CuriousShyRabbit
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I'm trying to delete a hold (the beta version of Jatopian's Inferno) from Change Location in DROD 3.0.0, and it won't let me! Instead, DROD crashes, I see a "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Error!" box, and the following line appears in drod.err:

Assertion error in line 1117 of .\DbBase.cpp: "message != messageIndex.end()"

I'm not sure what has gone wrong here. I know it doesn't happen to everyone. The runtime error does not occur when I delete a hold that I created myself. If anyone knows a workaround, such as how to manually edit a hold out of the .dat files, I would surely appreciate it. This problem is preventing me from loading updated versions of Jatopian's hold.

Jatopian
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Heh. When I read the thread title I thought "Oh no, am I losing a tester?" You should be able to import the current version over the old one, though.

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CuriousShyRabbit
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Actually, that's what I tried first, and it results in the exact same crash.

Tahnan
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I'm getting the same problem. I get the runtime error immediately when I try to download the new version of Jatopian's Inferno. I can delete the hold, but when I do, I get the runtime error when I quit DROD, and it's back in my list when I re-open DROD. (I can delete other holds.) In all cases, I get the same assertion error as CSR in my drod.err.

For the sake of completeness, I get the same behavior whether I do the deleting from "change locations" or from managing holds within the editor; and when I download the hold via the link at the top of the beta board and then import it from the file.

Jatopian
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Ugh. I'm beginning to think I've accidentally introduced some sort of bad juju into this hold. It's generated, what, 6 bug reports? It's crashed my computer twice now. And it might well run into copyright problems. Maybe I've accidentally constructed the black sigil Odegra, maybe it's the wrath of the shade of Dante and/or Ciardi and/or W.W.Norton&Co. I don't know.
*sigh* I'll see if I get the error when I can access DROD again tomorrow. I'll also try re-exporting & see whether that helps. Sorry, testers.
...Now that I think about it, jemann didn't get this error. Hmm.

____________________________
DROD has some really great music.
Make your pressure plates 3.0 style!
DROD architecture idea generator

CuriousShyRabbit
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I think the error is in the hold Jatopian attached here:
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=16008

From what I read, jemann did not download that version of the hold. He tried a slightly earlier version. (Correct?)

Since I already downloaded the apparently corrupted hold, I'm stuck. If anyone knows how to manually delete it from the .dat files, I would very much appreciate the help. Please?

Jatopian
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File: Jatopians Inferno.hold (40.9 KB)
Downloaded 41 times.
License: Public Domain

...Well, I import fine, FWIW. Here's the re-export, even though the problem seems to lie with an earlier version.
*hopes mrimer will come work some good juju soon*

____________________________
DROD has some really great music.
Make your pressure plates 3.0 style!
DROD architecture idea generator

---

[Last edited by Jatopian at 06-12-2007 11:31 PM]

Tahnan
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Nope, that crashed me.

CuriousShyRabbit
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Tahnan, it's the hold that we already imported that's causing the problem. I've been looking at my player.dat with a text editor and see that Jatopian's hold somehow inserted all its speech and poetry into the list of demo titles in player.dat. Comparing to the TCB part of my file, I see it wasn't supposed to do that. I've tried deleting the extra text, but then DROD doesn't recognize the file as a player file anymore. So, still stuck...

Tahnan
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Whoa. That might explain why the backup of my 3.0.2 installation has a 12KB player.dat file, whereas the 3.0.0 installation (with Jatopian's Inferno) is 21,000 KB. (It also seems to contain a lot of text from the Featured Element contest, and other holds I've played recently.) Plus a whole lot of ASCII gibberish.

Hey, if we posted our player.dat files here, could someone de-corrupt them?

jemann
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CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
I think the error is in the hold Jatopian attached here:
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=16008

From what I read, jemann did not download that version of the hold. He tried a slightly earlier version. (Correct?)

