Long War installer for Mac

This script is intended to install the Long War mod for Firaxis' XCom: Enemy Within game on OS/X. It basically automates the manual process laid out in this forum post.

This script is still in active development, so while I welcome pull requests, please check with me first.

Note that this only works with the Steam version of Enemy Unknown, and you must have the Enemy Within expansion.

Installation for the impatient

Note! This is currently beta-quality software. You may want to back up your installation directory before you try it. If something goes wrong, enable phoning home, pull up the game's properties in Steam, and choose "Verify Integrity of Game Cache." (This will probably re-download the entire game.)

• Launch the game once and quit
• Download the OS/X Long War installer .dmg file and mount it
• In a terminal, change to the mounted disk image

cd /Volumes/Long-War-Mac-Installer

• Install the mod:

./LongWarInstaller.py --install

• Block phoning home by modifying /etc/hosts:

sudo ./LongWarInstaller.py --phone-home-block

• Disable Steam updates and cloud sync
• Launch the game and enjoy Long War

You can uninstall the mod via ./LongWarInstaller.py --uninstall.

For more information, see the detailed installation instructions.

Usage

For usage information, run LongWarInstaller.py --help. See also the installation instructions.

Known Bugs (in the installer)

• Root level files are installed in XCOMData/XEW instead of at the root

State of the Mod

As I write this in mid-August 2014, users have reported several bugs after applying Long War to their XCom: EW installations on OS/X. I don't know much about modding and probably can't help with these issues; I'm just focused on getting the installer script to work. Please see the official Long War mod forum for help with the mod itself.

Currently the mod crashes to desktop on launch sometimes. There should be a fix for this in the works. I've noticed that having lots of free RAM on launch helps a lot.

There are also some reports of problems with CTDs when upgrading skills.

If you have a problem running the script, please file an issue here.

Etc

For detailed information about XCom modding, please see the excellent Modding Tools page on the Nexus wiki.

See also this Linux installer by wghost.

Big ups to nexusmod user Anderkent, who first figured out how to install Long War on OS/X, and to wghost81 who has forged ahead with the Linux version, and of course to the authors of Long War without whom none of this would be possible.

For future plans, see TODO.md

Creating distributions

This script can create installer distributions suitable for emailing to the Long War mods for upload to the official site. To create one, use the --dist option and one or more files to use as a base - these can be .zip files, or .exe files if you have innoextract installed (brew install innoextract).

Each of the files will be extracted in turn to one directory, so the order is important (later files overwrite earlier ones). After that, the script itself plus docs/README.html are copied into the directory and a disk image is created. Some metadata gets written into the README file on the disk image, see the source for details.