but everytime you pull out something non-standard (e.g., "Russian Solaufein") I get completely lost.
Apparently. You still don't have it right, it was "Comrade Solaufein."
Hmmm. I sent you a fairly detailed e-mail but either the vagaries of the Net or your willful blindness to my insane schemes now force me to expose my efforts for sabotaging the efforts of others and ruining everything.
I would like to open discussion on the following wild scheme:
- Extend the --automate format and the TP2 language to support exporting text-encoded binary versions of everything --automate can, uh, automate.
- Create, either as a separate DL of WeiDU or simply as the default behavior of WeiDU.exe, a rudimentary drop zone GUI that does this:
+----------------------------+
|DROP YOUR TP2 HERE |
+-----------------------------+
and processes a TP2 into the game directory WeiDU.exe was run out of when one is dropped there.
Purpose:
To enable TP2 to be a viable format for passing small distributions of .itms, .spls, etc. to people who are not skilled enough to weidu blah.tp2 --out override --tlkout dialog.tlk.
So bookski.itm, Comrade Solaufein's Marxist Texts, could be installed by a "regular person" by dragging the following TP2 file into this install window:
COPY_BASE64 ~fwijefowjeifjwoefwjfiojwfjpawfajojfa etc.~
SAY NAME1 ~Comrade Solaufein's Marxist Texts~
etc.
(base64 to be replaced by the much more efficient text-encoded binary format you undoubtedly know about, Mr. ocaML computer scientist guy.)
Does anybody care about this? I don't know. But automate is kinda halfway there, it's just that the multi-file distribution nature, plus the 200k overhead, makes WeiDU inefficient for this sort of relatively simple back-and-forth process.
If everybody's cool with that, though, it's fine by me. My mind just wanders.
[!--EDIT|jcompton|Nov 12 2002, 09:36 PM--]