Who with the what now? Sorry, wasn't reading this thread. I tried every version, I think (even when Jatopian said there was a new one and there wasn't - rrr). Sometimes I deleted the old version first, sometimes I didn't. No issues so far. This has been on a machine running the TCB demo, rather than the full version. Lemme just go check...
Yep, successfully deleted the latest version from a full TCB install (3.0.0). I laugh at your bad juju.

Jatopian
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jemann wrote:

You mean when I posted it in Architecture & not the new beta board? I'm sorry.

CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
Tahnan, it's the hold that we already imported that's causing the problem. I've been looking at my player.dat with a text editor and see that Jatopian's hold somehow inserted all its speech and poetry into the list of demo titles in player.dat. Comparing to the TCB part of my file, I see it wasn't supposed to do that.

Uh-oh. I bet this is somehow related to this.
I'm sorry, everyone.

____________________________
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Make your pressure plates 3.0 style!
DROD architecture idea generator

schep
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In a way, this is good news. All these strange problems about data jumping from hold to hold are finally reproducible. I don't have time this weekend to investigate, but unless somebody beats me to it, I plan to use the hold in question to (a) figure out how this sort of thing can go wrong, and possibly (b) figure out whether/how *.dats affected by the problem can be repaired.

CuriousShyRabbit
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Thanks, schep!
Unfortunately, things might not be as easily reproducible as they seemed before. My 3.0 player.dat was not very big, it was only my TCB progress. So I just replayed TCB to replace it. Besides different moves in each victory demo, a major difference between my old player (pre-inferno) and my new player was other people's TCB demos. My old player had imported and watched a bunch of them, while my new player didn't import any demos. Using my new player, I imported, played, and deleted both versions of Jatopian's Inferno without a crash.

I can't even begin to imagine why somebody else's TCB demo would make it so I can't delete one particular hold. I think I'll leave this question to the experts.

schep
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Hmm. I tried importing and deleting all three of the hold files currently in that thread, first in my 3.0.2r2 debug build, then in a backup of my real 3.0.0 install. Both versions have various other demos in the DB. And I didn't come across any problems. Am I using the wrong hold version? Or does anybody have a more specific procedure that produces a problem, preferably starting from a scratch install?

CuriousShyRabbit
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Thanks very much for looking into this. I'm afraid I can't answer your question. Tahnan and I both got the same crash after we played and attempted to delete the architecture board version of this hold. I've been trying to reproduce the crash starting with a new player.dat and haven't been able to yet. I'd be happy to send you my old .dats, if they would be helpful. Or maybe with some guidance from someone who knows what they're doing, I could make better progress at this.

I can reproduce other weird stuff that appears to be wrong with my old "corrupted" player.dat, but I haven't made it crash like it did before. Part of player.dat is a list of "messages", which includes a chronological list of demo titles (for TCB) and hold text plus demo titles (for other holds). I think this is what the line in drod.err referred to? In my old "corrupted" player.dat, this list has become scrambled, out of chronological order, and begins with a message fragment. I can reproduce the scrambling, by (1) starting with a new player that has only played TCB (2) importing and playing some of the Inferno (3) without quitting DROD, hit ESC and Play New Game (4) play a couple rooms over again. This scrambles the message list, sometimes leaving a fragment at the beginning, but doesn't cause a crash when I delete the hold. (There is no message scrambling if I quit and restart DROD before playing a new game.)

I also noticed that deleting a hold never deletes the text from the opening screen of that hold. But again, this doesn't cause a crash.

If it's not other people's demos (the only holds I've played in 3.0 are TCB and the Inferno), I don't know what else it could be. All I know is I've got some .dats with an undeletable hold in them.

schep
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Nah, broken strings inside a binary file aren't always an actual problem. It could be just unused space after things got shuffled around. I can "reproduce" what you described here, but everything still has the correct text in-game. Drat, just when you want things to start breaking....

mrimer
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Yes, the .dats might retain old information in unused portions of the files after records are deleted, similar to how your files often are physically retained on your hard drive after you tell the OS to delete them. This isn't cause for alarm.

