Hera's revenge -- corruption

Over the past few long time-periods, I've learned to achieve most of the stuff in Hera that needs achieving. My latest addon, "Infestation", is complete (it involves some pretty cool coding, too -- pick it up if you can get the chance). I've tinkered with dozens of projects, and though none of them were ever actually completed, the experience builds up.

There is one final problem posed by Hera that I have no clue how to solve, however.

In my project, "Human/Cantharan War" (which has been developed, off and on, since 2002), Hera's decided that it really just doesn't like me, and so it's taken to putting a bunch of "untitled" objects in the Object Editor, whenever I load it up. There are apparently no problems with it aside from that. Deleting the items seems to serve temporary purchase, but it doesn't help me in the long run because Hera just creates more the next time I open the plugin. My main copy and all of my backups have apparently gone through the same problem. There are still two backups untouched (but when I open them up, it'll undoubtably start eating them as well).

Do y'all have any idea how I can eliminate this problem? If it doesn't work, then I'll have to get a backup from a friend -- and if that doesn't work, then this project's future is in hot waters.

Are they eating up precious memory or screwing up your scenarios? If not, I say leave them. After going through all the scenarios that look promising on the Ares Add-ons page I'm looking forward to some new scenarios.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 08 May 2007 - 10:40 AM

They seem to replace existing resources, in some cases -- in any case, even if they didn't do damage, they're signs for potential later damage, which I'd really rather avoid.

I just uploaded Infestation, so with any luck, you'll be able to get your hands on it soon. It's tricky, so be careful!

Yep, I came across this before!
It was a long time ago though, trying to remember...

I think your bug might be to do with a cap on the number of objects you can have within a scenario file that appear in the object editor.
(not to be confused with the number of objects in a scenario when you are playing it, which results in the "maximum number of ships" built message)
My largest scenario, It's War Part2 has 462 objects in it, so any scenario with this number or fewer should be ok. War Part 1 has 339 objects. Perhaps 500 was the point that I encountered this bug..., don't remember. How many objects has your scenario in it? Have you older back up copies with fewer levels in the scenarios?

(You probably will have spotted this already - Each time a large ship is created each of it's onboard systems will create themselves as new objects, so for example a new Battleship being added to the objects could "auto create" up to 20more new objects. The newest objects will always be those with the highest numbers in the object editor)
Hera starts getting confused after a certain number of objects has been reached. And things will possibly start to get scrambled within the secnario. One bi-product of this that I got was cantharian carriers that used to shoot Ishman assault transports...
However your scenario is still stable, and reducing the number of objects should fix the bug

Try the following:
Delete the latest level you have added (This will delete some of the "objects" created automatically in association with this scenario) and see if the problem dissappears.
Or delete the newest warship you created. You may have to delete objects manually within the objects editor. Then save the scenario and quit Hera. Open the scenario again and hopefully the names will have returned.

I do remember that I was able to fix this problem.
Alsol, how many levels are in the scenario? I came to a bug in Hera that seemed to cap the number of levels that a plug could contain. (That's why my It's War plug ended up in more than one part.).

Great to see a plug still being worked on Hopefully this will be of some assistance to you in debugging.

Where can I find "Infestation"?

@lord-commander-anic, on May 8 2007, 12:03 PM, said in The Final Problem:

(snip, loads of text ;))
I do remember that I was able to fix this problem.
Alsol, how many levels are in the scenario? I came to a bug in Hera that seemed to cap the number of levels that a plug could contain. (That's why my It's War plug ended up in more than one part.).

Great to see a plug still being worked on Hopefully this will be of some assistance to you in debugging.
Where can I find "Infestation"?

Some confusion here -- what would the objects as in the scenario editor have to do with the objects in the object editor?

The scenario currently has about ten missions -- eight of which are actually complete (pending revision), from recollection. Certainly a good amount, but it shouldn't be enough to provoke Hera's wrath yet! Then again, who knows what the crazy thing is willing to do.

Infestation's currently pending approval on the addons page, but once it gets tested, it should be good to go. I've talked to Sarg about it, so hopefully it won't be too long.

Thanks! Hope to hear from you soon, concerning this.

- Bob

Re confusion: I was referring to the number of objects within a scenario (not the scenario editor) when the player is playing, it's nothing to do with this present bug, forget I mentioned it

With ten missions, the other bug (that of capping the number of missions (which I referred to as "Levels" previously)) won't affect you here.

