Data File paths and Capitalization

Support for running, installing or compiling OpenMW

Before you submit a bug report for the first time, please read: Bug reporting guidelines
Post Reply
User avatar
Greywander
Posts: 119
Joined: 04 Dec 2014, 07:01

Data File paths and Capitalization

Post by Greywander »

So I decided to jump back into Morrowind and I was working on installing some mods when I noticed something. While extracting the mods, I would get, say, one folder named "meshes" and another named "Meshes" (notice the capital M), which my PC treats as two separate folders. I believe this is more of a Linux issue than a Windows one, as I don't believe Windows will distinguish between capital and lowercase letters in file/folder names.

Now, I went ahead and merged the two Meshes folders, but I noticed that most of the folders inside also had the same issue, i.e. "f" and "F", "l" and "L", "m" and "M", "x" and "X", etc. Do I need to merge these as well? How does OpenMW treat these?
User avatar
jirka642
Posts: 117
Joined: 23 Aug 2014, 11:39
Location: Czech Republic
Contact:

Re: Data File paths and Capitalization

Post by jirka642 »

Use separate data folders for every mod! OpenMW will then merge them into one virtual folder on runtime. ;)

It's also a lot easier to uninstall mods this way.
User avatar
Greywander
Posts: 119
Joined: 04 Dec 2014, 07:01

Re: Data File paths and Capitalization

Post by Greywander »

I guess that will work, although it seems a bit tedious. Then again, doing a fresh install with a new mod list is always tedious, moreso to get it stable, so I suppose it's worth it. Thanks for bringing this up, I would have probably tried to make it work my way, otherwise.

I'm a bit curious, though, how OpenMW handles these capitalization issues. Would it only read from one or the other? Or would it read from one, then from the other (which may end up overwriting something you didn't want to overwrite)?

I'd love to see the launcher get some features to make mod installation easier, perhaps acting a bit like Mod Organizer. Maybe another post-1.0 feature to look forward to.
Chris
Posts: 1625
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Data File paths and Capitalization

Post by Chris »

Greywander wrote:I'm a bit curious, though, how OpenMW handles these capitalization issues.
If there's two files or directory with the same name just capitalized differently, I don't think there's any guarantee about what happens. For files, you'll probably just get one or the other "randomly" (whichever one the system provides first or last when getting a listing from the directory). For directories, it may merge them, or it may only give you one or the other. It's difficult to know, and I doubt it's worth defining specific behavior since it can only be trouble.
jmelesky
Posts: 47
Joined: 02 Mar 2017, 20:52

Re: Data File paths and Capitalization

Post by jmelesky »

Greywander wrote:I guess that will work, although it seems a bit tedious.
Oh, but it makes it soooooo much easier to remove a mod, or run with different mod lists.

I agree that adding directories could be easier, but I assume that will come in time.
User avatar
Greywander
Posts: 119
Joined: 04 Dec 2014, 07:01

Re: Data File paths and Capitalization

Post by Greywander »

Yeah, it's actually turned out to be quite a bit easier than I expected. Lots of copy and paste, though. Removing a mod is as simple as commenting out that line in the openmw.cfg file, and reinstalling a mod you didn't set up properly also much easier (I currently have bright purple kwama foragers and netches thanks to MCP's fake bump mapping, should be as easy as deleting the included meshes).
Post Reply