11 replies to this topic

[Idobek]

Command Line Options
--biff-get will search the override directory.

I noticed this today, and it was causing me a headache until I actually realised what was going on, so I thought I'd point it out. Does any body else have any other information on the way functions work that are not documented? I might be nice to keep a note of the unexpected things.

What else? Oh yeah, I noticed a while back that TP2 flags have to happen in a certain order. This order should work:

BACKUP
AUTHOR
ASK_EVERY_COMPONENT
AUTO_TRA
ALWAYS
ALLOW_MISSING
LANGUAGE

Can anybody comfirm that the order matters or is it just me that was having problems?

[Seifer]

Aside from the ALWAYS, the rest are fine. I've never used it I'm afraid.

[weimer]

Wow, you're right, that parsing really doesn't work. Fixed. BACKUP, AUTHOR (which aren't really flags) any-flag, LANGUAGE (which isn't a flag) should now work.

[Idobek]

From the READ_BYTE and IF_EVAL tutorial:

Use WRITE_ASCII for things like death variable, dialogues, scripts, etc. Note, that if you're WRITE_ASCIIing to say, the death variable, and the previous death variable entry is longer than the one you're writing, then you'll have spillover after WRITE_ASCII. To avoid this, embed a null character at the end of your string. So, if I have
WRITE_ASCII 0x280 ~Guy~
I would want to put a null character right after the y in Guy. You can do this by using a hex editor and inserting 00 after the y.

This should be updated to reflect that WRITE_BYTE can be used to remove spillover:

WRITE_ASCII 0x280 ~Guy~
WRITE_BYTE 0x283 0x00

I'd put in a WRITE_LONG there as well but I tend to the cautious. I think the words 'null' and 'hex editor' scare off people that other wise understood the tutorial.

[FredSRichardson]

Sounds like we need a WRITE_ASCII_NULL command that writes the string plus a null character. Actually, does OCaml use '\000' as the NULL character? In that case, this might work:

WRITE_ASCII 0x123 ~My String\\000~

But I'm definitely not sure about that... It might be worth a test. (If "\\000" doesn work, "\\0" might).

There should be a way to write an embedded null character unless WRITE_ASCII strips out non-ascii chars (I'm not sure why it would do this).

[Idobek]

I'm not sure a new command is needed. I just think the ReadMe should reflect that

WRITE_BYTE offset 0x00

can be used to clean out unwanted ASCII charaters.

[FredSRichardson]

I'm not sure a new command is needed. I just think the ReadMe should reflect that

WRITE_BYTE offset 0x00

can be used to clean out unwanted ASCII charaters.

Actually, I take back what I said. WRITE_ASCII_NULL would be bad in cases where you're writing to a ResRef. For example, this:

WRITE_ASCII_NULL offset ~12345678~

Would write 9 bytes including the null termination, where as the ResRef field can only be a maximum of 8 bytes wide, so the 9th byte would currupt the file.

The problem with the WRITE_BYTE solution is that it's a bit error prone. If you don't coun't your offsets correctly or if you change the string you could be in for a suprise.

A somewhat better solution, if it's possible, would be to embed the null char. I'll have to see if this works:

WRITE_ASCII offset ~1234\\0~

[MagusWizardo]

Why the double-\ ? Only 1 of them should be needed if OCaml only uses one \ for the null.

[FredSRichardson]

In some cases the \ needs to be "escaped". I'm not sure if that's true here or not, I might depend on how many times the string is evaluated.

I'll have to experiment and see if this works (in any config).

[Idobek]

Er... I'd like to make an adjustment to my SET_2DA_ENTRY tutorial. The last piece of code should read:

To fix this all you need to do is add another column header using SET_2DA_ENTRY on a file and removing it once you are done, like so:

  SET_2DA_ENTRY 0 0 4 ~IDOBEK ROWNAME~
  SET_2DA_ENTRY 6 1 1 ~SAMURAI~
  SET_2DA_ENTRY 0 0 5 ~~

A much better solution.

[weimer]

Updated.