The number of objects within the object editor is what is of concern.
Over the weekend I'll dust off a copy of War and run up the number of objects by adding ships and see if i can duplicate your problem. Then I'll see if I can fix it.
Have you tried reducing the number objects to see if it fixes the bug?

Incidentally, do you create new ships and things within your scenario file, or create them in a different file and paste the ship into the object editor? The latter method will create a much greater number of objects in the final scenario, as each ship pasted in will create new objects for all of it's systems rather than using existing versions of those systems (if they exist already).

@lord-commander-anic, on May 10 2007, 08:09 AM, said in The Final Problem:

Re confusion: I was referring to the number of objects within a scenario (not the scenario editor) when the player is playing, it's nothing to do with this present bug, forget I mentioned it

All righty.

Quote

With ten missions, the other bug (that of capping the number of missions (which I referred to as "Levels" previously)) won't affect you here.

Aye, thought as much.

Quote

The number of objects within the object editor is what is of concern.
Over the weekend I'll dust off a copy of War and run up the number of objects by adding ships and see if i can duplicate your problem. Then I'll see if I can fix it.
Have you tried reducing the number objects to see if it fixes the bug?

I actually did notice that there were duplicated classes, for some races -- for instance, the Ishimans had like 3x everything, in the main file. So I deleted all the extras.

The only problem is that when it did that, the bug kept coming back, and actually started eating the plugin -- destroying and replacing valid resources with its own random nonsense.

I haven't tried deleting other objects, but then, I need most of them, at one point or another, and wouldn't like to.

Quote

Incidentally, do you create new ships and things within your scenario file, or create them in a different file and paste the ship into the object editor? The latter method will create a much greater number of objects in the final scenario, as each ship pasted in will create new objects for all of it's systems rather than using existing versions of those systems (if they exist already).

Nah, I created everything within the scenario file, though I'm starting to wonder if the other approach wouldn't actually be better (though I'd need to set it up so that it wouldn't cause the duplication problem).

If I end up having to redo all of this, that's okay -- I've been messing with it for five years, off and on, and a few days/weeks rebuilding what I've already done, better and more efficiently, won't kill me.

- Bob

I ran the number of objects in mt scenario up to just over 1000 and wasn't able to replicate your problem. This suggests that other factors are involved. It was er, a number of years ago when i was using Hera so memories are fuzzy I'm afraid.
I'll try deleting some things to see if that messes things up a bit.

The problem with deleting the extra objects is that some of them aren't the "extra", but the original object... This causes the eating of the plug that you observed.

Deleting something might have been what started the bug in the first place?

Sounds like you're stuck with a re-build

When you are re-doing the plug it should be safe enough to paste any ships you created from your damaged plug into the new file, to avoid having to recreate them from scratch. But only use a plug file that you didn't try deleting anything from.

If you need a tester or anything else, I still play the game regularily on OS9 and would be happy to help.

Btw, I used to make a back-up copy of my plug every time I made a change, particularily with adding text strings and conditions. I ended up with nearly 2gigs of back-ups at one stage!

I didn't see a point in creating a new topic, so I posted here.

I've been working on two scenarios, but their progress came to a screeching, early halt when they were killed by errors and corruption. In the first one, a ton of resources of all kinds randomly got erased. For example, when I tried to play the scenario, the player's ship had turned into an Nastiroid and the planet could only build Sensor Relay Stations. I know this can't be fixed, but I'm curious why this happened.

The other one I'm sure has some solution, but if not, it's fine. On Level 3, during loading it quits because of an error: "Can't manage any more sprite tables.". It has 72 objects in the level, so why does it quit? I've gotten all the rotation resolutions right, I'm sure of it, and I already tried deleting imported sprites that I didn't need. I'm running OS9 on an old G3. Ares and Hera have ridiculous amounts of memory because this computer is unused except for things like Ares. Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Too many Spriet Tables!

That's an error message I never got!
It might refer to the names that you have given to your sprites (which are numbers that need to fall within a certain range). Have you applied the Ares colour table to the sprites so that they're not RGB or CMYK or whatever.
Other than that I don't know.

If the bug fixes listed above don't help you may have to go back to your last stable version of your file, you know, that back up that we all amke regularily....

If you like you can email me your plug file and I'll take a look at it and see what I can see.

Well, actually, these files were not made by me. They were taken from plug developer extra, and have worked fine before. It doesn't matter anymore, now that I've abandoned the scenario and a started a better one with a similar concept. I've already tried emailing the plug, but it doesn't work. Period. Anyway, lets just say that I learned to make backups the hard way. This new plug has plenty of backups. Thanks for the help anyway!