House
Level: Goblin
Rank Points: 17
Registered: 07-06-2007
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Not sure what is happening here... hopefully I'm just confused and somebody will say "just do [this]" and everything will be back to normal.

Purchased DROD 3.0 and KDD 2.0 a month ago and immediately registered my free Caravelnet trial key. Last time I played was 3 nights ago and everything was dandy. I believe my caravelnet expired yesterday. I fire up the game today and the game asks me to enter a name for my profile or click Import if one already exists on disk. That starts to freak me out. I click on Import and, using the in-game browser, search my drive for .player files which is what the screen tells me to do. (I'm on MacOSX by the way). I look in both \Users\[me]\Library\Application Support\Caravel\drod-3_0 and \Users\[me]\Library\Application Support\Caravel\drod-kdd-2_0 and no files show up that I can import. Spotlight also tells me there are no .player files on my drive at all.

I cancelled out of the program. I'm too scared to just type in a name again because I don't want to overwrite anything. I'm halfway through KDD2.0 so I'm going to be upset if I lost my progress.

Thanks for any help.

mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5058
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House wrote:
Not sure what is happening here... hopefully I'm just confused and somebody will say "just do [this]" and everything will be back to normal.

Purchased DROD 3.0 and KDD 2.0 a month ago and immediately registered my free Caravelnet trial key. Last time I played was 3 nights ago and everything was dandy. I believe my caravelnet expired yesterday. I fire up the game today and the game asks me to enter a name for my profile or click Import if one already exists on disk. That starts to freak me out. I click on Import and, using the in-game browser, search my drive for .player files which is what the screen tells me to do. (I'm on MacOSX by the way). I look in both \Users\[me]\Library\Application Support\Caravel\drod-3_0 and \Users\[me]\Library\Application Support\Caravel\drod-kdd-2_0 and no files show up that I can import. Spotlight also tells me there are no .player files on my drive at all.

I cancelled out of the program. I'm too scared to just type in a name again because I don't want to overwrite anything. I'm halfway through KDD2.0 so I'm going to be upset if I lost my progress.

That's freaky. I can't give ready advice on what to do to find your player progress, but I can say that this issue has nothing to do with your CaravelNet subscription or user account being active or not.

____________________________
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.

House
Level: Goblin
Rank Points: 17
Registered: 07-06-2007
IP: Logged

Ok, there are gremlins on my machine...

So firstly, yes I just got an email saying Caravelnet doesn't expire until tomorrow. There is no correlation there.

I just spent some time running "find" in the terminal to hunt down all files and directories on my machine that may have got modified in the past 3 days. Two files "drod.ini" and "player.dat" did get hit last time I played. Nothing else got moved and nothing is in my trash. Since those two files seem to be intact, I tried again to start up DROD and now it seems to work. My profile is back in and my progress is right where I should be. (It also started up in windowed mode which is what was set in my preferences, unlike this afternoon when it started in full screen asking me for a player name.)

Now...

1.) Is there anyway this afternoon the game could have hiccupped and decided there was no player profile existing when there was? Because I am convinced that there is nothing I did to cause the problem or solve the problem just now. Has anything like this happened to anyone else on any OS?

2.) I was, in fact, confused about one part and that was the game told me it was looking for "*.player" files and I have a "player.dat" file on my machine. Is that the right format?

mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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House wrote:
2.) I was, in fact, confused about one part and that was the game told me it was looking for "*.player" files and I have a "player.dat" file on my machine. Is that the right format?

No, all the *.dat files are used by the game and shouldn't be modified or swapped around to different game releases (unless you really know what you're doing).

The .player files are files that you explicitly make yourself. These files may be loaded into concurrent+later DROD releases. If you go to the Select Player screen from the main menu, you'll see the "Export" option. Click that to save a "house.player" file to disk. This file will contain your progress, so if you ever lose your installation, you may import this file on startup to retrieve your progress. I'd recommend generating this file now before anything else bad happens.

____________________________
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.

Kwakstur
Level: Smiter

Rank Points: 385
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Shouldn't Player files be automatically exported, say, every time you close out of DROD? We can never anticipate such a problem happening, so why must the thing that's there to save us not be automatic?

I would forget to export my player file, even if I knew something would happen. So I'm not prepared for an accident.

____________________________
Also known as ExpHP everywhere else.

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[Last edited by Kwakstur at 08-05-2007 06:14 AM]

NiroZ
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Kwakstur wrote:
Shouldn't Player files be automatically exported, say, every time you close out of DROD? We can never anticipate such a problem happening, so why must the thing that's there to save us not be automatic?

If you're prepared to wait for 1-5 minutes after closing DROD, sure.

mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5058
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I don't follow your argument. That's like saying your OS should back up your hard drive to another drive each time you turn off your computer because a hard drive might die any day. It's a feasible option to set up in general, but the point is that if something outside of the system in question is in control, then there's nothing foolproof you can perform within the system to protect it.

