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Bundler Tutorial


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CrazySnyper's Bundler Tutorial

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Thanks to Scubaman3d who helped me figure some of this stuff out, and created Task Force: Wraith, a way cool mod which was the first one I successfully bundled

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Included with patch 1.16 is a tool called bundler.exe

Until GRIN or a fellow modder releases a front end this program can only be run from the command prompt.

To use the bundler, go to start>all programs>accessories and click on 'Command Prompt'.

A black window will open up. At the top you will see information regarding your version of windows. Below this you will see something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\[your name]>

with a cursor following it. Before you can use the bundler you need to navigate to the folder it is stored in. This is done using the 'change directory' (I think thats what it stands for?) command; 'cd'. The bundler resides in GRAW root\tools, so assuming you installed to the default location you would type in the following:

cd C:\Program Files\Ubisoft\Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter\tools

then press enter. You should now see

C:\Program Files\Ubisoft\Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter\tools>

with a cursor after it.

For starters lets just see what the bundler can do. This is done using the '-h' option, so type in

bundler -h

The following screen should appear:

bundler.jpg

As you can see the bundler has five primary functions:

1. Compile Scripts (I assume these are .dsf files, but since I dont have any of those I havent been able to test this)

2. Compile XMLs to .xml.bin

3. Merge 'Load Files', whatever those are

4. Bundle, though this would seem to require a 'file log', which I havent bothered to look into yet

5. Quick Bundle. This is the easiest option for bundling mods at this point, and the one I am going to focus on.

To view more information on any of these options you can type in

bundler [command] -h

where command is the option from the -h screen that you wish to use.

Now before we get into the good stuff, a quick word about the bundler. It can't seem to deal with file names that have spaces in them, so the mod you are playing with compiling can't go in the default GRAW location (note the spaces in 'program files' and 'Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter') nor can it go on your desktop (which resides within 'Documents and Settings') or your 'My Documents' (which has a space itself and resides in 'Documents and Settings' also).

For this reason, and to limit the amount of typing necessary I found it easiest to work directly on my C drive.

Ok now for the good stuff. Lets say you are working on a mod, but you havent tested it yet, all you have is the uncompiled .xmls. The first thing you are going to want to do is compile the xmls (feel free to skip this if you already let the game compile them for you).

This could hardly be simpler.

When working with the bundler you want the directory your mod is in to conain the 'Data' folder, and inside the data folder should look like the GRAW data folder after you extract quick.bundle.

So lets say I am working on 'MyMod' (no space of course). I put MyMod directly on C drive so it looks like this:

C:\MyMod\Data

and inside there are all the data folders.

Now to compile those .xmls, all I have to do is type in:

bundler -vvb compile-xml C:\MyMod

Note that I used that '-vvb' option, which isnt listed on the -h screen. This option (as we know thanks to GRIN_viktor) tells the bundler to give very verbose output (which looks cool, and proves that its working) and I think tells it to break on error.

You can replace that 'C:\MyMod' with whatever you want, again provided there are no spaces. For this I could have gone the extra step of specifying C:\MyMod\Data if I had wanted to, but since Data is the only thing in the folder I just save myself the need to type those five extra letters this way :D

Now its time to bundle the mod. All of the bundles (the original, the patch, and custom levels) contain the Data folder within the bundle, so lets try to emulate that. To do this, when it comes time to specify a directory you need to point to the folder that holds the Data folder, not to Data itself.

So to bundle MyMod, now I just type in

bundler -vvb quick-bundle -r C:\MyMod -D mymod.bundle

Again we use the '-vvb' option, so you should see a bunch of stuff come up on the screen. Depending on the size of your mod it could take a while.

Once its done, just open up the tools folder (same one that has the bundler), and there you should find mymod.bundle and mymod.bundle.log (maybe this is the 'log', or at least the format used for the regular bundle function?).

Anyway, hope that helps someone. Again, I am leaving town tomorrow morning and wont be back for a week and a half otherwise I would do it myself, but hopefully someone can use this info to write up a nice little front end for the bunder, to make it all more user friendly and a little less tedious.

Edited by insane snyper
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Thanks again insane, thats a great tutorial.

One thing stands out in my mind...the script compiling option. Nemon wrote a script decompiler but I don't think he wrote a compiler. That would be great if the bundlerer.exe could be used for this purpose.

This might open up a breakthrough in sharing script mods...well, at least until GRIN gives us more tools.

I wonder if Nemon can comment on this.

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I know Nemon has some way of making scripts compile, because he posted video of some cool work he did with 3rd person.

I think, like with the xml compiling, that the game compiles .dsf scripts when you launch it (probably one of those context.xml compile options). This just provides a way to compile them without running the game.

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Regarding spaces in filenames, the bundler tool does handle them but they need to be enclosed in quotes:

bundler quick-bundle -r "c:\my directory with spaces"

yeah, I ran into this problem...every time I had a multi word directory, it wouldn't bundle so I just stuck with single words.

Thanks for the tip.

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  • 7 years later...

Found this forum much later than I wanted. However, I tried the little tutorial here. All it does is open & suddenly close on me. My system is a laptop. Sys. Specs are:

1. HP M6-1035dx laptop

2.AMD A10-4600M VISION APU @2.30Ghz

3. 6GB of DDR3 1333 1.35v RAM

4.Win 7 SP1 64-bit OS

5. 640GB hard drive

Would anyone with an idea on my problem Please Speak up... ANY help will be greatly appreciated!!!

PLEASE NOTE: TC's GRAW HAS PATCH v1.35 INSTALLED

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