ErikH2000
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I'm working on finding this horrible bug today. I'm going to try reproducing by trying out some of the hunches other people had.

If you have ever seen this bug where all text in DROD goes missing, I would really appreciate any info you have that can be used to reproduce it. We can't release DROD with this bug, so it is very important to fix it.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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ErikH2000
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Really, I mean it. I could really use help figuring this stupid thing out. I will happily listen to any ideas you have!

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

ErikH2000
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Here is a collection all in one place of what people have said so far related to this bug:

***Oneiromancer/Build40/Windows XP Home Edition***

Well, here is another screwed up thing...I just restarted DROD, and for some reason every subscreen had blank buttons, and no holds or levels listed in the menus. When I quit, there was no text in the popup window. Reinstalling restored the functionality.

I haven't yet been able to reproduce this with my new install. The old drod.err file just has three bytes: TTT. Sorry I don't know what's going on. All I was doing was checking out rooms for giving out hints, and checking out the help files, and copying and pasting rooms in the editor, etc. I've tried to redo everything I did before this happened, but I can't figure it out. Sorry.

***TScott/Build32***

I installed DROD build 32 (full install) and imported my player and a few holds. While playing Quath's "Temple of Kurath" I was called away from the computer, I left DROD on the title screen.

I came back to find a demo for a room called 'Testing Grounds: One West' (I think that was it) playing. This is a room that I've never seen before and I don't have any holds by this name. It has queens on right, goblins on the left, 2 brains and a yellow door/broken wall checkerboard pattern in the middle. Anyone recognize the room?

Anyway, this was the only demo playing (the original ones were nowhere to be found) and I wondered if it had something to do with the hold I was currently playing. So I swithched to a different hold, and now no demos were playing from the title screen at all.

I then exited DROD but found the usual exit window was now blank- NO text at all in it. Clicking where "Yes" used to be exited the game. Now going back into DROD I'm faced with another completely blank window, with blank buttons below. Turns out it's the choose player screen (I've got two names set up). Other screens like the "where" screen are now also blank, and in game the room discriptions all only have a colon (":") instead of the usual names. I've restarted my computer, and the same thing happens.

I don't know if the strange Demo has anything to do with the text problem, but I thought I mention them both as they both are very odd. Also, it now occurs to me that I had four demos from my own hold checked to play at the title screen in build 31 before I exported my player- could this have something to do with what happened?

***Eytanz/Build40/XP Professional***

I don't know if this is still relevant after the changes to build 41, but I was playing build 40, and exited DROD normally (at least to all appearances) - no crash, no visible errors - and when I restarted the text was all gone.

I don't remember doing anything unusual before exiting DROD.

(after asking for more details)

As far as I can remember, I imported and played TScott's demo of the last room in level 2 of Mike's hold "Dugan's Dungeon Revisited" (the demo is attached to the last message in this hold's thread in the architecture forum), stopped the playback after some 20 moves (since I was just looking for a hint, not a solution), then solved the room myself in several tries.

Note, now that I think of it, that the room involves many queens and a cursory inspection of post dates indicates that the demo may have been posted before the queens' change, so that there may have been some incompatibility I was unaware off because I didn't run the demo for long enough.

(I wanted to try to reproduce this but then I realized that I no longer have access to the room in question since I lost my player to the text bug, and it's too tough a dungeon to just play through quickly again).

Also, in a totally different direction - I multi-task quite a bit while playing DROD and use ALT-TAB to shift back and forth - and inevitably ALT-TAB gets all screwed up and stops working and I have to close all the other windows except DROD in order to play it. This isn't a serious bug, and it's been reported several times before, so I didn't want to bother you about it before the release, but it may have something to do with the text bug as well.

Running on XP professional, by the way.

***BillBuckner/Build40***

I quit DROD in the middle of a room. Shorty after I came back to it. The main menu buttons were fine, but when I pressed "Continue" I noticed that It didn't tell me what room I was in. I then noticed that EVERY button had no label.

***Mister***

(When asked about what happened before the bug occurred)

Nothing in particular, just playing/editing/whatever. With or without crashing. The only thing I think triggers the bug is using lots of big/heavy/bloated programs/games before starting DROD. Yesterday I used many programs and a game that consumes many resources, about 10 hours without rebooting, all this before starting DROD. Could it be something about low system resources? But after the bug, I started MS Office, BitTorrent, and Diablo II; all went smoothly so I'm out of clues

To anyone hunting this bug: make a backup of DROD's dat files everytime you are about to start the game. If the bug manifests, see if you can trigger it again with the backup after a reboot. I'm trying to do this, but always forget about it

***MRimer***
(Reported seeing the bug.)

I notice some possible connection between Eytan crashing on TScott's demo and TScott crashing himself, so I think I will go find that demo next and mess around with it.