____________________________
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.

ChrisB
Level: Delver

Rank Points: 58
Registered: 05-23-2005
IP: Logged

File: drod.err (152.3 KB)
Downloaded 48 times.
License: Public Domain

I have had a similar problem today. Purchase of JTRH & TCB plkus Caravel subscription. Played all OK yesterday & closed machine down - today I could not get any of the levels/holds up. When exiting the game I got an extra button that asked me if I wanted to buy the product.

I have reinstalled and since lost all of my history - i.e. thousands of rooms. I have tried copying the old .dat files but then get the purchase button again.

Any ideas???

P.s. I have now attached the error file from the original Data folder.

Chris

____________________________
If the pen is mightier than the sword, why does Beethro not use a pen??
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it's no match for an AK47!!

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[Last edited by ChrisB at 08-05-2007 06:01 PM]

Briareos
Level: Smitemaster

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ChrisB wrote:
Any ideas???

Were you running the demo before? Maybe you managed to start the demo executable (through an old link, for example) but using the new data files, which I'm sure would confuse the demo executable to no end...

np: Hexstatic - TLC (When Robots Go Bad!)

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

silver
Level: Smitemaster
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Registered: 01-18-2005
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automagic backing up of data isn't always good - because it might back up corrupt data over your good backup. you generally prefer to backup yourself when you're sure the data is good.


____________________________

jamie
Level: Smiter
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Aren't the executables the same for both the demo and the full game anyway ?

But yeah, it does seem related: it seems, Chris, like you've mixed 'demo' data files with 'full game' data files, which is a definite no-no.

*** FIRST LOG IN SESSION 8/5/07 11:32AM ***
Assertion error in line 813 of C:\Caravel\DROD17\DROD\RestoreScreen.cpp: "this->pRoomWidget->LoadFromCurrentGame(this->pCurrentRestoreGame)"
Assertion error in line 112 of C:\Caravel\DROD17\FrontEndLib\BitmapManager.cpp: "this->TileImageTypes[wTileImageNo] != TIT_Unspecified"
Assertion error in line 112 of C:\Caravel\DROD17\FrontEndLib\BitmapManager.cpp: "this->TileImageTypes[wTileImageNo] != TIT_Unspecified"
Assertion error in line 112 of C:\Caravel\DROD17\FrontEndLib\BitmapManager.cpp: "this->TileImageTypes[wTileImageNo] != TIT_Unspecified"
Assertion error in line 112 of C:\Caravel\DROD17\FrontEndLib\BitmapManager.cpp: "this->TileImageTypes[wTileImageNo] != TIT_Unspecified"

Nope, nothing to do with not specifying your tit but this assertion is where DROD updates the room data to reflect your current game progress. I'd bet a million nothings that this is due to the mis-synced data files.

It looks to me like for some reason, when you played today, you got into the demo version. You then reinstalled the full version, waving goodbye to your progress in the process. You then copied over one of the dat files from the demo version, causing this issue. Unless you can find you proper original dat files, I think you're stuck (though wait until someone else clarifies the situation)

____________________________
#f3i2g# Disclaimer: I'm Welsh, left-handed, and stupid. #f3i2g#

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[Last edited by jamie at 08-05-2007 11:41 PM]

ChrisB
Level: Delver

Rank Points: 58
Registered: 05-23-2005
IP: Logged

Yes well it really did go TITs up. However, thankfully, I did think to take a backup copy of the Data folder & managed to export a player profile.

I can now carry on as if nothing had happened - once I download all the trillions of holds again.

Maybe a lesson to all DROD players - make regular exports of your player profiles.

Thanks for all comments

Chris

____________________________
If the pen is mightier than the sword, why does Beethro not use a pen??
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it's no match for an AK47!!

coppro
Level: Smitemaster
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Registered: 11-24-2005
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Personally, I have cron take a daily backup of my data files... I figure that if I do something stupid to them, I'll know right away and be able to recover before cron decides to write over them again.

Syntax
Level: Smitemaster
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coppro wrote:
Personally, I have cron take a daily backup of my data files... I figure that if I do something stupid to them, I'll know right away and be able to recover before cron decides to write over them again.

Or you could cron a rolling day backup by prepending the yyyymmdd.
I know you know about that but thought I'd mention it to others who might not have thought about that and who're running a non-MS OS.

I only run XP at the moment so miss that ability.

Briareos
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Syntax wrote:
I only run XP at the moment so miss that ability.

Ummm... cygwin + zsh? In conjunction with at command that's built into Windows? Or the Task Scheduler?

Wouldn't want to work on a machine where there's no zsh...

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

Syntax
Level: Smitemaster
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Could do that I guess Just refuse to use Cygwin... I just need to get me a Linux box instead.