Feature request: add support for dark theme.
It's on the list, but it's harder than it sounds. I would have to change UI framework. If I change to WPF, I get a skinnable UI, but the FMs list becomes slow because WPF's DataGridView is slow. If I change to a third-party UI, I don't get the RichTextBox and can't display .rtf files. I could twist the current UI's arm until it sort-of allows dark mode, but the look would be incomplete (scroll bars wouldn't change for instance) and it would look half-assed.
AngelLoader v1.3.2 is out.
Since upgrading to a new PC with Windows 10, a stupid bug (see below) started happening. Fixed it.
-Critical fix: On Windows 10, the "activate-first-instance" feature broke and would cause a second instance of AngelLoader to stay running and prevent others from starting properly. Argh.
-Changed all character encodings to be explicit: should prevent potential issues for non-English Windows versions.
Well, with whom does it always take the longest?
Is it the women who buy shoes ... or is it the German translator?
I should throw my wife out and quit my job - it's terrible, to always be the last ...
Anyway: here the Germanized v1.3.2
Many greetings
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rO...as63zEKc69FX9F
No worries. Thanks
AngelLoader v1.4 is out.
Added:
-Added "Date Added" column, which shows the date the mission was added to the list. This is helpful in finding newly downloaded FMs when you have a lot of missions in the list.
-Newly added FMs are now scanned completely, rather than having only their game type scanned. This is almost as fast, and allows searching by title and other metadata if you can't remember a new mission's archive name.
-Added recent FM highlighting feature, where you can say that recently added FMs should be displayed at the top of the list and highlighted.
-Initial readme selection now takes AngelLoader's language setting into account. For instance, if the language is English, "fminfo-en.txt" would be selected, while if the language is German, "fminfo-de.txt" would be selected. This only takes effect for readmes that have not been detected yet. Those that have been detected already or have been selected manually are not affected, so as not to mess with your previous selections.
-Added a feature where you can manually choose the language you want to play an FM with (in the Edit FM tab).
-Middle-clicking the FMs list now centers the selected FM onscreen if it wasn't on screen before.
Changed:
-Home and End now scroll the FMs list to the top and bottom, rather than the left and right.
Fixed:
-Fixed: If you added user tags to an FM, re-scanned it, made no further manual changes to the tags, then closed AngelLoader, the user-added tags would be lost.
-Fixed: When scanning newly added FMs, the progress box wouldn't pop up if there was only one new FM and that FM was a zip.
-Fixed: When the FMs list was scrolled to the right and you changed selection or sorted a column, it would instantly scroll all the way back to the left.
-Fixed: Forward slashes were not always handled properly in file paths.
-Fixed regression: Date fields in the Edit tab would no longer change their visibility based on whether the dates were specified.
-Fixed regression: Multiplayer Thief2MP.exe was no longer detected on startup.
Do you have any idea about how long should a first startup of AngelLoader take (after FM directories are set up)? By first startup I mean first startup after windows start&login. A quite annoying thing follows me, no matter I use newDarkLoader or Angelloader. The startup takes 60-90 seconds, which is quite long, considering I have a decent modern PC without any speed related problems (if any of you need exact tech specs, I can provide, but I think that's not the point here). The only other thing that comes to my mind is I have T2 missions installed well above 100 - but that should not cause this slowness, I guess.
Do you guys have any ideas? Thank you.
Are any of your FM directories on a network?
Do you have "Include subfolders" checked in AngelLoader?
How many files total (not just FMs, but all files) are in the entire directory structure of your FM archive directory/directories?
Here You go, Fen:
Are any of your FM directories on a network? -> No,
Do you have "Include subfolders" checked in AngelLoader? -> Yes,
How many files total (not just FMs, but all files) are in the entire directory structure of your FM archive directory/directories? I can tell you the TG and T2 FM directories, where the unpacked versions of FMs are. If you need the number of files of the whole Thief folders, I can also tell you that.
t2 fm folder: 7,529 folders, 236,516 files.
tg fm folder: 884 folders, 10,815 files.
Thanks for the help in advance!
Alright, could you tell me a couple more things:
-For each directory where your unpacked FMs are, tell me how many folders are in there, but not in the entire directory structure, just how many folders are in the base unpacked FM directory for each game.
-For each archive directory, tell me how many files are in the entire directory structure.
Alright, could you tell me a couple more things:
-For each directory where your unpacked FMs are, tell me how many folders are in there, but not in the entire directory structure, just how many folders are in the base unpacked FM directory for each game.
