Total Annihilation

[Grumpy]

Original Poster: LawnGnome
Post Date: 24-03-2005

(note: I'm just copy-pasting from my post at TAUniverse.com)

Making an all in one TA DVD or CD

PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE DOCUMENT ONCE BEFORE DOING IT. There are important notes scattered around in it.

As a foreword, I will say this. If you include EVERYTHING from Cavedog on this, the disc turns out to be around 900 or 1000 MB, which is a pitifully small DVD. In this case, you can always add all the tilesets and maps and mods you want in sub-directories for easy archiving purposes. Alternatively, you can scrap the missions and fit this on a single CD. Hell, you could probably get by on a single CD just by scrapping the BT missions, so if you don't have those, don't worry about it since you likely will fit it on just one CD with ease.

Oh, and for the record, you will not be able to burn the music in a playable manner on either "version" of this. DVDs do not support discs with both data and audio tracks, and CDs are simply too small. You'll just have to make do.

What you'll need:
-A working, unmodified TA installation (which can be uninstalled later, we just need a couple files from it)
-Total Annihilation, discs 1 and 2
-TA: The Core Contingency
-TA: Battle Tactics (optional)
-TA version 3.1
-TA No-cd patch (optional, but recommended)
-Gnome's Battleroom GUI hack (optional, but I like pimping it )
-The six post-3.1 Cavedog units
-The post 3.1 Cavedog maps (optional, but recommended)
-totala.ini
-TA demo recorder installation file
-Any third party maps you want to have, such as Gods of War 2 or Gnugs of War or whatever. You can pack as many in as long as you have disc space left.

How to put this monster together:

NOTE: I have marked steps that are optional with the appropriate "OPTIONAL:" tag. This is just for stuff like mission files. If you don't want the missions in your Perfect All-in-One Installer, then just simply skip those steps.

1. Put in OTA disc 1. Create a new folder somewhere on your hard drive. Copy all the contents of disc 1 to that folder.

2. OPTIONAL: Put in OTA disc 2. Copy totala4.hpi to that folder. These are the OTA Missions.

3. Copy the entire /data/ folder from Disc 2 to your hard drive. (My original copy of TA was one CD (it lacked most of the music), so I don't know exactly what is on discs 1 and 2. If the /data/ folder is already there, you don't have to recopy it. The point is, there should be a folder called "data" in your hard drive TA disc folder thing, and it should have five .ZRB files. Which disc they come from does not matter.)

4. Put in the CC disc. Copy ccdata.ccx and ccmaps.ccx to your hard drive. The ccx files are in a sub-directory on the CD, they should be easy to find.

5. OPTIONAL: Copy ccmiss.ccx to the hard drive. These are the CC Missions.

6. OPTIONAL: Put in the BT disc. Copy btdataX.ccx to your hard drive, where X is 1-8. (There are 8 files.) These are the BT missions.

7. If you do have BT, copy btmaps.ccx to your hard drive. These are the 4 or 5 multiplayer maps which were included in BT. They won't do you any harm, but it also won't be a huge deal if you don't have them.

NOTE: This is where things can start to get sticky. If this is over your head, just forget about the Battleroom GUI Hack, it is not vital to playing TA.

8. If you are a total moron and can't use tools like HPIView and HPIPack, then just copy rev31.gp3 from a working OTA install to your folder where you are making the big disc and skip on to step 9. If you feel comfortable with mucking around with HPI, continue reading these sub-steps:

8a. Open the OTA rev31.gp3 file in HPIView. Go to File-->Extract All and extract it to a brand new folder on your hard drive.

8b. Take the Battleroom GUI Hack and unzip it. Inside you will find two folders, "bitmaps" and "guis". Open the folder you extracted rev31.gp3 to. Copy the contents of Battleroom's "bitmaps" folder to the rev31 "bitmaps" folder. Do the same for "guis". Click yes to replacing any files. This would also be a good place to pack in anything like the TAAN Evolva models, if you choose to use them. No big deal if you don't. They do not break multiplayer.

8c. Open HPIPack. Choose your rev31 unpacked folder (the directory which contains all the other sub-directories). Make the destination file C:\rev31.gp3 or something similar. Pack it, and once it finishes, take the rev31.gp3 you just created and put it in your directory where the contents of your disc-to-be are.

9. OPTIONAL: Apply a no-cd crack to your version 3.1 TotalA.exe file in your current TA install.

10. Copy that TotalA.exe to your ever growing disc-to-be directory on your hard drive.

11. Copy the TA Demo recorder installer (optional), totala.ini, the six Cavedog units, the Cavedog maps, and any 3rd party maps to that folder now as well.

Now it's really going to start getting semi-complex It's just a little bit of text editing, so don't get scared, but this is absolutely vital to make this disc operational.

If you will recall, the missions were labelled OPTIONAL above, so remember whether or not you chose to include them. It does make a difference.

On with the show.

12. In your disc-to-be directory, let's first open the file TOTALA.ID in Notepad. It will look something like this:

[Contents]
{
	multiplayer = 1;
        campaign = 0;
}

Now, if you chose to put the missions on this disc, change campaign = 0; to campaign = 1; . If your disc is going to be missionless, make sure it is still 0. Either way, multiplayer should not be changed. Save and close this file.

