Hak`M

I just took a look the Big World Porject. It seems that weidu is able to handle command line options (since they happen to be using that) so an automated install should be possible (technically), but beware that making it robust (solving dependencies and protecting against incompatible mod combinations etc) might turn out a bit harder than it seems.

At least I'll be following this thread for a while.

Verify the key files to ensure that the current installation is a clean one.

Not possible, since most mods only modify dialog.tlk and add new files to override - they do not modify chitin.key/other key files. You might try
interdia.2da or songlist for NPC mods, but Dungeon Crawl or Romantic Encounters, for example, do neither. You could try dialog.tlk, but what if the user has a French or German version of the game, and wishes to play with English mods?

Well just use an MD5 checksum of the dialog.tlk and some other mail files? At least to check if the start install is clean and properly patched it should work fine. To check intermediate states might be harder.

2. Verify the downloaded mods and patches to ensure that their version is correct

Er, how are you going to do this for each mod? I'd really like to know that.

Well again checking if a download not corrupted and the correct version can be done by an MD5 checksum over the entire archive before extracting it. It would required a list of all versions with a corresponding md5 checksum for the download. It think that someone mentioned using an SQL database to create a mod-list from where mods could be selected. That could easily hold a field for that.

If people really think of making a tool like this, take a look at apt (the package tool for debian based linux distributions), it also downloads, verifies, extracts and installs software. I heard things way back about making weidu work with command line switches, so that interactivity would no longer be required. Did that ever happen? (Yes I have been quite away for a while, so I lost track of things)

- Hak`M