____________________________
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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
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I tried importing and deleting the hold version posted here and in the other thread. I didn't have any problems. Maybe the issue has been fixed by now in my 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.

CuriousShyRabbit
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I'm terribly sorry for causing you all so much trouble. As discussed above, I wasn't able to reproduce the problem either, when I started over with new .dats. At the same time, I still can't delete that hold when using my old .dats. (Just now tried again, and it crashed again.) I think the only way to show you the problem, if it is a problem and not just my unlucky day, is to send the .dats in question. Would you like them?

mrimer
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CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
I'm terribly sorry for causing you all so much trouble. As discussed above, I wasn't able to reproduce the problem either, when I started over with new .dats. At the same time, I still can't delete that hold when using my old .dats. (Just now tried again, and it crashed again.) I think the only way to show you the problem, if it is a problem and not just my unlucky day, is to send the .dats in question. Would you like them?

Sure, you may zip/rar them and email them to me or post them here. It would be helpful to reproduce this and see for sure whether it's fixed.

____________________________
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.

---

[Last edited by mrimer at 06-26-2007 05:21 AM]

CuriousShyRabbit
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Here they are.

---

[Last edited by mrimer at 06-26-2007 06:00 AM : got it -- removed attachment]

mrimer
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CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
Here they are.

Thanks. I was able to reproduce a crash that occurred following deleting this hold. I've fixed it.

I also found a potential problem with the 3.0.2 data upgrade process and fixed that too.

____________________________
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.

---

[Last edited by mrimer at 06-26-2007 06:06 AM]

CuriousShyRabbit
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Thanks very much for going to all this trouble!

CuriousShyRabbit
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I apologise for the horrible necro here, but I have a question about the fix for this bug. I now have a couple of other undeletable holds stuck in my .dats. And I know some other people do too...

If I upgrade to 3.1 now, will I finally be able to delete these undeletable holds from my .dats? Or will the fix simply prevent other holds from becoming undeletable?

Briareos
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CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
If I upgrade to 3.1 now, will I finally be able to delete these undeletable holds from my .dats? Or will the fix simply prevent other holds from becoming undeletable?

I think that's quite hard to answer reliably - your best bet would probably be making a backup, upgrading to 3.1 and giving deleting said holds another try...

np: µ-Ziq - Strawberry Fields Hotel (Duntisbourne Abbots Soulmate Devastation Technique)

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CuriousShyRabbit
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I'm so sorry, I think I asked the wrong question. I would like to know what the intended fix was, please.

mrimer
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CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
I'm so sorry, I think I asked the wrong question. I would like to know what the intended fix was, please.

Sorry, I can't follow what fix you're referring to any more. Would you elaborate?

____________________________
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.

---

[Last edited by mrimer at 09-23-2007 06:18 PM]

CuriousShyRabbit
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mrimer wrote:
I was able to reproduce a crash that occurred following deleting this hold. I've fixed it.

I'm sorry for all the confusion. I meant to ask what fix was intended here, when you posted this (6 posts up in this same thread). Is it intended that upgrading to 3.1 will fix my messed up .dat files so that I can finally delete several undeletable holds?

mrimer
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CuriousShyRabbit wrote:

mrimer wrote:
I was able to reproduce a crash that occurred following deleting this hold. I've fixed it.

I'm sorry for all the confusion. I meant to ask what fix was intended here, when you posted this (6 posts up in this same thread). Is it intended that upgrading to 3.1 will fix my messed up .dat files so that I can finally delete several undeletable holds?

Oh, yes, in 3.1 you should be able to delete any holds that caused crashes when deleted under 3.0.

As a side note, it would probably be advantageous to verify sooner rather than later that 3.1 has indeed fixed this problem. If there is still a problem, I could work on getting the fix in the 3.1 patch going out this week. Otherwise, the fix might have to wait for the next future patch, and it's undetermined when that would be at this point (since, heh, there aren't any known bugs to fix at the moment).

____________________________
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.