If that helps?

Since I have your attention know, maybe you can also tell me how to use dromed with your loader? I posted the question already, but I think it got lost in the mass of messages. It's post # 123. Thanks in advance.

Edit: I checked some other mission and had some more problems like missing objectives or empty scrolls. But the Problem seem to occur in newer fms only.

[FenPhoenix]

I have only one problem, but I'm not sure if its a problem caused by Angelloader. After starting dromed and opening a mission I get the message "Can't find gamesys file." I had to open it manually. But then I get a lot of error messages that textures and models can't got loaded. Has someone an idea what the problem is?

Sorry, I don't know. AngelLoader just starts DromEd.exe and passes it the FM name. Sounds like your FM install is messed up?

Not really. Neither can I make a screenshot ingame nor can I upload one. The text is on the right spot but really unclear and the backgroundpaper looks burned. If that helps?

In what way do you mean you can't take a screenshot? You mean you're unable to take one at all (the PrintScreen key doesn't work?) or do you mean the screenshot key works but the screenshot doesn't show the problem?

For this FM, look at the archive name and then go into your Backups folder and find the zip file whose name matches the archive name. Open it up and tell me what files you see in there, and if you see the file "fmsel.inf", open that up in a text editor and tell me what files it lists.