Oolite Bulletins

Guys, a question regarding the Oolite-1.82_x64-Deployment-to-Test-Release.exe.

I'm running Oolite-x64 on Windows 8.1.

After a bit of trial-and-error I determined that this utility can be run from the command line, and it asks for a folder where an Oolite installation can be found.

I had intended to install multiple instances of Oolite on my laptop's D: drive, and I had installed them in to following locations:

D:\Program Files\Oolite
D:\Program Files\Oolite-Dev

In the Oolite-Dev folder I also created a custom Oolite icon and a shortcut (I like to have both the Dev and Prod instance launcher side-by-side on my task bar. The custom icon is so I can tell them apart).

The Deployment to Test utility doesn't seem to like my Oolite-Dev instance, although it did work fine on the Oolite instance.

What criteria is the utility using to determine that a valid Oolite installation has been found?

Here is the rundown of what happens when you run the Deployment to Test Release updater:

First, I have to note that the updater assumes a standard Oolite installation. The app expects an untouched installation structure, at least as folder names are concerned. If you start changing the structure, the most likely result is a stop due to invalid installation.

Upon execution, it will ask you for the game's root folder. If you have installed the Deployment version at its default location, then said root folder will be C:\Oolite.

Next it will do two things to ensure that it's not going to patch any random or erroneously given location: First it will look under the folder you have determined for a sub-folder called oolite.app, which is where the new binary will be copied. If you don't have an oolite.app folder directly below the root game folder, the updater will assume that an invalid location was given and will stop.

The second thing that it will check, assuming that an oolite.app sub-folder has been found, is that no wrong Oolite version exists in that location. To do that, it checks the size of oolite.exe and if it is not the expected one corresponding to the 1.82 deployment executable (or no oolite.exe exists at all), it stops. So, if you accidentally point it to patch e.g. a 1.80 installation, it will not just go ahead and ruin it.

So, in summary, two things: oolite.app exists (with this exact name) where it is expected to be found and oolite.exe (with this exact name) inside oolite.app is of size 5,063,680 bytes (64-bit) or 4,195,854 bytes (32-bit). If all this is OK, then the updater will proceed to do the following:
- Copy existing deployment oolite.exe to oolite.exe.dpl.
- Copy its Test Release version of oolite.exe inside oolite.app.
- Copy its included Basic-debug.oxp inside <root game folder>\AddOns.

Having said all that, if you have problems running the installation for whatever reason, you can still open the updater using 7-zip or any compression software that understands LZMA compression. The Test Release executable can be found inside \$_OUTDIR\oolite.app\ and the Basic-debug.oxp inside \$_OUTDIR\AddOns\. You can then copy them manually to their respective locations.

Edit to add: It is perfectly possible to run Deployment and Test Release configurations from the same location (this is why the updater keeps a backup of your original deployment file). If you want to go back to deployment release, all you need to do is rename oolite.exe to oolite.exe.TR - or whatever you want - and rename oolite.exe.dpl back to oolite.exe.

Edit to add more: Pay attention to what folder you are pointing the utility to. If you have specified a location by browsing to it, the utility will try to be clever and append "\Oolite" at the end of the path. It could be that when you picked Oolite-Dev as root folder, it actually tried to use "Oolite-Dev\Oolite". Just be sure that the folder shown in the textbox is correct and all should be fine.

Moved thread to Oolite-PC, as it is platform specific.