Why I never use Mod Merger to merge mods with texture conflicts
I mentioned in "Shampoo" HDRP Guide that to successfully merge mods, you should never merge any that have XBM-file conflicts, but maybe I was wrong and I would appreciate if we could get to the bottom of this. For me, Mod Merger, for some reason, cannot merge textures of different types and resolutions, even when they are cooked correctly.
Here's a set of mods that consist of a single noise textures, cooked as:
- World Diffuse (high compression)
- Particles (lower compression)
- Quality Color (lowest compression)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SUT...ew?usp=sharing
Each one has a vanilla resolution version, a 4K resolution version, and for each of those there is a copy. They are all very clearly labeled. Each and every single one is cooked correctly and fully uncookable with W3Oven. There is no corruption of any kind.
When trying to merge any of these mods with Mod Merger, before each attempt, I:
- made sure Working folders (Cooked, Packed, Uncooked) were gone/deleted
- closed and restarted Mod Merger (if not closed after an unmerge, Mod Merger cannot merge anything... a bug of some sort)
10 attempts were performed and different mods were selected at random. In each and every single case:
- Mod Merger could successfully merge (uncook/recook) when one and only one mod was selected (1 item ticked) 100% of the time
- Mod Merger could not successfully merge (uncook/recook) any single mod with any other single mod 90% of the time (it was somehow successful one time!)
How do you know whether the merging was successful? You can read the log (search for "fail", disregard only "cook.db"-related fail message) or look into mod0000_MergedPack content folder and notice the size of the texture.cache. 1KB = failure, anything equal or greater than 97KB = success, but only if more than 1 item was selected/ticked/merged.
If you use the pause feature and examine the contents of the Uncooked folder when merging any 2 of these mods, you will see that Mod Merger simply does not uncook the texture file, only unpacks it into Uncooked folder...
Could kind people please perform similar tests and let me know what your results are?
I mentioned in "Shampoo" HDRP Guide that to successfully merge mods, you should never merge any that have XBM-file conflicts, but maybe I was wrong and I would appreciate if we could get to the bottom of this. For me, Mod Merger, for some reason, cannot merge textures of different types and resolutions, even when they are cooked correctly.
Here's a set of mods that consist of a single noise textures, cooked as:
- World Diffuse (high compression)
- Particles (lower compression)
- Quality Color (lowest compression)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SUT...ew?usp=sharing
Each one has a vanilla resolution version, a 4K resolution version, and for each of those there is a copy. They are all very clearly labeled. Each and every single one is cooked correctly and fully uncookable with W3Oven. There is no corruption of any kind.
When trying to merge any of these mods with Mod Merger, before each attempt, I:
- made sure Working folders (Cooked, Packed, Uncooked) were gone/deleted
- closed and restarted Mod Merger (if not closed after an unmerge, Mod Merger cannot merge anything... a bug of some sort)
10 attempts were performed and different mods were selected at random. In each and every single case:
- Mod Merger could successfully merge (uncook/recook) when one and only one mod was selected (1 item ticked) 100% of the time
- Mod Merger could not successfully merge (uncook/recook) any single mod with any other single mod 90% of the time (it was somehow successful one time!)
How do you know whether the merging was successful? You can read the log (search for "fail", disregard only "cook.db"-related fail message) or look into mod0000_MergedPack content folder and notice the size of the texture.cache. 1KB = failure, anything equal or greater than 97KB = success, but only if more than 1 item was selected/ticked/merged.
If you use the pause feature and examine the contents of the Uncooked folder when merging any 2 of these mods, you will see that Mod Merger simply does not uncook the texture file, only unpacks it into Uncooked folder...
Could kind people please perform similar tests and let me know what your results are?
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