Zch
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 503
Registered: 05-15-2007
IP: Logged

Me and Kallor are building hold titled Gigantic Jewel Lost and have found some weird behavior on the editor.

Sometimes stairs lose their destination entrance, and turn to end hold -stairs.

Sometimes special characters lose information about the monster they are, custom graphics they use etc. Once one of our special characters even turned into an adder (can't remember exactly how this worked, probably the name of the character was adder when reading the dialog by double clickin the portrait).

Once one of our scrolls was empty, which should be impossible we think.

Most of the custom graphics in our hold doubled at some point (when selecting custom graphic the dialog window shows every piece twice except for the few that were added after this happened). We tried to remove the duplicates, but they reappeared soon after.

As we were not trying to test, we do not really have any information about the situations these problems arose.

Our hold is pretty big, and complex and was originally several smaller holds, thus some levels are copied from other holds. These copied levels contained custom grahics and scripting.

At one point our hold was working fine (except for the duplicate custom graphics) and we mastered it and put it to the Architecture board for testing. We fixed unintended solutions as they came by (no big changes, just minor fixes to some rooms and scripts). After some time Dischorran reached level titled Molten Core, and found out that both staircases were end hold. As we had mastered the hold before submitting it for testing, this can only be because of some bug in the editor.

Kwakstur
Level: Smiter

Rank Points: 385
Registered: 05-05-2006
IP: Logged

The End Hold bug happens all the time in big holds. It's been there since the AE days, and still nobody knows why it occurs. But it happens to everybody, so watch out.
Whenever you are about to export a new version of a hold, you always have to check all your staircases again. Turn on Highlight Errors when you check; TCB highlights End Hold staircases in orange to help you find them.

Your other issues are less common, but Copying and Pasting levels between holds is the most likely cause. DROD is always screwing up copy pasta jobs, especially big stuff like that. Some effects are immediate (I remember when I copied a level that some scrolls blanked, and most staircases broke (probably because different hold = different entrances)). Some others take a while to happen (and those are usually the freaky bugs like your NPC that became an Adder ). I think those are caused by some junk data created by copying levels.

If you want to avoid more errors randomly popping up in those copied levels, you could back up your .dats (except drod3_0.dat) and then try exporting and reimporting the hold. Open DROD and delete the hold from your Hold Management list before you import it.
This might make a few bugs go away, but it could also make some stuff worse (although that stuff was probably going to get worse at some point anyways).

But even if you manage to get those strange bugs to stop happening, you still always have to check for End Hold staircases. Like I said, that bug happens all the time.


The double images is probably because the holds you copied from and to both had the images. Something you can try: Pick an image to fix and make a list of every room using it. Change all of the rooms to another image. Once there are no longer any rooms using either copy of that image, delete both copies from the image list. If they don't come back on their own this time, you can import the image again and fix the rooms you changed.

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Also known as ExpHP everywhere else.

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[Last edited by Kwakstur at 04-15-2009 10:23 PM]