13. Let's move on to the next file. Open install.inf, again in Notepad. This is probably the most important step here. Scroll down to the [SharedFiles] section of the file. There you will see several lines that look something to the effect of install\filename.xxx. These are the files the installer will copy to the hard drive during the install process, and if even one is missing or typoed, it WILL fail. The "install\" parts are referencing files inside totala3.hpi. That is all well and good, but not all these files are needed, and the version of totala.exe in that file is 1.0, which is not what we want, so we are going to edit it.

Long story short, here's what you want this section to look like, effectively:

[SharedFiles]
install\setup.exe
install\setup.ini
install\smackw32.dll
totala.exe
totala.ini
install\totala1.hpi
rev31.gp3
cavedog_maps.ufo
cavedog_units.ufo
ccdata.ccx
ccmaps.ccx
ccmiss.ccx
btmaps.ccx
btmiss1.ccx
btmiss2.ccx
btmiss3.ccx
btmiss4.ccx
btmiss5.ccx
btmiss6.ccx
btmiss7.ccx
btmiss8.ccx
totala2.hpi
totala4.hpi
readme.doc

Correct, you only need that one dll out of the entire list. Also, edit out entries as necessary: If you are leaving out the missions, for example, edit out "ccmiss.ccx", the "btmissX.ccx" files, and "totala4.hpi". The "cavedog_maps.ufo" and "cavedog_units.ufo" entries are the post-3.1 Cavedog downloads, all packed into one file. You can download those easily packed files from FileUniverse. You also need to add any other files here, such as 3rd party maps. It's just a matter of hitting return and typing in the filename. NOTE: Anything without "install\" in front of it goes in the root of the CD, which means in the same folder as this install.inf file. As far as I know, you can't specify other directories, but hey, you can give it a shot. You could, however, repack totala3.hpi with all those files inside of it if you wanted to. It'd take a long time and provide no real benefit, but you can.

14. Hold on, we're not done with install.inf quite yet. Below the [SharedFiles] section, you'll see a part named [MultiplayerFiles] . As far as I can tell, this just tells the game what multiplayer maps are on the CD so you can conserve hard drive space if you want. It's either that or it's the part of the file that controls the multiplayer spawn. Either way, let's edit it. Sure, hard drive space is abundant these days, but why not do this right? It's just a simple edit, much like the part above. You just need to add a few entries:

[MultiplayerFiles]
totala2.hpi
ccmaps.ccx
btmaps.ccx
cavedog_maps.ufo

You can also add the third party maps on your disc to that list. Just make sure you get the filenames right. I'm not sure if this can/will read from totala3.hpi at all times, but I highly doubt it, so if you're repacking totala3 just leave the maps and missions out of it.

15. Yay, we're done with disc preparations! Assuming you did everything right, the disc is pretty much done. There is a way to test without burning a disc, however. With a program such as nero, start a new disc (CD or DVD, whichever it is in your case), and select all the contents of your disc-to-be folder to be burned. Instead of burning to a disc, though, choose "Image Recorder" as the device, and burn it to an .ISO or .NRG file (ISO if at all possible). Then, using a program such as Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools, virtually mount the disc and test the installation process. If it works, great, go ahead and burn yourself a hard copy and enjoy. If it doesn't work, reread this guide and figure out where you screwed up.

Finishing thoughts:
This disc, if created correctly, will install a perfect multiplayer TA install without swapping discs and stuff, except for one thing: The demo recorder. As you'll note, I merely had you burn the DR installer to the disc. Since the DR uses registry entries, it needs to be installed seperately, but by having it on the disc you won't have to download it again at least.

As I mentioned above, you can repack totala3.hpi. I'm not walking you through that. Just make sure to leave the maps and missions out of it, only put the data files and such in there and remember to modify the .INF file as necessary.

Personally, I repacked all the missions into one monolithic totala4.hpi. I don't think the CC or BT missions will work from the CD without doing this, but they will work from the hard drive just fine without repacking them.

I also packed the multiplayer maps I have into one simple file called "multimaps.ufo". You don't have to, I just did it for less clutter.

You can also put tilesets and stuff on the disc if you want. However, you're probably going to dip well into DVD territory by doing that. You don't have to have the tilesets auto-install, you could just toss them in a subdirectory on the disc. The same applies to mods and mod tools and the soundtrack and things like that.

TA's files (using CC compression, at least) do not compress in zip/rar files. Well, they do, but it's only about two KB for every meg or something like that. In other words, you just can't squeeze it down enough to make it all fit on a single CD *with* the music, though as pointed out directly below, if you repack the stuff (especially the OTA things) with CC level compression, you can narrowly squeeze all the data on.

Posted by a fellow user at TAUniverse:

By repacking the data files (totala1.hpi, ccdata.ccx and rev31.gp3), you can get a single monolithic totala1.hpi of ~39.5mb

By repacking the map files (totala2.hpi, ccmaps.ccx and btmaps.ccx), you can get a single monolithic totala2.hpi of ~223mb

By repacking the missions files (totala4.hpi, ccmiss.ccx and btdataX.ccx (X = 1-8)), you can get a single monolithic totala4.hpi of ~378mb

For a total of 641mb.

That's it. Quit reading, I'm done typing. Go play the game and have fun