Tahnan
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2460
Registered: 11-14-2005
IP: Logged

File: drod-cockup.jpg (25.3 KB)
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OK. Apologies for the tone of this message, but I'm really, really annoyed right now. I know that DROD is a labor of love and a huge project, but the bugs and the subsequent bugfixes have been so godawful terrible that I'm slowly starting to hate the game, and I really don't want to do that.

Here's what happened: having installed the 3.0.2 r2 patch, I got tired of not being able to export a hold with speech. (As I noted elsewhere, I already lost significant work in this hold by deleting an NPC by accident, and then being unable to import his speech from the backup I'd exported.)

So I saved all of the scripts with speech in them manually, exported the hold, uninstalled DROD, and reinstalled DROD 3.0 from scratch. Imported my player file, imported my hold.

The upshot:

* Just clicking on a room with scripting in it--not even opening it for editing, just selecting it in the main screen of the editor--produces 1,223 identical errors in drod.err:

Assertion error in line 2230 of .\Character.cpp: "eCommand < CCharacterCommand::CC_Count"

along with, of course, 1,223 error beeps. (That was pleasant.) That could be something like one error per line of scripting in that room.

* Every line of scripting in the hold seems to be gone. Or perhaps invisible? Clicking on a character with scripting--which is, let me tell you, no fun, given the number of error beeps I have to go through just to get to one--suggests that the lines of script are "there" in some sense. For instance, see the attached image: even though nothing displays (and, I should note, nothing runs--I think it's producing Assertion error in line 1604 of .\Character.cpp: "!"Bad CCharacter command"" when it does, though there are so many errors in the drod.err at this point that I'm not sure what produced what), you can see that I can select the "commands". That particular character, which I know to have had a seven-line script, has seven of those empty script lines.

The upshot? From where I'm sitting, it looks like I just lost--if the count I get from the number of lines in drod.err is correct--about 18,000 lines of scripting. You can see, perhaps, why I'm a little bit annoyed by this.

Is there a solution? Or am I going to have to recreate 18,000 [censored] lines of scripting from memory?

Stefan
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2119
Registered: 05-25-2004
IP: Logged

Tahnan wrote:
Is there a solution? Or am I going to have to recreate 18,000 [censored] lines of scripting from memory?

Holds exported from 3.0.2 are incompatible with 3.0.0. If you just keep the .hold file until 3.0.2 is more stable, and then re-import it (to 3.0.2), your scripts should re-appear.

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0.099³

Briareos
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 3516
Registered: 08-07-2005
IP: Logged

Tahnan wrote:
Is there a solution? Or am I going to have to recreate 18,000 [censored] lines of scripting from memory?

AFAIK Mike actually changed the way scripts are stored in the 3.0.2 patches to be more efficient, so those hold files aren't compatible with 3.0.0 anymore.

You still should be able to import your hold in another installation of 3.0.2 *or later*, though.

Maybe install DROD, edit the datapath.txt to just contain ".\Data;.\Data" (i.e. replace the installation path with ".\Data"), make the file read-only (so it can't get overwritten accidentally) and copy the directory and patch one of the two copies. Now use that one to build your hold, and the other one for CaravelNet and just playing the game.

You'll also need to edit the "Start in:" textbox in any shortcuts you have to TCB to choose which of the two copies to start, but that way you can at least use both patch levels at almost the same time.

np: Radical Face - The Strangest Things (Ghost)

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

Tahnan
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2460
Registered: 11-14-2005
IP: Logged

Crap. Well, OK, so I've re-installed the 3.0.2 patch and sure enough my hold is back (minus, predictably, all my speech).

Of course, I'm still more than a little irritated. The inability to export a hold from 3.0.2 if it has speech in it has effectively stalled any beta-testing I could have on this hold.