I haven't seen any reports of the behavior in build 41, which has a fix that may help. Has anyone seen the bug in build 41?

Did anyone lose the text *WITHOUT* qutting DROD first? This looks like one thing that all the reports have in common. If so, I may concentrate on reviewing the exit code.\\

Finally, if someone has brought DROD to its textless state, and you see no text when you start DROD, could you please attach your text.dat file to this thread? I want to verify that the text.dat is corrupted. Mike/Schik if you have already done this, please let me know.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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StuartK
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 564
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I've not personally witnessed this bug, so I'll just ponder (OK, maybe babble, since I'm straying into non-expert areas here) out loud...


Have you looked at post corruptions .dats? Are they just totally destroyed, or is there some information you can work back from? Is the data totally bogus, slightly askew, or what?

Is the problem occuring only under a particular OS? Are there any characteristic usage patterns among those who suffer? e.g. known to install everything that Windows Update throws at them, known to use large complicated applications extensively, or whatever. Would .dlls (and versions) in memory at the time of the crash, programs running alongside DROD be of assistance? Iarsn Taskinfo, and probably a number of other utilities (MS Sysinfo) can give some fairly comprehensive output, which you can copy to clipboard, then crosscheck to hopefully find some commonality.

Is it a memory allocation problem? Do people who have less physical RAM see this problem sooner than those who don't?

Is it a hardware problem? Have people tested their PCs to determine if there are any data corruption problems occuring outside of DROD, or noticed anything untoward? Some motherboards are more prone to problems than others (ABIT KG7-RAID is one I've had some traumatic personal issues with, though no longer) then there's the overclocking thing, faulty memory modules, etc.

Are people all upgrading from a particular version of DROD (1.5, previous build, a 'clean' .player file from when they completed Dugan first time with 1.6?)

Is it a subtle corruption problem, which only displays itself over time? ie the corruption occurs, everything seems OK, until Whammo!

Would nested backups help in diagnosing this problem? If you don't want to implement this internally in DROD, then if DROD could be executed from the DOS prompt, it would be easy enough to set up a batch file to back up the .dats (however many layers of backups necessary) every time it runs. Then, when the corruption happens, we have some backups to work from, and potential causes to eliminate or home in on.


How about logs of all keypressed and mouse moves, from when DROD first begins? If you have backups, you can then determine if the problem is internal to DROD.

ErikH2000
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StuartK wrote:
I've not personally witnessed this bug, so I'll just ponder (OK, maybe babble, since I'm straying into non-expert areas here) out loud...

There are so many possible factors (those that you listed and others) that we need to pursue the ones most likely to isolate the problem first. There isn't enough time to examine everything. And I can only expect a certain amount of help from our sturdy band of volunteers. So I asked some questions at the end of the last post that I considered were the most important for the moment. I didn't want to ask thirty questions, because people aren't likely to answer them all, and I want to respect people's time by concentrating on the best questions first. (Well, I hope they were the best questions.)

I liked some of your ideas. One of my requests from the previous message was for a post-corruption text.dat. I may create a diagnostic build that generates more information about what is going on. But I need some more insights so that I can narrow down what code needs to be looked at.

-Erik


____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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Schik
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ErikH2000 wrote:
Mike/Schik if you have already done this, please let me know.

I have not done that, or seen this bug or any data files associated with it.

I will drop other drod-related activities for a while and spend my drod time trying to reproduce this or inspect some code.

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

ErikH2000
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I reread TScott's above report more closely and noticed that he was seeing missing text before he had completely exited DROD. So I retract my question about that.

Has anyone seeing the missing text behavior in build 41?

If someone has brought DROD to its textless state, (i.e. you see no text when you start DROD) could you please attach your text.dat file to this thread?

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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Tscott
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I haven't seen this since build 32, but thought I should maybe clarify a couple things. Ignore everything I posted about strange demos in my bug report- that turns out to be normal behavor, I just didn't understand it at the time.

Also the demo Eytanz downloaded of mine definitely was made before the roach queen rule change, so it is no longer a valid solution (but should still be viewable up until Beethro dies).

