Chimera not working on Windows 1.8.0?

[Pheener]

Just really quickly, because brevity is not my strong suit:

I was happy to discover that I could play Myth and Myth 2 on Windows, and even had my old Mac CDs from back in the day. After I finally finished Myth 2 for the first time, I sorta wanted to keep going, so I dug up Chimera on The Tain. The 1.8.0 site says it works with Chimera, or at least that the detail pack has textures for it, but no matter where I put "Chimera Single-Player" and "Chimera Multi-player", it doesn't pop up in the game.

Other mods, like Wild West and Green Berets seem to work, but I know they've needed some specific work over the years to get to that point. Is Chimera not currently supported, or is it some funky Windows issue? Thanks!

[akula65]

See this thread:

http://tain.totalcodex.net/forum/viewto ... f=4&t=5659

[Pheener]

Those are some great general tips for a complete newbie, but I've already gotten several other plugins running by just plopping them into the plugins folder, and that's literally the only info that post provides other than describing a "plugin" button that doesn't seem to exist in Myth 2 1.8.0.

Whether you are playing single player or multiplayer, there is a Plugins button where you can enable the plugins of your choice.

I imagine he means the window where you choose the campaign? There's the "Tagsets" button, of course, which opens the "plugins" window, but it just shows the Green Berets tagset for me.

So let me be even clearer. After finishing TFL and Soulblighter, and playing around with other functional mods like Green Berets, Doom, and Wild West, I treated the Chimera installation the same way:
The zip has a cutscenes file, and two files with no extensions that seem to (obviously) be plugin files and not tags. If I place these in "cutscenes" and "plugins", literally nothing changes in my game. I've even tried sticking them in tags, but obviously that doesn't work.

If this seems really out of the ordinary, I'm happy to provide screenshots or logs or whatever.

[akula65]

If I put the "cutscenes" folder into the Myth II folder and both the 'Chimera Multiplayer' and 'Chimera Single-player' files into the "plugins" folder, when I select New Game in the main menu, I see both Myth II: Soulblighter and Chimera Single-player in the Campaign list. If I click on Chimera Single-player, the Level list shows the following:

The Healer
The Warrior
The Mage
The Archer
The Messenger
The Baron
The Chimera
The Fiend

So the single-player levels show up just fine without any tagset manipulation. This is on a Windows 7 SP1 32-bit machine with Myth II Version 1.8.0 Build 427b and no DTX pack. I take it you don't see this, correct?

[Pheener]

Yeah, I don't have those listed at all.

In fact, I went ahead and uninstalled my copy of Myth II, to reinstall it with the patch and start fresh, since these issues seem really out of the ordinary, and found that Windows 10 just refuses to reinstall it. The cd installation program always worked fine with some tweaking, but now it always cancels out at the very end, throwing up a non-bypassable error that says that my version of DirectX is incompatible (sounds like Windows 10 to me). If I ctrl-alt-delete the setup program, all the installed files are removed. Wonky.

For what it's worth, I had 1.7.0 on my machine from Windows 7, which I patched to 1.8.0 after upgrading to Windows 10, which is how I was playing this happily until I uninstalled it. Before going through all of this, I compressed my whole installation folder, so I have a backup, but this is obviously an issue with my installation/computer/Win10 and not 1.8.0/Chimera, so that's interesting.

Edit: To clarify, this is actually on Win10 64-bit, Nvidia 970, 16GB ram, etc. Myth II 1.8.0 Build 427b, with the DTX pack.

Edit2: Aaaaaaaaaaand extracting my .rar of the previous installation has miraculously made everything (with Chimera, at least) work. I have no idea what I did wrong, but... okay! Thanks for the help.

[akula65]

Glad to hear it.

It's possible you just needed to restart Myth II after putting the Chimera components in place, and by performing the reinstall, you effectively did just that.

[Pyro]

... a "plugin" button that doesn't seem to exist in Myth 2 1.8.0.

Correct. That button used to be the method of choosing plugins before v1.8.0. Now you just choose the mapset/campaign which would be the plugin you wish to play from that bottom list. For tagsets (a type of Myth plugin that typically replaces units and other non-map related objects and variables), you of course click on the "Tagsets" button to find and activate them.

For future reference, you shouldn't need to reinstall Myth to fix issues related to specific plugins. There are preferences files you could delete or move to a different folder to effectively make Myth2 act like freshly installed. These files are stored in the "preferences" folder as well as the "plugin cache" file stored in the "tags" folder.

Curious issue with the installation issue you had. Maybe the CD was scratch? Anyways, if you happen to run into other issues with Myth2 on Windows 10 (or any other operating system), please do post about it in the tech support section so the devs can make a note of looking into it for future updates.