Difficulty of leveled list merging in OpenMW
Posted: 16 Oct 2016, 23:54
So I know this isn't really on the table at any point in the near future, but I stumbled upon this in the wiki and it got me wondering:
Why is this difficult to do? I could see that it would slow down the function, having to process and compare the full lists in every ESM, but aren't most computers probably fast enough to sort through a few hundred lists with a few hundred entries at this point? Even if it is slow, it only has to be performed at startup when the modlist changes. I do think this is functionality that we should include at some point, because I know this was one of the main reasons people HAD to use Wrye Mash if they cared about this stuff at all.Does openmw need an outside utility to merge leveled lists or does it do what the original engine does and only take the last changes?
If not, are there plans to implement such a feature?
OpenMW does not merge leveled lists (or any other lists for that matter, e.g. pathgrids, spell lists, etc.). Doing so cleanly is not possible, because the ESM format does not specify which list items were added, changed or deleted; it simply includes the whole list for each file that does something with that list. For a future iteration of the file format, we could eventually include this info, and then merge lists during runtime (for files that were created in this format in OpenMW-CS, anyway).