T2: 166 folders
Tg: 37 folders
-For each archive directory, tell me how many files are in the entire directory structure.
t2: 305 zipped files in the FM folder, 236,516 files in the unpacked FM folder (within its entire structure)
tg: 60 zipped files in the FM folder, 10,815 files in the unpacked FM folder (within its entire structure)
I hope I got your second question right. If not, please clarify and I'll provide an answer.
Nothing looks out of place there. I've made a debug version of AngelLoader.exe where it will log the amount of time it took to do various startup things. If you would, could you try downloading it here? Rename your original AngelLoader.exe to AngelLoader.exe.bak and then extract the one in the zip into your AngelLoader directory. Then, on a fresh Windows boot, run AngelLoader, wait for its window to pop up, and then close it. Then paste the contents of AngelLoader_log.txt here, and I'll take a look to see if I can find the problem.
Originally Posted by FenPhoenix
Done! Here's the log file (it was too long to paste it here, others may be bored to scroll through it):
https://gofile.io/?c=L6xJBw
Okay, I see the problem. According to the log, your FM archive directories contain 7,529 and 884 subfolders respectively. What are your FM archive paths? You should make sure they contain only FMs and/or .FMSelBak.zip files and nothing else. And if they contain any subfolders, make sure those subfolders don't contain anything unrelated either. Alternatively, just uncheck "Include subfolders" and make sure all your FM archives are stored directly in one of your FM archive paths and not in any subfolders thereof. At the moment, AngelLoader (and NewDarkLoader) are having to enumerate through 247,331 files, for which 60-90 seconds on a cold boot sounds about right.
Last edited by FenPhoenix; 3rd Mar 2020 at 15:56. Reason: typo
Okay, tried to make my folders cleaner (although nothing really unrelated was found there), and also unchecked the "include subfolders" options. Made a PC restart then an Angel coldstart.
Here's the newest log with the debug version of the exe:
2020/3/3 21:17:57 1.4 Started session
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Init
create required directories took: 00:00:00.0000476
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Init
Config read and associated stuff took: 00:00:00.0457970
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Init
lang read took: 00:00:00.0215611
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Find
total installed dir enumeration took: 00:00:00.0231978
2020/3/3 21:17:57 GetFMArchivePaths
Config.FMArchivePaths count: 2
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Find
GetFMArchivePaths took: 00:00:00.0017845
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Find
FindFMs.Find(): archivePaths.Count: 2
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Find
archive path 0 files count: 60
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Find
archive path 1 files count: 300
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Find
total files in all archive dirs: 360
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Find
total archive enumeration took: 00:00:00.0266654
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Find
FindFMs.Find() took: 00:00:00.0724841
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Init
View construct and InitThreadable took: 00:00:00.1995713
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Init
View.FinishInitAndShow() took: 00:00:00.0827774
2020/3/3 21:17:57 Init
Core.Init() took: 00:00:00.0827774
Think it's much much better in terms of time! Thank you for the help, I think (I hope) that's a solution. Will make a couple of further tries and if something comes up, will let you know.
No problem
I've got FEATURE REQUESTS, please Mr. Fen, consider:
- adding path column with a full (direct) path to mission archive file AND the ability to export current fan mission list (filtered, only visible columns) to a text file in CSV format
- adding support for 7z (ultra) compressed fan mission archives
- replacing ZIP compression with 7z (ultra) for Backup folder
reason for 1:
after playing and rating several hundreds of missions at this point, I want to remove the ones that suck the most (zero replay value) to free up space
reason for 2 and 3:
saving even more space (I don't care how long it will take to scan archives/install/reinstall)
Thanks for your hard work, Mr. Fen.
Last edited by thieff; 10th Mar 2020 at 19:43.
Hey Fen.
Which is the link to the translation changes?, is it always the same?
Okay, I'll consider an FM remove / delete feature and a 7z backup option.
Regarding your point #2, AL does support 7z FM archives. Do you mean it doesn't support 7z files that have been compressed with "Ultra" settings? Does it crash or display an error dialog?
Yep, the link always leads to the latest changelog.
CORRECT! AL does support .7z archives. I was testing it wrong.
what I did was unpacked RANDOM_MISSION.ZIP, but forgot I have Bandizip set up so it creates parent folder if it finds multiple files inside the archive (so you don't make a mess by accident) and thought the folder was a part of the mission.
of course that was the error and despite AL finding such .7z archive and scannig it, the mission wasn't showing up in the list.
I corrected that, and now all is good.
alas the scan takes really slow ie. 3-4 seconds per 1 .7z archive. I have to reconsider having a bit bigger files. disk space can be extended, our life time cannot.
so, please scratch that part.
thank you.
