Weirdish Bug Report

Not sure how to explain myself on this one. I was monkeying with slices and discovered that you could use the Slice Debug menu in Game.exe to export a Slice Collection. Fun! I thought I might be able to save myself some time by loading one big slice collection (don't ask) rather than making a million load slice commands. Then I ran into an error message: exciting! They thought of everything! It just wouldn't do to have a second Script Layer or MapRoot. Deleted the offending slices as instructed, re-exported and tried again. Still no luck. I thought it might be because the slice collection in question was like 16 megabytes (don't ask). Left only a single, solitary slice, re-exported, tried again. Same thing. If I were a guessing man, I'd guess that somehow it's still got a Slice Handle hooked up to it, but custom obviously doesn't tell me that.

In the future, is it better to post Bug Reports on the QA forum or here? I wasn't sure, so I just posted where I was.

Oh, and I guess formal repro instructions:

1) Open your game. I used the Test Game button in custom.

1.5 ) Do something to load a slice. I did a CreateRect... or two

2) Open the Slice Debug editor (Ctrl+F4?) and export your collection (F2?)

3) Close out of Game and go to Custom (I already had it open because I was Testing Game)

4) Go to the Slice Collection editor and try to load your collection (F3?)

5) Get yelled at. Do what it says and delete all the special slices and then re-export. Hit Escape to return to the collection editor

6) Try to import your new, seemingly special-less slice collection. Get yelled at again. That's the bug.

Version Number Is: 20150128 gfx_directx+sdl+fb music_sdl

Ah, interesting.

Well, what you are trying to do isn't a finished feature yet, so I am not surprised to see problems.

I think it might be talking about the type of the hidden root slice, but I couldn't be sure without reproducing it myself

Ahhh, no worries! Sorry to bug a guy before it's finished. I did eventually figure out how to accomplish my goal though, so it's all good.

EDIT: Oh, and don't think I was being sarcastic! When that error popped up I almost cheered I was so impressed! It was like finding a cheat code or something.

HUEHUEHUE. That was a good one. Yo know, i like his style, it's very retro and all, and objective too.

---

"I can't buy food with glory"

I got nothin but love for the playa, he mad stylin boo!

Very suspicious Giz, very suspicious...


What do you mean? That it should automatically strip out disallowed slices either at import or export time?

I had a look at the problem, and the root slice had the SL_ROOT lookup code.

Maybe we should omit unneeded data from the .slice files; 16MB is a bit ridiculous. We're up to nearly 280 bytes per slice (which works out to ~64000=320x200 slices. That must be one helluva long script)

No, I just mean that using the slice editor on a running game was just something where we said "Hey! This is possible, why not add it? Might be handy for debugging"

The fact that you can export from it, and then re-import that into custom is just a lucky circumstance, not a planned feature.

That is all I meant.



Perhaps. It seems like omitting default values from saved slices has both upsides and downsides.

64000 slices is a lot. Maybe we need the ability to write pixels to a backdrop sprite slice.

Writing to a sprite slice would mean that the slice's sprite would have to become unique, and would cease to be a reference to a numbered record of a specific sprite type... but that doesn't seem too impractical, I think?

Suspicious?! Why, I never!

Hey! Letting you access editor X in-game is possible, why not add it? (I think that being able to view and edit NPCs is a good candidate. For most other stuff if you wanted to edit it, you're probably better off using live-previewing.)


I don't see very significant downsides, but I guess the likelihood of a game having thousands of slices in its collections is low, so it's not currently worth worrying about.[/quote]


We certainly do, and for all types of sprites. I would have added it years ago, but I wanted to add a far more efficient interface once we support arrays. Looking back, that's the same bad reason I use to justify every bad decision!