There's a game studio in Sweden which makes games that are really modder-friendly. There's pleasantly formatted text files with their own scripts as the source for much of the game's mechanics. Mods, which aim to alter those mechanics or add new ones, can either add new files with more script, or override existing ones (which entails making a local copy with the desired changes).
However, every now and the developers release a patch for the game, which may update some or all of those original ("vanilla") files. If I have overridden some of those files for my mod, then my local copies will not receive those updates. I not only have to merge in the changes manually: I have to track down each of the files that my mod overrides to see if any of those got patched, first. Which is a bit of a hassle if the mod is big enough.
I'm thinking of a tool that can do all of these things:
When it runs, see if any of the files in the vanilla directory tree got updated since the last time it checked; and if those updated files also exist in the mod: so in a different root directory, but in the same subfolder with the same name.
- I could make this step simpler by just keeping a plain list of the files I changed, and have it reference that list instead of scan through my mod directory tree every time.
if there are any such files that changed, then try to rebase my changes on the new version of vanilla (which should often work because my changes will tend to be subtle)
if it fails in that, notify me somehow.
And preferably, it should run automatically, e.g. daily.
I was going to implement it myself, but then I considered that this was just like interacting with a version control system. If this were Git, then vanilla would be the master, my mod a branch, and this tool would just continuously try to pull and merge in new changes from the master, something that humans do all the time. So this must have been thought of before, I figured.
The tool should preferably be free and light-weight. My operating system is Windows 10.
