Savefile Character / Map Editor v1.0.1 (April 15, 2014)

[xolotl]

Wow! I loaded it up this morning and just couldn't get away to say thank you. Right now I am dealing with a band of thugs and getting my tail waxed! The only strange thing was the disappearance of my saved games. They are there but they are invisible. I have to count down X number of spaces in the SAVED screen to get to the game when saving but it is a mild annoyance.

That's quite strange, actually - the Eschalon savegame dir actually has a couple of files in it, and the editor doesn't touch the one that has the actual savegame names in it. Could you maybe zip up your savegame dir and send it to me? I'd be interested to see what's causing it, and if the editor is somehow involved.

[Loki]

Here is my email address: GAPAMiller@MSN.COM Please send me an email with the instructions on what you need to see in a .zip file and where to send it. In my Book 1 Saved Games slot 2 is missing. When I play the game the Quick save file option is visible but nothing else. This is after I deleted the game, re-installed it and then ran your editor .exe file. Save game slot 2 is missing in the Book 1 Saved Games folder. When playing the game and saving the Quick Save slot is visible but no other slot. If I move down several positions the game will save but the name of the save is not visible. Very strange. Otherwise the game is working fine but I have learned not to go back and re-edit a character already in play.

Thanks

[silverkitty]

Oh, there may be a simple fix then: just make an empty/new folder called "slot2" in saves directory.
This kind of thing happens if you have both the editor (or even just an Explorer window open to the saves directory) AND the game open at the same time - because of the way Windows "locks" files, it doesn't let Eschalon properly delete/re-create the save game folder.

[xolotl]

Otherwise the game is working fine but I have learned not to go back and re-edit a character already in play. :|

This kind of thing happens if you have both the editor (or even just an Explorer window open to the saves directory) AND the game open at the same time - because of the way Windows "locks" files, it doesn't let Eschalon properly delete/re-create the save game folder.

Oh, interesting - silverkitty, you've noticed that behavior in the past too, then? I should probably add a warning for Windows users if so.

Though it does confuse me - the editor opens the file to read it in, but then immediately closes it. It doesn't keep the file open for the duration... When you save, it actually re-opens the file based on the pathname, and then closes it again right away. So really, there shouldn't be any locking issues going on.

[silverkitty]

It's kinda wonky, but it seems like the only way it frees locks if any application which touched the files is also closed...

[xolotl]

Okay, I see what's actually going on here, and I'm not sure if it's something I'll be able to work around. Basically, it's the gtk+ "Open File" dialog which is creating an open handle to the individual slot directories and then not releasing that handle. My code itself is closing out everything properly, but those open directory handles stay around until the character editor closes. I'll have to release a new version which warns Windows folks about this, if I can't figure out some other way around it.

Edit: Ah, okay, looks like if I hop on the very latest gtk+ version for Windows, the problem goes away (the dialog closes its handles properly). I'll have to get a new version out tomorrow (well, today I guess) which bundles the newer version, though I think that there's some things I have to clean up before the app will work in gtk+ 2.20.x. We shall see!

[xolotl]

Version 0.6.1 of the Character/Map editor is now available here: http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/

Windows users are strongly encouraged to upgrade, to avoid potential problems with locking the savegame directories, which could result in losing a savegame slot if you run the editor at the same time that Eschalon is running. Users on other platforms wouldn't be affected by this (it was a bug in the bundled version of gtk+ which was causing this).

Apart from that, there were a few minor bugfixes not really worth enumerating; check the ChangeLog for details if you want.

Enjoy!

[Loki]

Marshall & Silverkitty:

Thanks to both of you. I went back and made a new slot 2 folder and lo and behold suddenly all of the save folders appeared and appear to work just as they were ment to.

Loki

[Vernholio]

Love the game... Having a great time playing it, but unfortunately I found out too late about "saving my game before resting". Monsters spawned, I ran... right by Mary at her camp. The damn Toxic Salamanders killed her, and now her quest is whacked. So, I took to Google to try to find out a way to remedy this, and I ran across this editor (ver .61 -- the straight Windows .exe). It installs easily, and runs great... Except, I can only open the master map files in the data directory -- and not the saved game map files (I keep getting error messages). Is this by design?

Anyway, all I want to do is put Mary "back in the game", so I can complete the quest. Am I just out of luck?

Thanks a lot for any advice.

Oh, and by the way, I'm running the Steam version of Eschalon: Book 1

[xolotl]

Except, I can only open the master map files in the data directory -- and not the saved game map files (I keep getting error messages). Is this by design?

Anyway, all I want to do is put Mary "back in the game", so I can complete the quest. Am I just out of luck?

Ah, it could possibly be something to do with the Steam version - the editor is supposed to be able to open up savefiles as well. Could you possibly send me over your savefile directory (or even just the one savefile you're trying to open) so that I can find out what the differences are? I should theoretically be able to straighten it out pretty quickly.

Oh, and note that while you'd certainly be able to put Mary back in there, it's possible that the quest itself has been irrevocably marked as "unfinishable" - the editor doesn't touch quest information at all. Mary's quest isn't at all necessary to finish the game, though, so if it doesn't work out, you'll be able to do everything else in the game with no problems.

[Vernholio]

Ah, it could possibly be something to do with the Steam version...

Unfortunately, that's kinda what I assumed. However, I didn't know about the quest flag. Regardless, thanks a lot for the quick response, and once I get home tonight, I will grab the map file, and get it to you to look at.

Again, thanks a lot for your help 9and great work on the editor!)

[xolotl]

Unfortunately, that's kinda what I assumed. However, I didn't know about the quest flag. Regardless, thanks a lot for the quick response, and once I get home tonight, I will grab the map file, and get it to you to look at.

np - be sure to grab the .ent file as well (the map is actually stored in two files). Best yet would be the whole savegame slot, so that I've got more data to work with in case it's not obvious what's different.

[xolotl]

Hello all!

I've released 0.6.2 of the editor, which fixes:

1) Vernholio's problems with opening up savegame maps from the Steam version.
2) Previously, if you loaded one character and then another character, the spell checkboxes wouldn't get cleared out properly if the second char didn't have the same spells.
3) Stacked item quantities (like arrows, etc) shouldn't have been restricted to 255; that's been fixed.

So yeah, nothing major, but if one of those might have affected you, it might be worth an upgrade.

Available at the usual place: http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/

[xolotl]

0.6.3 of the editor suite has been released! This contains just a couple of minor bugfixes in it, addressing an issue introduced in 0.6.0 (earlier versions weren't affected). If you were attempting actual Book 1 map edits, it's possible that entity and item scripts weren't getting saved properly, and a semi-related glitch was causing an ugly Exception to get output to the console when editing tiles which have entities on them.

That's it! No other changes. Enjoy!

http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/

[xolotl]

Hello - I've got a question for anyone who's used the map editor (on Linux) for Book 1 in the past... I've been gearing up for a new release of the editor, and had loaded up Fedora 13 on another machine to test a few things out. I found that the click-and-drag function on Fedora 13 is crazy slow. The map scrolling lags behind the mouse pointer by quite a bit, and then slowly catches up. Basically I want to know if anyone else encountered that, at some point, and if so, if you were able to figure out some way to make it Not Do That.

The other machine is pretty old by this point - an Athlon XP 2100+ (1.7GHz), but that's what I had been using as my primary desktop (and development environment for the editor) up until maybe four or five months ago, which means that I had had the map editor running with no speed problems at all, then. What's different is the distro (used to be Gentoo, now it's F13).

Anyway, if anyone's got any ideas, I'd love to hear 'em!