Also, I've been testing DROD out on a Win98 machine. I noticed it wasn't mentioned in my original post.

I haven't had a chance at all to test build 41 yet, hopefully tomorrow. I'll put it through the paces and be sure to try to view that demo among other things.

[Edited by Tscott on 09-08-2003 at 05:42 AM]

____________________________
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its bearings on Cair Paravel. O my love, O it was a funny little thing to be the ones to've seen.
-Joanna Newsom "Bridges and Balloons"

ErikH2000
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Schik wrote:
I will drop other drod-related activities for a while and spend my drod time trying to reproduce this or inspect some code.

Thanks, man! I really appreciate the help. In my head this is the most important thing to work on, since it is holding up the AE release. I worked on getting a repro today, but no such luck. I'm going to sleep on it and see if I have any fresh ideas tomorrow.

-Erik


____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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Tscott wrote:
I haven't seen this since build 32, but thought I should maybe clarify a couple things. Ignore everything I posted about strange demos in my bug report- that turns out to be normal behavor, I just didn't understand it at the time.

Sure. I was concentrating on reproing the empty text bug, and I ran the demo today under different circumstances and didn't turn anything up.

I haven't had a chance at all to test build 41 yet, hopefully tomorrow. I'll put it through the paces and be sure to try to view that demo among other things.

Great! Some testing help would be wonderful.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

StuartK
Level: Smitemaster

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File: drodstart.bat (228 bytes)
Downloaded 47 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

StuartK wrote:
Would nested backups help in diagnosing this problem? If you don't want to implement this internally in DROD, then if DROD could be executed from the DOS prompt, it would be easy enough to set up a batch file to back up the .dats (however many layers of backups necessary) every time it runs. Then, when the corruption happens, we have some backups to work from, and potential causes to eliminate or home in on.

Would you believe? DROD can be started from a command prompt now. I didn't see anything about it in the fix lists (so this could have been fixed for a while) but thanks anyway, whoever did it


For those who want to make a backup of all their .dats every time they launch DROD (either because they're testing, or because they're worried about losing data) the following text, saved as a batch file, drodstart.bat , in the main DROD directory, will do the job

cd data
del *.bk10
ren *.bk09 *.bk10
ren *.bk08 *.bk09
ren *.bk07 *.bk08
ren *.bk06 *.bk07
ren *.bk05 *.bk06
ren *.bk04 *.bk05
ren *.bk03 *.bk04
ren *.bk02 *.bk03
ren *.bk01 *.bk02
copy *.dat *.bk01
cd ..
start drod

You'll have to set up a shortcut to the batch file. When doing so, additionally ensure that you edit the shortcut properties so that the 'Start in' location points to your DROD folder, or the batch file won't work.

[Edited by StuartK on 09-08-2003 at 04:53 PM]

Oneiromancer
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File: text.dat (442.8 KB)
Downloaded 305 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

Erik: here is my text.dat from my build 40 folder that got corrupted.

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

ErikH2000
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Oneiromancer wrote:
Erik: here is my text.dat from my build 40 folder that got corrupted.

Thanks, O. This has been useful!

For Mike and Schik:

The file is, in fact, corrupted. Also I can tell that it's corrupted at the Metakit-format level. We didn't just write incorrect data to it. A general-purpose Metakit viewer fails to read it.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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StuartK wrote:
Would you believe? DROD can be started from a command prompt now. I didn't see anything about it in the fix lists (so this could have been fixed for a while) but thanks anyway, whoever did it

Yeah, this got fixed while someone (was it Mike or Matt?) was working on another bug.

For those who want to make a backup of all their .dats every time they launch DROD (either because they're testing, or because they're worried about losing data) the following text, saved as a batch file, drodstart.bat , in the main DROD directory, will do the job

Sounds good. Thanks!

-Erik


____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5058
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Reporting in...

