[Bug]: Some DLL mods can't find their ini file due to hardcoded paths

[jn64]

What happened?

Some native DLL mods have additional files like .ini for config. E.g. Pause the game for ER includes PauseTheGame.dll and PauseTheGame/pause_keybinds.ini. The ini is used to set the keys for pausing/unpausing.

There doesn't seem to be a way to tell me3 to include the ini and make it available to a specific [[native]], so the mod always has default settings.

It works as expected with a different mod loader (Elden Mod Loader).

Minimum example:

profileVersion = "v1"

[[supports]]
game = "eldenring"

[[natives]]
path = "natives/PauseTheGame.dll"

Files:

ELDEN RING/Game/modengine3
├── bin
│   ├── me3
│   └── win64
│       ├── me3-launcher.exe
│       └── me3_mod_host.dll
├── mods
├── natives
│   ├── PauseTheGame
│   │   └── pause_keybinds.ini
│   └── PauseTheGame.dll
├── profile1.toml
└── launch-eldenring-mods.sh

Version

v0.6.1 (Latest)

What operating system are you seeing this problem on?

Linux

Relevant log output

[garyttierney]

This is a problem with those mods rather than anything special Elden Mod Loader/me3 has to do. See e.g: https://github.com/techiew/EldenRingMods/blob/master/ModUtils.h#L102.

These DLLs mods expect the ini files to be inside the Game folder in a path structured as mods/<modName>/<iniFile>. It appears to be working fine Elden Mod Loader because it's loading them in the same folder structure as they're hardcoded to load configuration from.

[jn64]

I see, thanks. Moving the file to ELDEN RING/Game/mods/PauseTheGame/pause_keybinds.ini works.

[garyttierney]

Thinking about it we will give mods a way to lookup config from the profile, maybe something like

[[natives]]
path="test.dll"
[[natives.config]]
int-value = 1
array-value = ["abc", "123"]

[[natives]]
path="1"
[[natives.config]]
my_option = "2"

# OR new WIP profile format version
[mods.my-mod]
path = "test.dll"

[mods.my-mod.config]
int-value = 1
array-value = ["abc", "123"]

But unfortunately there's not much we can do to support these specific DLLs without a bunch of mod specific hacks upstream.

[Zakaarus]

Just found this issue as I'm working on a pull request to fix it for FreeLockOnCamera. FWIW, ModUtils.h, which seems to be a popular library, is fairly trivial to fix. The function, GetModFolderPath() already finds the path of the .dll then does extra string manipulation. Simply removing these later steps (except removing the file extension at the end) gives you the path you need. There are a few side effects like going from a relative path format to an absolute one, but it really does seem to line up in every case I've tested it for.

I'd make a pull request for it but I'm kinda scared to mess with a bigger project like that that's explicitly for Mod Loader and not even for me2/3 anyway. (So I'm starting with changing the implementation in a smaller project)