With each new build of the hangar module, I’ve been keeping my own dumps of the game folders, running diffs against the varying versions, and making internal notes just out of nerdy curiosity for what’s actually being changed under the hood. I figured I’d start sharing some of these results, as others might find this interesting too. I plan to make this a recurring thing with each new patch until it becomes impractical.

This won’t cover each and every single byte difference between builds – just major points of interest that I find in doing diff-comparisons; in particular things which might not have been directly mentioned in the patch notes. There’s also a LOT to manually go through between builds, so it’s likely that I’ll miss some things.

This will generally be a bit of a disorganized mess as it’s more or less a brain dump as I go, but I’ll try to keep things as neat as I can. Bear in mind as well that 99% of this document will be my own conjecture – I may (and likely will) be wrong about my interpretation of a lot of things.

Summary:

• CURRENT BUILD: 02-25-2014 – Build 5686
• PREVIOUS BUILD: 02-17-2014 – Build 5513

(As per \CitizenClient\Client_Release.id)

This is going to be a fairly short one, because the main focus on this update (which was put out so rapidly after the last one) was to add Oculus Rift support. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of free-floating configuration changes which account for this, and many of the integration bits are likely hardcoded into the EXE itself and beyond further analysis.

That being said, this latest patch did bring a few other surprising changes under the hood which I felt would be worth documenting – I’ll leave it up to you if this seems too redundant or not given how recently the last major update was put out. Read on for the details.

In particular, I’ll also call out right away that the Freelancer variants are now gone from the game data files, with only the core Freelancer version left behind. This seems consistent with the jovial fist-shaking Wingman allegedly did regarding the premature reveal during today’s Wingman’s Hangover.

Patch Breakdown

ANIMATIONS / CHARACTER MODELS

• Nothing – No major animation or character model changes this time around.

SCRIPTS / GAME DATA

Gamedata.pak\Libs\Config\Profiles\default\attributes.xml has a couple of line changes ostensibly related to getting Oculus support working. There were previously several lines referencing “StereoDevice”, “StereoMode”, and “StereoOutput” attributes (referencing corresponding r_stereo* cvars); these have been compressed down into a just couple of base “StereoDevice” attributes which existed previously. One for “platform=pc” had it’s “requiresRestart=1 flag removed, while the other for “xbox|ps3” has been left alone and untouched (and as such please don’t read too much into the latter, as it’s almost certainly a leftover from the base Cryengine SDK).

* Three new files have been added in \CitizenClient\Tools\CrashHandler: CrashHandler.pdb, DebugHelper.pdb, and DebugMonitor.pdb. My Visual Studio lore is a bit rusty, but these should contain debug / symbol information, shouldn’t they? This may be related to the “Internal updates for development” item referenced in the patch notes (and may provide a bit of extra fun for anybody who knows how to interact with these properly).

SHIP / WEAPON / OTHER OBJECTS

There was a comment in the patch notes that they “Disabled Cutlass tractor beam until the hatch clipping issue can be solved”. This is reflected in a bit more detail in the following commented-out section from Scripts.pak\Scripts\Entities\Vehicles\Implementations\Xml\DRAK_Cutlass.xml:

(etc...)
 <!-- Switch / bay_sensor    ////////// DISABLING UNTIL WE HAVE A PROPER STATE MACHINE - SEE BUG RSI-6105   ///////////////
 (etc...)

As previously documented, ObjectsFreelancer.pak lost about 150MB worth of weight today. This is due to the sudden absence of the three Freelancer variants.

TL;DR / MEDIA COMPILATION SECTION

• N/A – Nothing substantial to report today.

With each new build of the hangar module, Parias likes to run diffs against the varying versions, and make notes just out of nerdy curiosity for what’s actually being changed under the hood —  in particular things which might not have been directly mentioned in the patch notes.

99% of this document will be personal conjecture – Parias may (and likely will) be wrong on the interpretation of a lot of things.