Return to City 17

Lark · Post by **Lark** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 4:21 pm

since face poser now works I am up to doing any rednecks you need

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Sat Feb 02, 2008 3:17 am

gtaiiilc wrote:since face poser now works I am up to doing any rednecks you need

lol

Yes, I am planning on replacing the text with faceposer goodness. Possibly not for the first release, but eventually, yes.

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Mon Feb 04, 2008 10:34 am

F***! STUPID GODDAMN HAMMER A** F***!!

As you may have guessed, Hammer screwed with my map again.

So, I ended up loosing around 5 hours of work on the map. And before you ask, yes, the autosave f***ed up too. "Out of Memory Loading Solid". Quite lovely I assure you.

My last version saved was a week ago, so right now I'm working off of the decompiled last compile 5 hours ago and re-creating the parts of the map added since the last version. So yea. All told, I'll end up about 10 hours behind sched. Fun.

I am NOT impressed with Hammer. As usual. Oh well. There's my rant for this release... This seems to happen to me every time! It's really getting annoying.

Sorry. Had to rant. Very pissed off. Going to sleep now.

Hell-met · Post by **Hell-met** » Mon Feb 04, 2008 1:31 pm

Ouch.

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 4:37 am

Well, currently I have some mixed feelings. On the one hand, I recovered the latest version of the map and found out why it corrupted. On the other hand, I'm even more pissed at Hammer for having such a shitty user interface. I mean, come on. I've taken Human-Computer interaction courses in college, and Hammer makes some of the worst examples look like the most intuitive thing in the world! I guess it's because Gabe worked for 13 years at Microsoft.

The problem is Hammer silently failing and not parsing errors, something that Windows is also very good at doing. Which is bad. If an error exists, make sure the user knows about it!! If the system fails, make sure the user knows WHY!!

The actual error was that a pair of quotation marks ("") had slipped their way into my map. (This was because I had been programming for my computer science course, doing some string parsing, and was used to throwing quotes around anything I was passing back and forth).

How ever was I able to figure out that the quotation marks were the source of all my source woes? Well, I opened up a decompiled version of a previous compile, then started re-adding all the changes I had written down to implement on the previous version that had been corrupted. About an hour into re-adding the changes, I accidentally added another pair of quotation marks in the same place for the same reason. (It was an AddOutput thingy that wasn't working right). I thought "Hmm... I haven't seen any other quotation marks during my re-adding of all of these features that I already added to the map three times...". So I took out the quotation marks, saved it as fileA, added the quotation marks, saved it as fileB, then re-opened fileA and fileB. Whatdya know? fileB wouldn't open! Eureka!

Then, 'cause I was sick of re-adding all these things I had already done, I took the corrupted .vmf and threw it into Scite. Using Scite, I searched through all 300,000 lines of code (of course, I knew the name of the entity i was working on, so it took 0.35 seconds), found the offending line of text (complete with double-quotation marks), and removed it. Booted up hammer, and whatdya know?! It opened the previously-corrupted map!! WITH all my changes in place! Wonderful!

But yea. This is a very valuable lesson for mappers: Hammer sucks. To be a little more specific: Hammer stores values of inputs/outputs, entity names and keyvalues, and most other information you type into entities inside of quotation marks. Hence, if a quotation mark slips into your map, when Hammer goes to compile or open your map, it finds an empty string (or ""), followed by yourEntityNameHere, followed by another empty string. Ordinarily the file would look like this: "yourEntityNameHere", but since you added the quotes, it now looks like: ""yourEntityNameHere"". So Hammer thinks that one keyvalue has been set to blank (IE ""), and looks at the next keyvalue, which happens to be yourEntityNameHere, doesn't recognize it (obviously), so thinks it's an error (which it is), and decides to end it's life. That's right. Instead of telling you what's wrong, it simply dies.

Now, while Hammer will recognize you pressing some OTHER forbidden character (such as %$#@!&*${█§), it will NOT recognize that you have pressed the f***ing QUOTATION MARK.

Steam · Post by **Shana** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 5:43 am

Lol, quotation marks, brings back bad memories, i fixed it the same way you did, i opened the vmf in notepad and thought "maybe these quotation marks after addoutput are the problem", which it was.

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Fri Feb 15, 2008 9:26 pm

Time for a bit of an update!

I've been working very hard on school and mapping over the last week, and I'm glad to announce that I'm nearing completion of the next three maps. It looks like I'll be ready to release by next weekend. (This weekend will be set aside for bugfixing, polishing, lighting, cubemapping, soundscaping, etc.). Hrm. Well, at least I hope it will be next weekend...

Regardless, I'm hoping to post some screenshots of the new maps up sometime this weekend. (Perhaps even later on today if we're lucky! Depends on how my Calculus lab goes...)

But yea, as for a more succinct status update, here's the latest guestimates:
oc_return_c17_04: 90%
oc_return_c17_05: 80%
oc_return_c17_06a: 75%
oc_return_c17_06b: 60%

I've split 06 up into two pieces for simplicity and gameplay's sake, but I'll only be releasing 06a when I release next weekend.

06b is over half done, except for entities and some other stuff, but yea, progress is proceeding. And 07, 08, and 09 have mostly been completed already, so I'm tentatively hoping for a release of 06b - 09 sometime in the next month or two.

Stay Tuned!

fug's Obsidian clips · Post by **fug4life** » Fri Feb 15, 2008 9:39 pm

^

^

j/k

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Fri Feb 15, 2008 11:45 pm

fug4life wrote:^ ^

j/k

skidz · Post by **skidz** » Sat Feb 16, 2008 12:01 am

Valve are trying to redeem themselves with the newer engine code, adding a lot of extra warnings and messages to the console, but hammer is still a train wreck, and face poser even worse.

Barnz · Post by **Barnz** » Sat Feb 16, 2008 3:58 pm

Welcome to the 2003.

Hell-met · Post by **Hell-met** » Sat Feb 16, 2008 9:12 pm

Off Topic

Can we technically play portal and tf2 maps?

(Even without the game specific entities)

RC17 seems to be broken in OB engine, by the way

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 7:02 am

skidz wrote:Valve are trying to redeem themselves with the newer engine code, adding a lot of extra warnings and messages to the console, but hammer is still a train wreck, and face poser even worse.

Yea, they're doing some stuff to it which is good, but it's still like taking the first ten steps of a hundred mile journey. A train wreck it is indeed. Sorta like the one in Ep2.

Hell-met wrote:
Off Topic
Can we technically play portal and tf2 maps?

(Even without the game specific entities)

I think so, but I really have no idea, and this certainly is off topic!

RC17 seems to be broken in OB engine, by the way

I'll have to check that out... what's broken about it?

---

So, a little late as usual, but here's a few screenshots. They're really brief and don't show a lot, (because of potential spoilers, though I'm sure you may have guessed a few already), but anyways, here they are:

As to current progress, I've got most of 04 done, 05 needs AI work (stupid civilians), and 06 also needs work but is coming along. I got an alpha tester in today who ran through the new maps a few times and caught some more bugs, so I'll have to do a bit more fixing up.

And to whet your appetites for the (hopefully soon) upcoming release:

Hell-met · Post by **Hell-met** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 1:29 pm

DaMaN wrote: I'll have to check that out... what's broken about it?

It wont even load at all.