It’s been a wild few months, and I would like to thank all of the testers of Rime that have been reporting bugs, suggestions and usability problems.
One main issue that I have with Rime is the lack of automation. It had gotten an auto-updater quite awhile back, but it was very primitive and needs an overhaul so I can push updates faster to the testers and eventually the entire community. With this documentation is key for such a complicated and large project and before hand-generating the documentation or even using a tool like DoxyGen wasn’t exactly up-to-par. I’ve spent the last few days creating DokuGen which takes the C# assemblies and XML documentation and creates a DokuWiki format output so you can just drop it in your dokuwiki/data/pages/ directory and have it reflect instantly online!
The next issue which was brought to my attention is the auto-updater. Currently it does not track any release information, or modules that need to be removed. This caused an issue when I deployed a new version of Rime that would crash on startup because an external plugin was linked against an old version of Rime. This means that I will be working on Deeploy to handle this case.
The last issue that needs to be tackled for deployment is setting up a Windows VM in order to automatically build, create the deployment package (with Deeploy) and the wiki documentation (with DokuGen).
Another side-thing that needs to be worked on is getting native Havok Physics support in Rime. Near the completion of the map editor, I noticed that many things (walls, grounds, certain buildings) were all missing. This is due to how the game loads physics objects (destruction and otherwise) and they are in Havok Physics containers which need to be reverse engineered. I have started the process, but there is no estimation on when completion will be.
There have been many things done on the web side of things as well. I recently moved the website, forums, and wiki all to a different server fully supporting SSL/HTTPS. This step is an extra layer of security to protect the community. It may be overkill, but I rather be more cautious. I will be having a few different parties do pen-testing as well as people looking over the web-sided implementation for Rime to ensure there are no obvious bugs.
With all of this being said, I think it’d be nice to have a tease at what has been in store for Rime in the last few months. There are designs being done for a community “pool” for modding. You can create various teams, projects and collaboratively work together using Rime. You will not need an external place to share, sync, or create team based mods. The plans are still being laid out but it’s something I’m excited to be working on.
As with most blog updates, here is a simplified change-log of everything so far.
Additions:
- Added launching of a engine’s version bindings by auto-searching for “_bindings” as an extension
- Added support for Medal of Honor: Warfighter compressed ebx files
- Added a Virtual File System browser and removed BundleBrowser
- Added ResourceRef Ebx type for Battlefield 4 support.
- Added Request/ResponseProjectManagerMessage to allow the project manager handle to be used from within plugins
- Added OpenGL based map editor
- Added OpenGL based shaders for the map editor (thx nofate <3)
- Added Battlefield 4 model support
- Added support to FBCC for negative enum values (NoFaTe)
- Added support to FBCC for empty enums (NoFaTe)
- Added support to FBCC for the new VeniceEXT binding library (NoFaTe)
- Added support to FBCC for custom attributes
- Ebx creation and serialization (WIP, not finished, NoFaTe)
- Added OpenTK extensions for Frostbite
- Added basic support for Frostbite 2015.4 (FIFA 17)
- Added decoding types for LZHAM and LZF
Fixes:
- Fixed duplicate naming of VeniceContentMountingPlugin and Fb3ContentMountingPlugin
- Fixed null reference exception in GameMountManager
- Fixed recursive mounting of Frostbite 3 engine games
- Fixed Ebx decompression for Battlefield 4
- Fixed LZ77 decoding
- Fixed initialization of ProjectManager in order to fix a null exception
- Fixed a bug that prevented the VfsBrowser from navigating backwards
- Fixed a threading issue with OutputPlugin
- Fixed an issue where CasBackend would return false on ReadFile when it completed successfully (doh!)
- Fixed bug with BundleObject.GetPath not generating the correct path
- Fixed terrain parsing (NoFaTe)
- Fixed issue with GameContext level list loading and menu level population (NoFaTe)
- Fixed issue where MessageManager would break out of the async message loop.
- Fixed bug where the map editor would take over mouse input if the window was not in focus
- Fixed RelocPtr implementation
- Enabled loading of CompositeMeshAssets
- Replaced implementation of Cas, Bundle, Sb backends and removed all others.
- Fixed bug in map editor camera that would freeze the camera if the speed was too low or negative
- Fixed parsing of Prefab transforms
- Fixed alignment of objects in the GameContext
Changes:
- Changed GameMountManager to be a bit more verbose in the case of BuildInfo parsing failure.
- Changed the PartitionManager to use a generic EbxReader, this allows the same code to handle multiple versions of ebx readers.
- Changed implementation of VfsBrowserPlugin to prevent crashes.
- Corrected RimeLib naming convention
- Renamed EditorPlugin to VuEditorPlugin (to prevent confusion with the map editor plugin)
- Changed VuEditorPlugin to prevent auto-loading in Rime
- Converted the project from WPF to WinForms
- Changed the entire UI to use ATF more efficiently
- Vector classes were changed to allow for proper editing (NoFaTe)
- Changing the way the BundleBackend handles requests for data. Implemented the non-existent paths of /bundles/_res_ /bundles/_ebx_ and /bundles/_chunk(s?)_ for parsing generic non-bundle specific requests.
- Entire level loading process was re-implemented.
Removals:
- Removed StreamingPartitionReader as it was incomplete and replaced by EbxReader
- Removed LookupTable class as it was deprecated and not used
- Removed RimeEvents as it was deprecated and not used
- GenericContainer and GenericContainerValue were deprecated and removed
- Removed RimeRequestUpdateStatus message.
- Removed UpdateStatus message
- Removed RenderObject class as it was deprecated by Mesh/FbXMesh