I am a bad man. My most humble apologies to GFireflyE!

from Elemental Forums

Hey y'all!

So, as you know, I've been hammering away at that Revenant mod I've been working on for a couple of weeks now.

Dhuran and GFireflyE expressed interest in checking out what I had so far, so once I felt comfortable with what I had so far, I sent them beta copies of my mod, to get some input.

Long story short, I broke GFireflyE's game.  I had some loose/unclosed tags and such that caused his game to crash and such.  In my flurry of cutting and pasting things, well sometimes things happen.

I've already apologized in the LH Support thread he started, but I feel really bad about this.  Sure it should be an easy fix (delete my .xml modfiles, should fix the game), but nonetheless I don't like having put him through the crashing and odd behaviour my beta files seem to have caused him.

Seriously, I even played the game for a several hour stretch before zipping up the files, and wasn't seeing any issues.  Otherwise I would have held off to track down whatever problem had cropped up, but I was seeing 'normal' behavior on my end...

I hadn't seen any significant issues on my end in the last dozen or so restarts of the game (other than one spell not targetting correctly and some text that needed some love), so I thought I had the 'errors' that were causing some of my earlier crashes licked.  Obviously I had not, and a subsequent recheck of my .xml using an .xml editor showed where I had some missing/extra tags.

 

I've already sent him a PM to apologize, but I feel really bad about this. I honestly didn't think it would break his game so, so even if it ends up being easy to fix it still makes me sad.

GFireflyE, again my most humble apologies.  I very much appreciate your willingness to help, and mean no ill will towards you whatsoever.

Community, I'll try to do better r.e. rechecking my tags before releasing extensive mods, even if just to a select few betatesters.  This is my first extensive mod that I've released btw...

 

7,826 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top


Apology accepted captain Needa. :p

 

In all seriousness, now that I know what the problem was, a simple removal of the associated mod files corrected the precarious state.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Unclosed tags, huh? Who would ever have guessed? :D

Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I remember a little duck birdie saying something about that just yesterday morning...

 

I just sent GFireflyE and Dhuran the updated files.  Simply 'cleaning up' the tags wasn't quite sufficient, as I was still seeing slow load times.  Which I didn't realize were as significant as they were until I implemented my 'get rid of unnecessary duplicates' strategy for the Summoning and Prodigy trees, and streamline the General Trait tree using the AbilityBonusOption subtags.  This required adding one more trait, but sped up the game quite significantly.  My game is now hitting the 'opening' screen much faster, and even map load and subwindow time loads are down significantly.

Now to find out if what I did will work for Dhuran and GFireflyE.  If their experience goes well, then I'll feel comfortable to put this out into the wild.

BTW, while the total zipped mod was 6.8 MB in size, the core folder.xml .zip is now a mere 61 kb or so, despite having multiple files.  I have some pretty big pictures included in the mod for some background screens that substitute for the core game versions...

 

One note.  I DO think there is an Ability cap of sorts in play.  Something I did was to put several of the 'similar' options under the same Ability tag, but under separate AbilityBonusOptions tags.  This essentially creates a 'radio button approach' for the game, so it 'gets the hint' that only one Option should be active at a time.  The millisecond I did this with the General Perk that I was trying to get the 5th option going for (Kingdom, Empire, Banshee, Cindercorpse, WannabeRevenants) things seemed to clear right up.

 

I appreciate your good sportsmanship GFireflyE!  I'll make it a goal to try not to do this again, but no hard promises as I seem to keep trying to take Elemental a direction it isn't wanting to go...

One more note to GFireflyE.  Since the DebugErr is 'detecting' the readmes, it'd probably be a good idea to not put those in the mods folder (just leave them in the .zip or wherever you are stashing stuff for later).  The Notepad 2 version I have doesn't automatically assign the .txt extension for some reason, and I forget to add it when I'm making the filename, so that is why the game is seeing it I'm sure.  I just added the .txt extension to the readme for the next time around...

I'm LOVING how I managed to 'clear/repurpose' both the General tree and the 'new' tree, to cleanly allow multiple implementations. The new path  is now just begging for an Undead Hunter (think Van Helsing & Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter) and Necromancer version, just sayin!

:drool:

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Good Morning tjashen

Unfortunately, I'm still receiving crashes on load from mod saves.

Here are the files:

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6yoi728yrbsgxfu/debug.err

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lkyirx539qrypas/legendaryheroes_23_crash_2014_6_22T20_40_32C0.mdmp

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1yfddmijpy4jp3b/legendaryheroes_23_crash_2014_6_22T20_40_52C0.mdmp

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rsrg6568pnlfqc2/legendaryheroes_23_crash_2014_6_22T20_41_17C0.mdmp

 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Yeah, I figured you would still be seeing this (see my other thread).  I do appreciate your continued attempts to playtest this, while I determine what the problem is.

I think I know what has happned, but am hoping that isn't it.  I feel a bit like Icarus must have felt, in a figurative sense.  If you fly too close to the sun, you get burned...

Heavenfall has seen a similar issues, his was Shard related, so I realy hope that is the problem.  Even though I love the temple art I created, and spent a lot of time making the 7 different versions of them for harvesting a death shard, well I think the work I've done in the other areas is much more useful to us modders so if push comes to shove, the rotating skull temples can go away and I won't be TOO disappointed.