Yeah, I've tested out a lot of people's .dat files throughout the various builds and every time the text's missing or DROD will no longer start for someone it has always been because the file is broken, i.e. the Metakit tables are no longer valid. This is not caused by just the wrong values being written to records in the file, extra records or missing records. It is because the file itself has been incorrectly saved to disk. The text is no longer there when the text.dat file specifically has been corrupted. The others are often still intact, and have no suspect values in them anywhere on examination.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2794
Registered: 02-04-2003
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I had a thought about alt-tabbing. This might be making memory usage go up, which jibes with another person's experience of having problems while large apps open at the same time as DROD. I'm going to see if I can find a stress tool and reproduce the problem that way.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Oneiromancer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2936
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I had a random thought--kind of like a hunch. It seems to me that in Windows XP, the Explorer crashes a hell of a lot more often than in previous Windows versions, but even so XP is able to recover from these crashes so it isn't a big deal. When this happens for me, all of the icons on my desktop disappear, and the screen flashes, and when everything comes back any folders I had open are closed but the programs are still open. It seems to happen most often when I am surfing the web. Right now I am just leaving DROD open while I am going about my daily business, and we shall see if I get corrupted again. I am also curious what happens when my screen saver comes on, since I have to put a password in to get back on the computer...perhaps that screws something up with DROD also.

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

ErikH2000
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Oneiromancer wrote:
I had a random thought--kind of like a hunch.

Yeah, I'm interested what you come up with.

My memory testing didn't help much. I wrote a program that grabs an arbitrary amount of memory to create low-memory conditions. The problem is that with virtual memory, I have several hundred megabytes of memory available. It made me realize how hard it is to create a state where memory allocations inside of an application will fail.

But it seems possible that some of the people who were reporting problems while other apps were running might have low virtual memory. So a few questions for those people:

* Have you recently seen messages from Windows about being low on virtual memory? (Either with DROD running or without)
* Did you ever manually configure your virtual memory settings and if so, in what way?
* Is your available hard disk space under 100mb?

All hunches and vague notions will be listened to.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Oneiromancer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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File: Neil2.player (121.9 KB)
Downloaded 53 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

Heh, well, the one time I left the computer for long enough to have the screen saver kick in, it didn't...I'm not quite sure why. I think it's because I was trying to download very large demos of Devil Whiskey (remake of Bard's Tale) and Warlords IV (turn-based strategy) . And of course Explorer hasn't crashed the entire time either, so I haven't been able to repeat the text loss yet. Of course, there is always the possibility that it has been fixed in build 41...but I guess it's not likely, eh? Perhaps a good thing would be for DROD to have a backup folder where it is continuously exporting players and holds in case of crashes like this. It should be noted when the text loss happens, the buttons still work, so I was able to just open up build 41, note the button placement, and export my player file from the text-loss build 40.

**Here I found another bug: if you import a player with the same name to your current game, it always brings up the select player dialog when you start DROD, even though there is only one name to choose from.**

Anyway, once I changed my name in "Settings", and exported the player file again, it said that it was corrupted when I tried to import it to build 41. So maybe you can figure something out from that, and it is attached to this post. But to answer your other questions...

ErikH2000 wrote:
* Have you recently seen messages from Windows about being low on virtual memory? (Either with DROD running or without)

Nope, never.

* Did you ever manually configure your virtual memory settings and if so, in what way?

Yes: I have 512 MB of RAM (came with 256 MB, added 256 MB more when I bought it, have often wondered if the memory is bad just because I like to throw blame around), and so I set the paging file minimum and maximum to 512 MB. I read that normally you would set it to 1.5 times the RAM you have, until you have a large amount of RAM (like over 256 MB) and then just set it to the actual amount of RAM. So that's what I did.

* Is your available hard disk space under 100mb?

Definitely not, and I try to defrag once a month.

All hunches and vague notions will be listened to.

Heh heh heh...

Game on,

[Edited by Oneiromancer on 09-10-2003 at 02:02 AM GMT: Forgot to add .player file]

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

Zmann
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Oneiromancer wrote:
I had a random thought--kind of like a hunch. It seems to me that in Windows XP, the Explorer crashes a hell of a lot more often than in previous Windows versions, but even so XP is able to recover from these crashes so it isn't a big deal.

Yup, happens to me too. I feel special now.

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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I'm not sure if the text-loss bug is still in build 41 or not. But so far nobody has reported the bug in 41. It is possible that we fixed it, but I'm skeptical. Has anyone seen the bug in build 41?

We might continue to build 42 assuming it has been fixed.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Oneiromancer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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I was trying all sorts of stuff today--while playing through Korgath's hold I had to access my lab's server a couple times, and Explorer kind of crashed each time, but no text loss. When closing DROD down it took a few seconds, so I thought I might have initiated the text loss, but no luck. I was perversely wondering if the fact that it asks me who I am every single time I start the game up (even though there is only one name there--see the Build 41 thread) was neutralizing the bug. But yeah, I still can't reproduce the bug...

