Make auto mods more auto

[simonsan]

I just thought that we could give the possibilities to (automagically) create DAT file patches from a customized DAT in a mod and an original version. These patches we could store in a human-readable form (yaml, toml) and parse them in auto-mods to then reapply them after game patches. 🤔 We could get around some boilerplate with this for each mod-patch I guess?

Hmm, what do you people think? Is it just a brainfart and I'm overlooking something?

As the DAT-file patch in human-readable form is describing somehow the whole process, we can also use it to verify and therefore test what we did when applying our patch to a new DAT.

[HSZemi]

Essentially, you are replacing the explicit C++ code to modify the dat file with generic C++ code to parse patch instructions and apply them to a dat file.
And then you also want to automatically generate those patch instructions from a diff of two dat files.

Both things are technically possible, but sound like a lot of work. If you want to tackle any of them: good luck, have fun 🤗

[simonsan]

I thought of it, because that would make automating things easier, for example auto-mods could be used officially and automatically update mods in their workshop when a new patch is released. Without the people needing to care, they could just store the initial patch instructions within the upload of the mod and then it gets applied automatically when downloading the mod.