Mission Editor: Cause of failure

[PatrickAWlson]

When there is an issue with a mission file the ME simply states "error: failed to load".   I have yet to find anything that will tell me what the error is.  Suggestions?

[No601_Swallow]

Um... I think this has only happened to me personally, so far at least, when I'm trying to load a mission from an outdated version of the game. (The "replace all CheckEntities with CheckPlanes in complex triggers" text edit ploy fixed this for me. I don't know if others have had this error in other circumstances.

 

(Happy New year, by the way, one and all. Just 40 minutes left in GMT for 20-and-good-riddance-17!)

[SAS_Storebror]

Open the Mission Editor, click "Tools->Resave All Missions in Folder".

Navigate to the folder that holds your "critical" mission and click OK.

 

Cheers!

Mike

[coconut]

Got plenty of those when I generate missions automatically. Best way was to remove parts of the mission until the error disappeared, then you know the problem is in the part you removed. You can reiterate that in the suspect portion of the file to cut it down to the exact line that's causing trouble.

 

It's a tedious manual process, but it normally doesn't take long before you reach a conclusion if you use interval halving.

[PatrickAWlson]

Got plenty of those when I generate missions automatically. Best way was to remove parts of the mission until the error disappeared, then you know the problem is in the part you removed. You can reiterate that in the suspect portion of the file to cut it down to the exact line that's causing trouble.

 

It's a tedious manual process, but it normally doesn't take long before you reach a conclusion if you use interval halving.

That's how I solve the problem.  My issue is that PWCG mission files have over 20K lines ...

[JG1_Shadepiece]

Jeez Pat, that's quite a bit of labor. Good suggestion if the error could give you the file line though. That'd be pretty useful.

[PatrickAWlson]

I miscounted - they actually have over 300K lines .

 

No labor at all in generating it - that's what the software is for.  But if I get it wrong I know I'm in for a multi hour debug session, and those are just not fun.  Usually the pain is mitigated by the fact that the code is well segmented and a new error is inevitably the result of new code.  The last session was ugly because it was an internationalization issue, so it only failed after release for folks in some countries.

 

If the thing had only told me what line it had failed on I would have solved in in 15 minutes.