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

ErikH2000
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Oneiromancer wrote:
I was trying all sorts of stuff today--

Hey O, I really appreciate all the testing. We are moving on to build 42. Maybe we will find the text-loss bug there, but I hope not.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

mrimer
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Oneiromancer wrote:
I was perversely wondering if the fact that it asks me who I am every single time I start the game up (even though there is only one name there--see the Build 41 thread) was neutralizing the bug.

Woah, I never heard about this. Can you post or email me your three .dats? It should never ask who you are if there's only one player to choose from.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

Oneiromancer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2936
Registered: 03-29-2003
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File: Datfiles.zip (438.2 KB)
Downloaded 50 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

Ooops, it was actually earlier in this thread, sorry, I forgot...but I still said it, so your fault for not seeing it! So, look up a few posts for an explanation of what happened.

Anyway, I attached the .dat files (and the .err file) to this post as a zip file, so enjoy!

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

mrimer
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No, you definitely have two players, not one. But (erm, ahem) the second one has no name... (We'd probably better fix that.) Click on the slot *below* your player name in the list to verify that there is indeed a second one there. You can delete it, and then you won't have to choose your player any more on startup. But this *is* a bug/feature: if you go to the Settings screen and erase your player name, then you end up with a player without a name. I think we should make it so that you can't OK out of the Settings screen when the player name field is empty. (And we should have a message explaining why you can't leave when you try to push OK.) But this is pretty low priority, so we might not get to it for this release unless any really juicy bugs are found to serve up at the Roasted Roach Grill.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5058
Registered: 02-04-2003
IP: Logged

I added a check to the settings screen to not allow erasing your player name. It'll be in the next build.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

Oneiromancer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2936
Registered: 03-29-2003
IP: Logged

Here's some more stuff I did with regards to the missing text bug (hopefully this was fixed and is a moot point).

1. I exported my player from the build that has the text missing. The .player file showed up, so I assume it worked correctly.

2. I installed a new copy of Build 42.

3. When running the new copy, I didn't let it import my old data. Instead, I imported the .player file from the missing text build. It imported successfully, but it didn't have me as having solved Dugan's. It also didn't have a name associated with it at all, although I was able to enter this in the Settings screen. Everything else worked fine though.

Then I went back to my old build (build 40, by the way). I was in the hold that I had created for the smoke test, so I went to "Where" to switch to Dugan's. It was easy to tell which one was Dugan's because there was still a (*) there to tell me that I had solved the hold. Perhaps this is strange, perhaps not. I went to a room that had a scroll in it. I noticed that the top of the screen, where it shows the room name, just had the symbols " : . ". The scroll was blank, as expected. I switched back to the hold I was building, and created a scroll. I was able to input text on it. After placing it, I tried to playtest the room. Crash to desktop. I went back into the game. I had to select the old hold again. The room hadn't been saved, so I created a new scroll. Then I tried to exit the builder so it would save the room. Another crash to desktop. The "stderr.txt" file reads, "Fatal signal: Segmentation Fault (SDL Parachute Deployed)". Back in the game again, selecting the new hold again, I noticed that there is some text on the Build screen: "25, 2003" in the little box that says when the hold was created. Those numbers were pushed all the way to the left of the box. I then tried to put a scroll in the room that Beethro wasn't in, just in case, but no go. I went back in again, and tried to create a new level. Crash after accepting the title and description. Finally, I went back in and edited Dugan's dungeon. I clicked on a scroll there and got another crash. Always the same error text, by the way. Then I ran out of ideas.

Perhaps this was all pointless, and related to the fact that the text.dat file is corrupted and can't be written to. I would have thought that scroll text would be kept in .hold files...except I guess that those aren't created until you export. Hmm. So, I doubt that I discovered anything new, except possibly that error message.

Game on,

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"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

ClaytonW
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 961
Registered: 02-04-2003
IP: Logged

Hey, the missing text bug is still there in build 45. I just got nailed 10 minutes ago. Windows ME. The only thing I can think of that I was doing unusual was a lot of undoing and redoing. Although there weren't any problems last night when I quit. I opened DROD just now and it's all gone.

eytanz
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2708
Registered: 02-05-2003
IP: Logged

Since there's a chance that by the time any dev people see this it'd be too late: I think you should upload your corrupt data files here; they might help them find the bug.

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I got my avatar back! Yay!