Slicers GUI Installation

Slicers GUI's Installation of Terror.

Downloading and installing the Slicers GUI tool is a bit scary an experience, because in this computer security-conscious world we live in it means watching a few intimidating security warning screens popping up which we can't evade because the only way to avoid them is paying: the security certificates Microsoft and others provide to validate apps as coming from a known developer are just too expensive for us.

So, we'll walk through the process to show what comes up in that regard.

As with the rest of our tools, the Slicers GUI is available at this repository in our GitHub:

Inside it, we see the usual repository page containing the tool's source code and a description. Instead of downloading that code, we need to use the link in the description, that leads to an installer file hosted by Google Drive (it's too big to be hosted by GitHub, so…):

To download that installer file, we right-click on it and a menu will appear with a download option:

First scare: Google warns us that the file is too big for them to do an antivirus pass. We proceed anyway.

The download of this tool's latest versions weights around 450 MB (Slicers GUI is an Electron-type app, the likes of the popular Discord. Those contain whole internet browsers inside to facilitate web-style programming, which makes them rather big. Add to that that the tool provides now with background music!). Once done, there we have our installer (obviously, the version number will vary with each new release):

We double-click on it aaaaand…

Okay, that feels a little ominous, and leaves us apparently stuck, with no options to go on. Well, they are hidden under that link. If we click on it…

…We'll get a means to go on with the installation anyway:

NOTE ON ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE: if you use an antivirus such as, say, Avast or Microsoft's Windows Defender (the one built in Windows 10), and notice that some of the steps already described or the next ones don't work, check if the antivirus has quarantined some element of the app and, if so, have it OK it back into place. They seem to be extra paranoid with the app's extraction.exe element, classifying it as Ransomware.

Now we'll see a fancy animation for a few seconds (the installer takes a little while) and then an initial setup screen appears. Before filling it in, we need to consider a few things.

Setting up.

SWTOR stores its assets in an "Assets" folder that contains a series of rather big .tor files with fairly descriptive names. Sadly, we have no means to easily and quickly find and extract individual files from inside a .tor file. The only practical way to work is to select the ones that are relevant to what we want to do (assemble a player character, assemble a location of the game, extract the game music and sound effects, etc.), extract everything from them, and keep the results around.

And that's the issue: the results, depending on what we want, could fill up to 70-ish GigaBytes of storage space! For the Player Character stuff we are going to need about 32 GB., which still is a lot, especially in this era of affordable laptops that top out at 256 GB. If we are very constrained, we might have to consider using a secondary hard disk drive, or external storage (a big USB thumbdrive, a external HD or SSD enclosure, etc.)

So, knowing that, let's see what the installer is asking us for (it shows tooltips if we hover over the labels and fields, by the way):

• The Resources Folder:

  The very first thing it's asking us is a location where to place the app's own files: preferences of several types (in human-readable format, by the way), the all-important hashes_filename.txt (the file containing the list of known, identified game assets, that we typically update as the game does), etc.

  IMPORTANT: the installer won't create a folder where to put its stuff, so we better do it ourselves. If we pointed it to the Desktop we'd find those files spread among whatever was already there. So, we create one ourselves, naming it, for example, "Slicers GUI Resources", plain "Slicers GUI", whatever, putting it wherever we want: for example, on the aforementioned Desktop.

  IMPORTANT: we won't be able to change this folder's location without uninstalling (through Windows' Preferences Panel's apps options) and reinstalling. The app doesn't have an option to change it after installation.

• The Assets Folder:

  The second thing it asks us is the location of SWTOR's "Assets" folder. If we used swtor.com's installer to install the game, it typically is at:

  C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic\Assets

  If we installed the game through Steam, the default location is:

  C:\Program Files (86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Star Wars – The Old Republic\Assets

  This setting can be changed afterwards (for example, to point at the assets of a SWTOR's Public Test Server download).

• The Output Folder.

  It asks us where the result of our extracting and converting activities (those big assets extractions, sound and 3D file conversions, etc.) will be placed. As explained, for assembling Player Characters we'll need around 40-50 GBs., but if we intend to grow beyond that the worst case scenario (extracting just everything) means almost 100 GBs., and then we might want to have some extra spare space for additional stuff (for example, for batch-conversions of some of those assets to other formats). Still, we can begin with those 32 GB. and move and expand them around later on.

  This setting can be changed afterwards, so that the results of the extraction can be moved around if needed.

  IMPORTANT: don't select the same folder used to hold the app's own files (the Resources Folder). The reason is that, so far, the only way we have to update the app is by uninstalling an old version and installing a new one, and the process deletes that folder. If we put everything in there, an update would mean losing the extracted assets and we would have to extract them again.

  IMPORTANT: Also, don't select the root of the boot partition (say, C:\my_output_folder). For some reason, Slicers GUI's game assets extractions fail if the destination folder is in the boot partition's root. This problem doesn't affect the root of other partitions or drives. We are investigating the issue, and as soon as we solve it we'll announce it, because that location would be a very convenient one otherwise.

  External drives are perfectly valid destinations: adequately sized thumbdrives, external drive enclosures, NAS, remote drives…

  Regarding our Desktop and Document folders, and cloud services such as OneDrive: the Desktop and Documents folders are very typical catch-all places for things we want to have at hand, and are perfectly valid locations for the results of our extractions. But if we happen to use cloud storage services such as Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, DropBox and the like, those folders might be set to be automatically synchronized with those services (if our Windows user account is a Microsoft account instead of a local one, we'll see that the Desktop and Documents folders are OneDrive subfolders!).

  We might want such syncing to happen, actually, in which case all is well. But we might not, for example, if we have a metered internet connection: a big assets extraction copied to OneDrive could make us reach our monthly internet limit very quickly.

  Usually, we can set exclusions so that specific folders or files aren't copied, but maybe it's better to just make sure that the Slicers GUI's output folder is set somewhere we are sure isn't being synced. For example, directly inside C:\Users\my_user_name\; or, if we have a second partition or drive, we can put it anywhere inside D:\.

• The Install Language.

  This refers to the language we run SWTOR in: English, French, or German. It happens that SWTOR downloads its language-related game assets (user interface, all text, voiceovers) only in the one we chose in the installer, and won't download any other language versions unless we dig in the game launcher's preferences to choose them. That was causing us problems in the past (greying out the Extraction Presets menu). With this option we can match what the game has and save us trouble.

  It can be changed later, from the app's Settings (the sprocket button near the top right corner).

After we have selected the locations and options for everything, the installer will put what it needs in the app folder we selected, and place an app shortcut on the desktop.

On finishing, the installer will launch the app for us.

As we can see, it's an all-in-one kind of affair, with a few features already working and others pending implementation. It shows the setup directories that we are allowed to change, as aforementioned, plus another that is meant to point to game character folders exported by TORCommunity.com's Character Designer or by its database's 3D viewer.

Updating the hash file.

When we selected a Resources Folder to work as a preferences folder for this app, the installer created inside it a hash subfolder, in which it placed a hashes_filename.txt file. This file has a list of known game assets' IDs and the names to save them as files with. As the last version of Slicers GUI is a few years old, the included one is quite out of date.

To get the very latest one, go to Jedipedia's File Names page: it keeps track of the latest additions to the list of known game assets. There are links to download the ones combining the most recently released Game Update of SWTOR with those of the Public Test Servers ("Live"). There's also the ones from the game's betas before its original release ("Beta"), and all combined ("All").

Just choose the "All" one, drop the file inside the hash subfolder, and let it overwrite the existing file there.