WeiDU weirdu

[ZFR]

So I'm looking at mods and I notice some are marked weidu while others aren't. Can someone tell me what exactly weidu is? Is it like you can only have one weidu mod at a time, or what?

[SixOfSpades]

You can only have one NON-WeiDU mod at a time, and that mod must be installed first. Frankly, I'm not sure there are even any noteworthy non-WeiDU mods still around (since The Darkest Day was converted to WeiDU), and if there are they aren't being updated.

Before WeiDU, mods simply copied their files into the Override directory, replacing anything that was there before. To uninstall the mod, you had to do a full uninstall/reinstall of the entire game. Example: You install a mod that allows Bards to cast more spells, all the way up to Level 8 spells. The mod does this by placing an edited version of MXSPLBRD.2DA in the Override folder--the original 2DA file is simply overwritten. You can only have one non-WeiDU mod because if any two mods made changes to the same file (for instance, DIALOG.TLK, the file that contains all the text in the entire flippin' game), the mod that was installed second would completely erase the changes that were made by the mod that was installed first.

WeiDU works much the same way, only during the installation process, it moves the original versions of the file to a "Backup" folder, so that if/when you choose to uninstall the mod, it deletes the mod's version of MXSPLBRD.2DA and replaces it with the original. More importantly, instead of outright replacing DIALOG.TLK, it instead adds to it: During the install, it takes the new text that you've written for your mod and cleanly splices it into the TLK file, without damaging what was there previously. This, more than anything, is what allows more than one mod to be installed at a time, and why WeiDU itself stands for "Weimer's Dialog Utility."

[ZFR]

OK. Thanks for explaining that.

[ElfBane]

Hey Six!, how are you and yours doing since the floods? I hope you made it with minimal loss.

[SixOfSpades]

We got a little water in our basement and the cheap-ass carpets down there got soaked, but we've been letting then air out and it smells okay now. I don't know of any actual flood damage in Bellingham, but the river in a neighboring town overflowed its banks a little. Personally, I'm surprised that an area with this much natural drainage could get flooded at all.