How to repair module manager or reappoint installed modules?

[Roger Wilco]

Hey everyone, I'm hoping someone has some expertise in the game files here. Searching around online I can't find any post that have solved this problem w/o redownloading the entire game.

This is honestly a lesson in using a mod manager. I had installed to scripts manually for custom missions and some other mods files. After botching the install I attempted to remove the files and instead install them through the OVGME.

I deleted the scripts folder. Deleted the custom aricraft and etc files.

I thought I would do this and simply clean then repair my install and everything would be hunky-dory. Well that didn't happen. Suddenly even after a clean, repair, and clean again, the game gave an error on boot, "dcs-manifest.bin error please repair game"

I deleted the exact file, cleaned, repaired, and cleaned again. This didn't solve the error. What did solve the error was deleting the actual dcs.exe then clean, repair, clean again.

My game was now booting again, but now with another issue. None of my modules are appearing.

The modules and files for them are still in my drive, but the game is not picking them up. Going into the module manager it wants to install all of my payware again. However, clicking ok and install the game quits to desktop and never starts the downloader/updater. Clean, repair, clean is not solving this issue.

I'm trying to avoid redownloading the game again. ED's downloader utility only gives me a dismal 1 MB/s max and redownloading the entire game takes literal days for me on stand-alone.

Does anyone know how to point the game to my installed modules or at least get the module manager to actually download and reappointment whatever files are missing?

[Tippis]

The first suspect in all of this, and especially if your problems arose out of manually installing mods, is the fact that DCS has two separate directory structures that you need to be aware of and keep track of.

 

One is the install directory, the other is your local user directory (the one in %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\DCS or %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta). It is quite likely that your problem resides in the latter, but you're trying to “fix” the former. Nothing that has been done in or through the local user directory can or will ever be fixed through repairs or reinstalls, because those only affect your install directory. On top of this, in most circumstances, mods should be installed in the local user directory — there are exceptions, such altering the behaviour of airplane devices (like the F-5 RWR fix, or sound mods), or adding map data (kneeboards, extra beacons and the like). This means that mods can break the game in ways that no reinstall will ever fix; you have to remove the mod from the local user directory instead.

 

The upshot of this is that such errors are usually easy to identify and fix. Simply temporarily rename your local user directory (change it from “Saved Games\DCS” to “Saved Games\DCS Temp” or something) and see if this changes anything. If it does, you can move the old files and directory back in place, one by one, until you accidentally move something back that breaks everything again… and then you can just delete that offending file or directory. Doing it this ways also means that you temporarily lose things like all your binds and user missions, but again if you just move the whole thing, you can just move it back in place afterwards and everything gets restored.

 

As such, you don't really need to use a mod manager for anything that goes into the local user files, only for stuff that affects the base install. And very little should. The problem is that this separation, and the way these directories are structured, have changed over time and older mods will incorrectly state how and where they should be installed.

 

 

As for your current issue, those modules should indeed be pretty much auto-detected, and it sounds an awful lot like DCS has gotten confused about what's installed where. This could conceivably be cause by something getting screwed up in your local config files, so the notion of temporarily moving that directory and seeing what happens still holds. You might also want to try using something like SkateZilla's DCS Updater GUI utility to see if you can get the installer to run properly and realise that all the files are already in place. It can even be used to force install/uninstall specific modules without going through the mod manager, so you can test it on something that's relatively small to see if you can get some traction without a full re-download.

 

But again, the first step in these kinds of screwed-up install issues is to give DCS a set of completely clean local config files by moving (and I keep emphasising that you should just move them — not delete) your existing ones out of the way, since this can solve a shockingly large number of issues.