WinAGI Version 2.1.10

[klownstein]

I'm glad to know that I am not the only person to have had this happen! I ran into this less than a week ago and thought I'd done something crazy because all my comments and formatting throughout all my logics had seemed to disappear. I wasn't even able to retrieve them by opening my backups. All my comments/editing had just disappeared. I even uninstalled my old version of WinAGI and reinstalled the most current version to see if it would fix it, without success. I just started to process of trying to re-add comments and rename variables yesterday so I could read my code again. But, thanks to your post, I have been able to find that my comments aren't really gone into oblivion. I'm sure it was something I did that caused the issue, but I don't know what it was, so wouldn't be able to reproduce it (on purpose anyway). Thanks a million!
-klownstein

[obscurenforeign]

Can you check which version you are using? If it's 2.1.10, I believe there was a bug with the 'New from Template' function.

2.1.12 here. I made sure to download a fresh copy of WinAGI from the wiki. (Not that I really had a choice, it wasn't installed on my PC anymore.)

What's happening is that the game file name and resource directory name aren't being properly renamed after they get copied from the template. The template game filename is 'AGIV2.wag', and the template resource directory is named 'Resources'. Which matches what you are describing. The wag file does have your new resource directory name (src), but since the copied directory didn't get renamed to 'src', when you re-open the game, it will create a directory named 'src', and then decompile the logics. Your solution is a good way to fix the problem.

This was actually what clued me in. I decided to screw around (because what else will I do with hosed barely-developed source code?) with the data files in the project directory when I realized that the wag file is actually just plaintext. I saw "ResDir = src" and I figured I may as well try copying the lgc files over. (Afterwards I deleted the files in the src directory to see if they were even being accessed... and I made a backup of the project files after finding my comments gone, at least...)

I'm glad to know that I am not the only person to have had this happen! I ran into this less than a week ago and thought I'd done something crazy because all my comments and formatting throughout all my logics had seemed to disappear. I wasn't even able to retrieve them by opening my backups. All my comments/editing had just disappeared. I even uninstalled my old version of WinAGI and reinstalled the most current version to see if it would fix it, without success. I just started to process of trying to re-add comments and rename variables yesterday so I could read my code again. But, thanks to your post, I have been able to find that my comments aren't really gone into oblivion. I'm sure it was something I did that caused the issue, but I don't know what it was, so wouldn't be able to reproduce it (on purpose anyway). Thanks a million!
-klownstein

It's a really terrible feeling to lose a significant amount of work like that. I'm glad my post helped you! (Fortunately for me I barely wrote half a function before I had to close WinAGI, so my mood was mild annoyance...)

I'm just a bit amused that every time I try picking this program up again, I seem to find a brand new bug... no offense.

[AGKorson]

I'm glad to know that I am not the only person to have had this happen! I ran into this less than a week ago and thought I'd done something crazy because all my comments and formatting throughout all my logics had seemed to disappear. I wasn't even able to retrieve them by opening my backups. All my comments/editing had just disappeared. I even uninstalled my old version of WinAGI and reinstalled the most current version to see if it would fix it, without success. I just started to process of trying to re-add comments and rename variables yesterday so I could read my code again. But, thanks to your post, I have been able to find that my comments aren't really gone into oblivion. I'm sure it was something I did that caused the issue, but I don't know what it was, so wouldn't be able to reproduce it (on purpose anyway). Thanks a million!
-klownstein

I'm sorry you had trouble with this. It's hard to do thorough testing on such a complex application, but I still should have caught this one before release.

One thing I did make sure I incorporated into WinAGI was a philosophy of protecting game files as much as possible from catastrophic errors; it's pretty hard to make things actually disappear; backup copies are made of game files before running critical file operations, so if something does go wrong, it should be possible to recover. And if the WAG file gets corrupted, it may not know where resources are anymore but they aren't gone - they'll still be in the source directory.

I prefer (and strongly recommend) using the 'AutoExport' option (on the General tab of the Settings form) to always have backup copies of non-logic resources as well. That way, if disaster strikes your VOL and DIR files, you still have all your pictures, sounds, and views as individual files.

