Slitherine

Well, the thread title is rnot meant soo serious, however, the problem I encounter right now is.

Somehow, strange characters do appear sometime in a modded eqp file I use, please see the pic. They look more like something I'd expect in a binary file, though I'm not a programmer so I could be wrong.



So far I have found no clear pattern when or where they appear, but in the worst case they can cause serious problems, even that a unit entry becomes unusable. I can edit those things out, but sometimes I find them again somewhere later in the same eqp file. In the case shown in the pic I didn't even touch most of those Italian unit entries (except changing the name to Bersaglieri), all edits were on different units.

Has anybody ever encountered something similar and knows what's going on or how to avoid this?

The only programs I use to edit the equipment are the unit editor found here and Programmer's Notepad (from where the pic is). I do changes quite often, so deactivate/activate this file using GME often too. Could this play a role here? I also do virus scans regularly. In short any help or insight about this would be greatly appreciated.

I have to check USMC again if there's anything like that in there too.

I recommend to use the same program for editing an efile. Personally, i only use notepad and have not encountered this issue.

To avoid any problem I only edit the equipmet, efx and other files from the data folder only with Excel or with the Open Office equivalent spreadsheet...
it works a lot quicker cause I can jump from cell to cell and no hassle about wrong Tabs and other common errors who come along easily with Notepad++...not to mention the clearness of a spreadsheet which makes coding a lot easier

Bebro,as you're well aware I have edited alot of units.

I have only used Mark Garnetts editor and have encountered no problems at all.

The only time that I've encountered problems is when I've opened and edited the equipment file using notepad or copying and pasting entries.

I think that with you using the the two different programs the "coding" is getting screwed up.

Try editing and sticking to one program or the other (like Nikivdd said earlier in the thread). See if the problems persists

As someone who has done a lot of unit editing, I say Excel is the way to go for convenience. It is much easier to compare stats, stay organized, and make a lot of changes quickly and accurately.

I use only the old way with the Windows-Editor. It´s not the fastes way but it works till now without mistakes.

Thx for the answers, guys. In the future I'll either go for Excel or revert back fully to notepad. Hopefully it's gone then.

bebro wrote:Thx for the answers, guys. In the future I'll either go for Excel or revert back fully to notepad. Hopefully it's gone then.

Excel will promt you telling that spaces=tabs and ask you how you wanna open the document..choose option 1 (excel2010) "divided" > next window option 1 "tabstopp" next window option 1 "standard" and click finish...once you are done save by closing subwindow..Excel will tell you that certain elemtns are not compatible with unicode..just ignore and save anyway

You can set pzdat files to open in Excel by default - so just double-click them and they open already in columns. However, I believe there are times when it affects the format and requires a text editor. For example, in my efforts to get SE units I modified the nations.pzdat file. The Editor would not open with an error message about global parameters. I reverted the pzdat in Excel back to the original values - Editor still did not open. I could only get the Editor to work if I deleted nations.pzdat and copied across a new one - I could edit it in Notepad++ and the Editor would open. Go figure! Anyway, I use Excel with pzdats in 95% of cases and Notepad++ for the other weird 5%.

El_Condoro wrote:You can set pzdat files to open in Excel by default - so just double-click them and they open already in columns. However, I believe there are times when it affects the format and requires a text editor. For example, in my efforts to get SE units I modified the nations.pzdat file. The Editor would not open with an error message about global parameters. I reverted the pzdat in Excel back to the original values - Editor still did not open. I could only get the Editor to work if I deleted nations.pzdat and copied across a new one - I could edit it in Notepad++ and the Editor would open. Go figure! Anyway, I use Excel with pzdats in 95% of cases and Notepad++ for the other weird 5%.

..if you would not make excel call the pzdats by default this problem would not occur..it has to do with the internal excel text checking and conversion tool..if excel is forced to open these files it will use a default profile which, with certain files, will screw the format totally and once screwed its not even possible to revert back as the spaces and tabs got mixed up and Excel has no reference anymore what was what...the problem with these textfiles is that a space can be a tab or not...once screwed the internal formatting (which includes the references if space=space or space=tab) the file is almost lost...

its really more secure to open excel and then open the file you want making sure excel uses the right configuration (divided,tabstopp,standard) and not a default profile...this way these weird 5% are not going to happen... ...In my initial experiments with the game engine I edited the nations file quite a few times and never ran into any issue...

OK, that's good to know. So far the 'weird' stuff is very rare but at least I know why now. Cheers.

Turns out some of those thingies were in the latest release of USMC indeed, but as far as I can see only in "reserved" lines of the eqp file, so shouldn't cause a real problem. Still I'll provide a clean file as hotfix asap...