BG Cliff Construction Kit discussion

#141 Hey Konrad, don't you just love it when life gets in the way of doing a project? I really hate when that happens, but happens often enough that I get delayed on content packs by months not weeks cause of it...

How's the RD stuff coming on the new engine testing? See post #133 near end...

Will

#142 BG Cliff Construction Kit for TGEA 1.8??
Just got things looking pretty over here...

#143 Hehe. BG CCK for TGEA 1.8.1! I'm on it! End of this week.. this time nothing can stop it.

Jon sent me some shots, pretty indeed! Go Ruin!

#144

BG Cliff Construction Kit v1.2 for TGEA 1.8.1

I'm happy to announce that the CCK was successfully ported for TGEA 1.8.1. I have not yet tested with 1.8.0, but that should work as well.

Now the grinch: It will not be available right away. I am having a discussion with GG about the Kit appearing in the GarageGames store.

So, please, until that is sorted out, have just a little more patience.

How to make sure the Kit appears under your account

When the Kit is finally in the shop, I will go through every existing purchase, and ask GG to automatically add the Kit to your account here, on GarageGames.com.

The important part: If the email address through which you ordered the Kit is not the same as the email address that GG has on file about you, then please send me an email FROM the address that you used to purchase the Kit with the email address that GG has on file about you IN it somewhere.

If you do not send me such an email, I will assume that GG knows about your purchase email address, so that's going to be the address they will link the Kit to.

Thanks again for your patience.

#145 EDITED POST :-) Thx Konrad

#146 Hey Will,

Thanks for letting me know. Edit your post for your email, so spam bots don't parse it up. I got your email. :)

Again, I know you've been waiting for this port, so thanks for your support and patience, Will.

#147 When I can buy this stuff from GG shop? Or can i buy it from the old link?

#148 Szia Marton :)

You can buy it from the old link. The GG shop arrangement is still in progress. For new buyers, I send update 1 automatically when I see the purchase.

In the GG shop both the 1.7.1 and the 1.8.1 versions will feature the latest versions.

Konrad

#149 Hi Konrad,

how do i get in contact with you? i purchased the Pack a while ago from the 'old' link. i think it was around the 21.12.2008

Bye
Qbound

#150 Hi Qbound,

Either through the email in the support section of the CCK guide, or the email in my profile - either will do.

#151 Hi

any news about BG Cliff Construction Kit v1.2 for TGEA 1.8.1

#152 Hi Afan,

Waiting for GG. Any day now, hopefully.

#153 Konrad - I tried to do a port back to a clean version of TGEA 1.03 and while it does compile properly, it crashes the moment I try to open the editor using F11.

When I debug, it points to winStrings.cpp, specifically,

dsize_t dStrlen(const char *str)
{
   return (dsize_t)strlen(str);
}

There are no errors listed up to the crash in the console log.

If I do a debug compile it points to strlen.asm

mov     eax,dword ptr [ecx]     ; read 4 bytes

I'm hoping you can give me a bit of help on this since I am really unsure what is causing this in 1.03 but not in later versions.

I hope you don't mind but I took the liberty of zipping up my code and script files and emailed them to you. I would really appreciate any help you can give me.

#154 Hey Ron

Of course I don't mind, I'm glad you sent me the files right away.

I don't have a 1.0.3 install unfortunately, but I can make a few guesses, see if these help.

If the trouble's in the source, I think it is related to material property maps. First off, you could skip using them altogether by commenting out the code part in the replicator that's responsible for terrain type occlusion - not allowing cliff shapes to appear on specific terrain textures.

If the problem persists, then I suspect that this is a script problem. The rest of the code strikes me as 1.0.3 compatible (it's just my gut telling me, so don't bet on it.. :) I have no way to check). Although, just like 1.7.1, 1.0.3 had its material property maps commented out in the source as far as I can remember, so this might not necessarily be a source problem at all.

If you are loading a mission with a cliff or a cliff replicator in it, please try removing them, fire up the mission, and enter the editor, and see if it complains.

If it does, then try catching the value with which the crash occurs in dStrlen, and set up a conditional breakpoint. So when that triggers, you can check your call stack and see where the program came to that dStrlen call. If you could get me that call stack, I could probably tell you why its crashing.

Good luck, and let us know if you figure something out. I'm hoping others who would like to make this transition from 1.7.1 to 1.0.3 would also learn from your quest. :)

#155 OK here is what I got so far. The call stack wasn't giving me anything but a reference to a garbled input to the dStrlen function. I tried several different tests and did finally come up with something that is giving me a pointer, to what I don't know yet.

First I can open a mission with out a cliff on it no problem. But if I try to load the editor, it crashes.

Second, it crashes if I try to load a mission with a cliff on it during the loading stage.

Now what I did was go through each instance where dStrlen was called in the cliff code so I could see which one was called last before the crash. Oddly, I got more data than I had anticipated.

First I got this
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 296
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 296
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 296
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 296
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 296
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 296
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 296
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 296
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 311
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 311
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 311
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 311
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 311
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 311
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 311
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 311

and then alot of this combination:
tsBGCliffStatic.cpp line 260
tsBGCliffStatic.cpp line 262
fxBGCliffReplicator.cpp line 194

but here comes the pointer, right before the crash I got another set of the first group above and then

ResourceObject::construct: NULL resource create function for 'base.cliff.dds'.
ResourceObject::construct: NULL resource create function for 'base.cliff.dds'.
tsBGCliffStatic.cpp line 260

So what I get from this is that it was loading all of the other textures and creating resource instances until it came to this one and it died. I already checked the file in photoshop, it is fine. So I tried removing the file just to see what would happen. Everything happened the same as before except it ended with

tsBGCliffStatic.cpp line 260
tsBGCliffStatic.cpp line 262

and no call to anything else. I have to admit this one has be a bit stumped.

#156 The DDS loader and resource manager was given an overhaul in 1.7.1, so in 1.0.3 it must be pretty different. I am suspecting that this must be the first dds file your system loads. It is the original texture on the cliff mesh. So if your project does not use other dds files, then this must be it.

Try converting your DDS files. Try PNG-s first, because JPGs seemed to have an issue when treated as normal maps. I have no idea why, and I see this only once every month. But still, from a PNG we can expect a reliable behavior.

Let me know if that helps.

#157 Well I am half way there now. I can open maps with cliffs now. The editor still crashes for the reason above though. I am going to do some comparisons with files you sent me and see what if anything was done wrong.

#158 Well I should have tried testing my current conversion with a clean copy of TGEA 1.03 in the first place. It works just fine with PNGS. My modified version crashes for something pretty dumb and I will have to track that down.

That section in EditorGui.cs where you set up the all of GlobalActionMap.bindCmd bindings kills my game. Since this obviously a problem on my end, That will just about do it then. Thanks a ton Konrad.

#159 You're very welcome, Ron. I hope you figure out that crash soon. Glad to hear it's working under 1.0.3 as well. Good luck!

#160 Well after an hour more of digging I finally came up with a solution that works very well and I will share it just in case someone else has this issue when adding this to a heavily modified code base.

All I did was encompass the GlobalActionMap calls included with the kit into a function named setupEGlobals and added the call for it at the end of the Editor::open function and it all works perfectly.

In my case I am sure it is because I have done a lot of modifications to the actionMap code and script for my game.

I hope this solution helps someone else.