Building the STEINS;GATE Improvement Patch for Steam

THIS PAGE IS ONLY OF INTEREST TO NERDS and people who'd like to make their own patches for STEINS;GATE (or some other SciADV titles) - and even then, you'll need a nerd to deal with this.

This is a snapshot of our root project for the STEINS;GATE patch, with some assets removed.

It's going to be painful and these instructions may not be complete. As you can see, our build is kind of a mess, and you'll need to extract assets from an already patched game installation. This isn't the release we'd like to have made, but we hope it's better than nothing.

Clone this repository recursively. Some of our internal dependencies are submodules.

Licensing and stuff

• Most of our code is released under liberal open source licenses, check the repositories
• Please do not pirate the game
• If you release a patch, take care to find and change all relevant text to not misrepresent us as the authors of your patch. There is a lot of such text scattered throughout:
  • content/languagebarrier/patchdef.json (please use your own AppData directory too)
  • installer/userdata
  • Hardcoded in the launcher source code at launcher/realboot (note, there's a technical support link pointing to our Discord, please don't keep it that way without asking us first)
  • EXE metadata in terribuild.ps1
  • We probably forgot something

Third-party dependencies included in this repository:

• 7zS2.sfx: Customised 7-Zip SFX module (public domain)
• rcedit-x86.exe: rcedit (MIT)
• xdelta3.exe: xdelta3 version 3.1.1 (Apache 2.0)
• Newtonsoft.Json.dll: Json.NET (MIT)
• DXVK: dxvk (Zlib)

External dependencies

• Visual Studio 2022
• Qt 5.15.2 for Visual Studio 2019
• Libraries for noidget (see installer/noidget/conf.pri.sample)
• DirectX 9 SDK - make sure the DXSDK_DIR environment variable is set to e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft DirectX SDK (June 2010)\
• Python 2.7 - make sure it's in PATH
• 7-Zip - make sure it's in PATH

Building dependencies

• Build sc3tools using the cargo build --release in its subfolder (this also happens during the main build but you'll need it for asset extraction first).
• You do not need to build LanguageBarrier or xdelta3, these are built during the main build and noidget build, respectively.

Preparing assets

• Export edited images to the cc-edited-images subfolder in this repository. Sorry, no convenient way to do this right now - take languagebarrier/c0data.mpk from a patched copy and copy things to the appropriate paths according to c0data_toc.csv.
• Build SciAdv.Net with its build.cmd.
• Extract languagebarrier/enscript.mpk and languagebarrier/enscript_c.mpk with ungelify from SciAdv.Net somewhere.
• Dump patched script text with sc3tools (also from SciAdv.Net): sc3tools.exe extract-text *.scx cc in the extraction folders.
• Copy the output .txt files from enscript.mpk into a cc-scripts subfolder and the output .txt files from enscript_c.mpk into a cc-scripts-consistency subfolder.
• Extract the Steam version's original USRDIR/script.mpk into the script_archive_steam subfolder.
• Copy languagebarrier/audio, languagebarrier/subs and languagebarrier/video to content/languagebarrier

Configuration

• Copy installer/noidget/conf.pri.sample to installer/noidget/conf.pri and adjust for your system.
• Copy config.ps1.sample to config.ps1 and adjust for your system

Actually doing the build

• Run terribuild.ps1
• Get a billion errors
• Cry