Automatic Installer

[Tomb King]

How do you make an automatic installer for your mods?

[Darth333]

You can use NSIS to create an installer: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/

 

There was also another one that was easy to use and did not required doing any scripting but I can't remember the address or the name (NSIS offers more customization options but for a simple mod, the other installer is more than sufficient).

 

edit: found it: http://www.qsc.co.uk/gpinstall.htm

[Lorden Darkblade]

Very useful

Is this in any of the stuck threads above?

[Tomb King]

Thanks. It's not in the stuck threads but I think it should be one of them.

[SeraphimJMF]

Yeah, it would be great if more moders knew about it. The only mod I know of that uses it is the Holowan Plugin, and it makes it very easy to keep track of your mods. The ability to uninstall in the add-remove programs is great; it saves you from manually going through your override and module files with a list of files on a particular mod in order to make sure you remove all the components.

[Darkkender]

I would like to also nominate this information for the tools stickies. I will be using one of these installers for the TSL Hholowan Plugin.

 

Also to those not aware Redhawke's Ord Mandell mod also used an installer in it's final release version.

[stoffe]

The problem with automatic installers, as I see it, is when several different mods need to override the same files (2da's, modified module scripts etc).

 

Since those files would have to be merged by hand to make them play nice, it isn't very desirable if an installer app overwrites any existing copies of those files in the Override folder, or likewise deletes those files entirely from Override when you uninstall the mod.

 

It also makes it a bit hard to check through the files to see if they are compatible with what you already have installed if you don't know what files comes with a particular mod. You'd need to make a blank copy of Override in order to see what it installs, and that defeats the purpose (ie making things easier) of using an installer.

 

Installers may be handy for mods that doesn't touch any of the standard game files and only add new content though, IMHO.

[Darth333]

Originally posted by stoffe -mkb-

The problem with automatic installers, as I see it, is when several different mods need to override the same files (2da's, modified module scripts etc).

 

Since those files would have to be merged by hand to make them play nice, it isn't very desirable if an installer app overwrites any existing copies of those files in the Override folder, or likewise deletes those files entirely from Override when you uninstall the mod.

 

It also makes it a bit hard to check through the files to see if they are compatible with what you already have installed if you don't know what files comes with a particular mod. You'd need to make a blank copy of Override in order to see what it installs, and that defeats the purpose (ie making things easier) of using an installer.

 

Installers may be handy for mods that doesn't touch any of the standard game files and only add new content though, IMHO.

This is the exact reason why I did not put it in the tools sticky yet. I may add it but with a warning...

 

Installers should be used only for "big mods" only and not for every mod to avoid installation errors. There were only 3 mods for K1 that used installers: Holowan Plug-in, the AIOFPM (which had about 500 files ) and one of Redhawke's new area mods (Ord Mandell I think).

 

Personally I always prefer a .zip file where you can see all the files before extracting them. When I use an installer, I always extract to a separate folder as indicated by Stoffe to avoid unwanted results.

 

In other words, don't use it because it looks cool but because it's necessary