Google Failed Me: 2018

I installed Descent 3 from GOG.com, and updated to 1.5 to try to get things to run smoother (probably wasn't necessary). The main campaign (Retribution) worked fine, but it wouldn't load the expansion campaign (Mercenary). The internet repeated the same advice "install mercenary again".

The double installing of Mercenary ist [sic] necessary in order to avoid the following error message when starting Mercenary: “Could not load MERC1.D3L”

It took me a while to figure out that "ist" was german for "is" not typo for "isn't", and I didn't have the Mercenary install to re-install. So I went about comparing files.

It seems that the EXTRA.HOG file was altered, and seems to be the same size as EXTRA1.HOG. I Copied EXTRA.HOG back and it loaded.

To verify I wasn't ruining everything, I downloaded a .hog file viewer to check out the contents. MERC1.D3L was definitely in the larger hog file, but missing from the smaller patched version. The new 1.5 patched EXTRA.HOG file had the same files with the same sizes as EXTRA1.HOG, so I'm pretty sure nothing is missing. The old larger EXTRA.hog had lots of extra stuff, and it seems to have an older version(at least smaller) of AIGame.dll. but that was present in EXTRA1.HOG so I'm assuming the game just used the EXTRA1.HOG version of that and any "missing" file.
EXTRA.HOG - 1.4 GOG.com 212,406,907 bytes

AIGame.dll 188416 bytes
AIGAMEi.STR 21745 bytes
coop.str -- missing
d3.str -- mising
dmfc.str -- missing
environment.ogf -- missing
lots of extra files.

EXTRA1.HOG 476,566 bytes

AIGame.dll 204800 bytes
AIGAMEi.STR 21745 bytes
coop.str -- 2533 bytes
d3.str -- 161887 bytes
dmfc.str -- 69508 bytes
environment.ogf -- 15737 bytes

EXTRA.HOG - 1.5 Patch 476,566 bytes

AIGame.dll 204800 bytes
AIGAMEi.STR 21745 bytes
coop.str -- 2533 bytes
d3.str -- 161887 bytes
dmfc.str -- 69508 bytes
environment.ogf -- 15737 bytes

Google Failed Me

Friday, May 4, 2018

Syma x5hw video stream

Friday, March 30, 2018

Decent 3 Unable to load level file merc1.d3l