Unfortunately yes, it takes forever to scan 7z files.
(tech talk ahead)
It's because AL's scanner needs to have random access to the archive, but 7z archives don't allow that (unless you specifically set the archive to "non-solid" when you create it, which most people don't, because it's a non-default option and selecting it would probably negate much of 7z's compressed size advantage). Every time you want to read a file in the .7z archive, you have to decompress through the whole archive until you find it, wasting a bunch of time decompressing data that you just throw away. If a readme file or missflag.str (a very important file for scanning) happens to be near the end of a 500MB archive, then the scanner would have to churn through close to 500MB of compressed data just to find the file that tells it what other files it needs, and then it would have to churn through that same data again looking for them. It's relatively likely that doing this would take more time than just extracting the entire archive to a temp folder once and then reading the files in a random-access fashion from there, so that's what the scanner does. Wish I could do better, but there you are. Nature of the format.
thanks for the explanation. I expected as much.Unfortunately yes, it takes forever to scan 7z files.
(tech talk ahead)
It's because AL's scanner needs to have random access to the archive, but 7z archives don't allow that (unless you specifically set the archive to "non-solid" when you create it, which most people don't, because it's a non-default option and selecting it would probably negate much of 7z's compressed size advantage). Every time you want to read a file in the .7z archive, you have to decompress through the whole archive until you find it, wasting a bunch of time decompressing data that you just throw away. If a readme file or missflag.str (a very important file for scanning) happens to be near the end of a 500MB archive, then the scanner would have to churn through close to 500MB of compressed data just to find the file that tells it what other files it needs, and then it would have to churn through that same data again looking for them. It's relatively likely that doing this would take more time than just extracting the entire archive to a temp folder once and then reading the files in a random-access fashion from there, so that's what the scanner does. Wish I could do better, but there you are. Nature of the format.
in short it's pointless to switch to 7z. better stick with ZIP. it works. no reason to "fix" that.
it's not a big deal.
but CSV export would be helpful. but don't sweat it too.
I remember having a program that could copy any type of standard WinAPI text field, listbox, memo or a string grid from any running windows application to a clipboard. I could try that instead, and if I put all the fm archives in a single folder there's no need to have additional path column.
I just need to recall the name of the program.
cheers.
A solid .7 file can allow quick access if the FM author makes first the file in two stages:
1. Generate a new .7z file for everything except the readme, missflag.str, and the optional file fm.ini
2. Addsthe remaining files to the existing .7z file.
That creates a file with two solid blocks.
[It may be the other way round, but I tried this, one way or the other, a while ago and performance was good]
However, it depends on the FM author remembering to do it. Also, I think AnglelLoader may scan the .mis file to work out what game the FM is for, so that's another thing for the author to add to the second stage, but that would make the second block larger, slowing things down a bit.
As for the CSV file, have you had a look in AngelLoader's .ini file? You might be able to generate something from that data.
Yeah, I could probably do more thorough testing to see if I can be faster in some cases, even if not all.
IIRC the files AngelLoader needs to read the contents of are:
-missflag.str (to find out which .mis files are actually used - a lot of FMs have "dummy" .mis files that aren't in the right format or are just garbage data)
-newgame.str (it can find potential titles here)
-title.str / titles.str (ditto)
-all .rtf, .txt, .wri, .glml files in the base dir (or FanMissionExtras / Fan Mission Extras for T3) - the readmes, which it can scan for all kinds of data
-fm.ini
-fminfo.xml
-mod.ini (common in SS2 FMs)
-the smallest used .mis file ("used" meaning specified in missflag.str)
-the smallest .gam file if any are present
It needs to scan the above two files to determine game type. It does a quick check of the .mis file first because if it finds a string at a certain location very early in the file, it knows it's Thief 2 and can early-out right there. Otherwise it has to scan the whole .mis file, but it will scan the .gam file if there is one because those are much smaller and can still be used for detection.
What I could do is to only extract the files I actually might need to read. That way, even though I'll most likely still end up extracting more files than I need, at least it won't necessarily be the entire archive. How much time that would save I don't know; .mis files tend to be among the largest files in an FM and I would still need to extract all of them. But I guess for an FM like The Rebellion of the Builder 2 where it has a huge amount of its size in custom resources, it would save a substantial amount of time, that is, assuming files happened to be arranged in an opportune order...
yes, I've checked it. all data I need is there. thanks.
Last edited by thieff; 12th Mar 2020 at 17:43.
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