The Patch ignores my CFG file!

[krtaylor]

I run TTD on several computers, and today I upgraded some of the older ones to most current TTDXC and Patch. On one of them, everything changed fine, just the way I expected it to. On the other, it appears to be ignoring the ttdpatch.cfg file! TTDXC reads it just fine, and makes the changes, and the newgrfs work OK too; but as far as I can tell, the Patch is doing just defaults. The screen res won't change; the train loading won't change (I use sequential loading) and so on.

It won't even display verbose mode when I turn that parameter on! That's how I knew for sure something was badly messed up.

Is there some parameter you have to have in the file to tell it where it is? I vaguely remember something like that but can't find it in the wiki.

Yes, I manually ran mkpttxt.exe (although TTDXC should have automatically done it), and I deleted the OVL file.

The game plays fine, it just doesn't do what I want it to. Frustrating.

[Prof. Frink]

At a guess, TTDXC might not be saving the .cfg file with the right filename. (+/- W maybe?)

[krtaylor]

OK now, something truly bizarre is going on.

First, let me make some facts clear:

1. I know for sure that I am in fact playing the Windows version of TTD. It has GameGFX.exe, and has the "Are you sure you want to exit to Windows?" messages in it. So no confusion with the DOS version.

2. I think that I'm using the Windows version of the Patch, simply because the name of the file is ttdpatchw.exe (Not totally sure though as I discuss below.)

Anyway. I looked in the TTD directory and found, sure enough, a ttdpatch.cfg file. It was dated 1997, which is odd because I didn't even have this particular computer then. So I deleted it. There was also a ttdpatchw.cfg file, which had all my correct switches, and was in fact the one TTDSC was correctly using.

Then I ran TTD. No difference, my switches were ignored again. I quit, and looked back in the directory. Amazement! There's a ttdpatch.cfg file, this time dated today! I looked in it, and sure enough, all the switch settings were pretty much the defaults.

I can't imagine how this could be, except if somehow I had the DOS version of ttdpatch under the wrong name. But if that were the case, how could it be using the Windows version of the game? And it does somewhat work, because the new vehicle sets run OK (Windows version of all of those, too.) And anyway, this is Windows 2000, the DOS version isn't supposed to work at all there.

I cannot recall hearing of this happening, can you?

But now I look in my main TTD computer (which is working fine), and I see that it doesn't have ttdpatchw.cfg at all - it's just ttdpatch.cfg. Is this the way it's supposed to be, regardless of whether you're using Windows or DOS version? I don't remember ever changing it.

I suppose I'll delete the ttdpatch.cfg file, change the ttdpatchw.cfg file to not have the "w", tell TTDXC its new name, and see if that fixes it. I suspect it will. But I don't have any idea why. This is very strange.

[krtaylor]

Well, I did like I said I would do, and sure enough, it fixed everything. Huh.

One other oddity, one of my installations has a ttdpatch.grf file in the directory (not the newgrfs directory, the main TTD directory.) Any idea what that's for? It must not be essential, since none of my other computers have it.

[Patchman]

TTDPatch never looks at ttdpatchw.cfg (unless you explicitly force it to with the -C command line switch). So for some reason TTDXC was writing to ttdpatchw.cfg, but TTDPatch was using the old ttdpatch.cfg file, and remaking that file when you deleted it.

[Andrex]

If you accidentally rename a DOS version into ttdpatchw.exe, TTDXC will keep showing "TTDPatch x.x.x alpha x (DOS) detected". But it would probably display the Windows icon, because TTDXC is based on the file's name to determine if it's windows or DOS version.

Anyway it also checks for the TTD executable to ensure you are using both WIN (or DOS) patch and game versions together, otherwise reporting messages will popup.

[krtaylor]

OK, so ttdpatchw.cfg is spurious and not what you're supposed to use. Problem solved.