TL;DR: Update mod manually + get the masks DLC!


With several people taking up modding textures for the weapons, a few months ago I decided to check out what it took to add new assets to the game. The main inspiration being the masks added (well, modified) by Project Platinum. By far the easiest way to do this is to simply add bundles and allow the game to find them. My first proof of concept includes the Project Platinum masks and a selection of PD2 masks that come in a set of four. I've ported them to PAYDAY: The Heist and added code to use them in game, without replacing other content. Of course this is only visible to others with the same assets, so I needed to "spoof" the masks: people without the assets would see something like the clowns mask set. Moreover, to prevent any licensing issues you need to have PD2 in your library to use those masks.

You can find the masks in the downloads section in this group's discussion boards: https://steamproxy.net/groups/dahm4pd/discussions/3/5358712989065799879/

Now the tool isn't available as it needs a lot of improvement to be functional. I needed a lot of manual work and even updating the bundle database isn't automatic. If I would release it now, it would take too much of my time answering people's questions about it for not knowing how to use it. I do still intend to release it as it would be awesome to see more community content, but it really depends on how much time I have to work on it.

For a very long time I've hosted my content on Dropbox. Their service is free, supports automating many things, is well known and easy to use by just about anyone. Unfortunately they've made some changes and one resulted in a bug in combination with the WinHTTP library I use(d) to communicate with it. If either Dropbox or Microsoft solves the issue on their side everything would work fine again, but since they haven't done so as of writing this, I'm forced to include this message. If you're using an older version of DAHM you most likely won't be receiving information about new updates. To prevent these issues in the future, I've added a secondary host that's hosted by someone in the community. So if one of these services goes down or has issues (and indicates that it does), it'll try the other one. At the same time I've switched to OpenSSL by default. This option has been available for a long time, but I never needed to give it much attention.

Long story short, download the update manually from here: https://steamproxy.net/groups/dahm4pd/discussions/3/

In the 1.4 update of the mod I also fixed some minor issues in the injector, specifically in the event server that hardly anyone uses. This is all minor stuff so it normally wouldn't be causing any issues. Unfortunately, in this case it did cause issues because something went wrong with the compilation (converting the code to a binary file you can use). It only affected the zip extraction, so I didn't even notice until I got reports that players could not update their mod and in some cases even had their the mod completely disabled.

So if this affected you, you'll have to repeat the same steps when you initially installed the mod: extract the latest version to the game folder.

This will not replace any of your customizations, unless you changed the lua files provided by the mods directly, but you shouldn't do that.

First of all: Happy New Year. But that's not why I'm making this announcement.

Most of the people that use the DAHM mod framework for PAYDAY: The Heist will be on version 1.10. This was the latest version before today and it has been for nearly a year. I've had an update ready to address some of the issues that version has for quite some time, but there's a serious issue with this version of the mod that breaks the update functionality, or at least the DLL file that comes with it (version 24). It was compiled with the wrong flags and this broke the (zip) file extraction functionality. So in other words: if you try to update the game, it will crash. A few months ago I already updated the zip to include a newer version of the injector, so you may not be affected. If you have 1.10 (+25), then you can use the internal updater. Otherwise, it needs some manual work.

Nothing really happens if the game crashes (well other than the game closing itself), so you can either use the internal updater to download the files -- which will be placed in the updates folder next to the games executable -- or you can go to the forums and download the update manually. That's it. Hopefully I won't break it in the future.

TL;DR: Update the mod manually if the version shown at the bottom is 1.10 (+24) or lower. Use auto updater otherwise.

Having a dedicated Discord server never really was a priority for this group. People that needed help usually found me hanging around on another server affiliated with the game and its users and used that as feedback for this mod and related topics, but situations have changed, forcing me to take action myself.

While Steam has undergone some changes over the past years and its chat now more resembles Discord, group chats still remain rather limited. I therefore prefer to use Discord to chat with a larger number of users instead of using this groups chat or adding everyone to my friends list. Of course these forums remain operational and (most) questions will continue to be answered there, but the focus will be more on the Discord server. Which by the way is set up to be a bit of a general server with a focus on the first PAYDAY game.

The server does not require membership of this group or anything like that to participate. However, some channels are only available to to users that can identify themselves with a Steam account to avoid situations where users claim to be someone they are not. The main topic on the server is supposed to be a Steam game after all. I'm still looking into improving this part, so any feedback is appreciated.

And yes, I know this is yet another server and I would've preferred to have the already small community for this game remain in a single place. Unfortunately there's no official server from OVERKILL™ so we have to improvise for this game. Feel free to join and talk your passion for this game, mod or whatever your heart desires. As long as I don't have to censor it. ;)

https://discord.gg/MdzXvtD

Today, October 20th (in the CEST timezone) marks the 7th anniversary of the release of PAYDAY: The Heist on PC. The game is getting old, but imo there still isn't anything to replace it.

But that's not the reason I'm posting this announcement. In fact I don't like posting announcements, but sometimes I have to do it to reach (some of) the users. So what happened? With the release of version 1.6 of the DAHM mod, the mod updater was rewritten to update the support for modworkshop and paydaymods. That all worked fine(ish) in most cases, but it broke automated checks for the main DAHM framework and the bundled mods. I released an update to it two days ago, but nobody got the notification for it in game... And since the in-game announcements are also in that file, posting the announcement there isn't an option either. So I seriously messed it up.

Manually checking for updates does work and it'll notify you of a new version. To do that, click the update notification box or go to options -> mods -> mod manager and check for updates there) or manually extract the zip file. The new release doesn't really have new features, but it does have lots of fixes and makes it easier for third party mods to hook into functions.

I don't expect to release another update unless something needs fixing.

TL;DR: I can't code and I broke the auto updater in the past. Now you have to check for updates manually or extract the new zip like in a fresh install. See the downloads section for that.