Could Beamdog help with modding on the iPad?

ljbo

At the moment modding on the iPad requires to jail-break the device. I don't want to do that and I am sure a lot of other people interested in mods don't want either. It seems to me that a rather simple change could be made by BG:EE devs to make it possible to install mods on a vanilla iPad. First let me remind the directory organisation of the app:

BGEE Home folder ├── BGEE.app  ├── Contents ├── Resources ├── override
                                                          ├── lang ├── en_US ├── dialog.tlk
                 ├── Library   ├── Portraits
                 ├── Documents 

The .app folder is signed and any change in there after the installation of the app will prevent its launch. There is no way around that requirement enforced by Apple. On the contrary, the Library folder is writable by the app itself. It is not visible from iTunes but there are freely available and legit tools that can be used to read/write there (ifuse for command-line lovers or iFunBox for GUI addicts): this is how custom portraits can be installed by putting them in the Portraits directory. Finally the Documents folder is visible from iTunes and fully readable and writable.

Some times ago @lunar discovered that a mod could be installed by putting its files into Portraits. Unfortunately many mods modify dialog.tlk and therefore this solution is eventually a dead-end (even SCS needs to change dialog.tlk for things as mundane are reporting pre-buffing by spell casters).

My proposition would therefore be the following: could BG:EE developer put the override folder at least in the Library folder, or even better in the Documents folder? Programming-wise, this sounds trivial a change. Could it be that it would be forbidden by Apple?

lunar

Yeah I would love to see this, too. Another solution may be that enabling dialog.tlk to be overriden via portraits folder. Say, if edited dialog.tlk is found in the portraits folder and game recognises it, we can make do nearly all of the mods installed on Ipad. :-)

alnair

Apparently, judging by this post by @Dee, the Windows version already works in a way similar to this.

Could one of you, @ljbo or @lunar, actually try putting a mod in Documents/override and see what happens?

ljbo

@alnair Please forgive my late reply. As far as I can tell, a dialog.tlk in Documents/override is not picked up on MacOS with the latest beta that is now version 1.2. So again, only a partial solution that won't work for any mod featuring new texts.

wolpak

Maybe this should be moved over to feature request?

Dee

Your dialog.tlk file won't ever be read from anywhere except for the lang folder; mods that change the .tlk file make their changes directly to that file.

Illustair

@Dee In layman's, it's doable then? We'd just have to use lang folder instead?

Dee

The lang folder is inside of the application files, so you won't be able to modify it.