I am curious how you got into this situation - for the WAG file to get confused about the location of your source files, it had to have been modified somehow to point to the wrong subdirectory. If you still have the 'broken' WAG file on your system, can open it in a text editor and see what it looks like? It might give a hint as to what happened if I know what properties got changed. I'm hoping it's something you did, and not a bug!

Oh, and btw, have you had a chance to check out Flag Quest? It's got code in there that shows how to move objects in a straight line. Check it out, and let me know if you have any questions. Hopefully it's something you can use in your project.

[AGKorson]

2.1.12 here. I made sure to download a fresh copy of WinAGI from the wiki. (Not that I really had a choice, it wasn't installed on my PC anymore.)

Yeah, I went back and checked the change history in github, and found that I made that fix AFTER releasing 2.1.12.

I'm just a bit amused that every time I try picking this program up again, I seem to find a brand new bug... no offense.

Well, it does suck a bit when I learn of these kinds of bugs- I always try to make sure everything is working before releasing it. But on the plus side, any extra help with testing is a good thing, so I can at least get these bugs fixed, and get an update out.

Speaking of which, I have another update that's pretty much ready for release, but before I do, are you aware of any other bugs (big or small) that I need to address? I'd like to get this out in the next couple of days.

Thx again for all the feedback!

[ZvikaZ]

Hi.
It's a good opportunity to say how much I, and I assume everyone here, appreciate your work on creating, and constantly improving, WinAGI.

I prefer (and strongly recommend) using the 'AutoExport' option

Suggestion - if this feature is strongly recommended, maybe you can turn it on by default? If someone dislikes it, it can always be turned off.

[Collector]

Hey Andrew, off topic , but how's progress on your C# implementation going?

[AGKorson]

Hi.
It's a good opportunity to say how much I, and I assume everyone here, appreciate your work on creating, and constantly improving, WinAGI.

I prefer (and strongly recommend) using the 'AutoExport' option

Suggestion - if this feature is strongly recommended, maybe you can turn it on by default? If someone dislikes it, it can always be turned off.

Thx for the compliment, I appreciate it.

AutoExport actually is on by default, at least it has been for all version 2 releases.

When you upgrade from one version to another, your settings (usually) get saved, so if you had it turned off before it will remain turned off even after an upgrade. This is actually an unintended side effect of how Windows stores the configuration settings file; it typically is put in the AppsData folder instead of the game directory, so when you remove an old version (an absolute must when upgrading), the config file doesn't usually go away. So when you reinstall the next version, WinAGI just grabs the previous config file and chugs along.) There are a few situations where Windows will kill the config file after uninstalling, but I haven't figured out exactly what's going on. I haven't spent a lot of energy trying to tweak the installation process, and have pretty much accepted what ever Windows throws at me as long as the program installs and runs.

So if you've ever disabled it in the past, it will (usually) remain disabled after an update. But it's easy enough to turn back on.

[AGKorson]

Hey Andrew, off topic , but how's progress on your C# implementation going?

I got most of the code working to load and view game resources; it's still quite buggy, and need a lot of work to clean up all the bad coding practices that come from the VB6 model. I haven't even started on any of the editors yet. That was almost a year ago.

I got sidetracked last year on another AGI project. I'm not ready to share that project yet - hopefully real soon. Once that's done I'll try to refocus on C#.

But I can't help myself from tweaking the VB6 code; I am using WinAGI a lot on my current project, and often come across new bugs and tweaks that I just can't ignore. Old habits (and familiar tools) die hard I guess.

[Collector]

I know what you mean about the VB practices. As I have noted elsewhere my SCI Audio Utilities started life as VB and its conversion to C# is how I first taught myself C#. It was mostly just a conversion when I should have just completely rewritten it in C#. Inevitable bugs are a result. I have it mostly refactored, but have not touched it in a while. I still need to finish the Unicode support, but have been distracted by other projects, too.