The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 28, 2008

Official News page 4


WHAT YOU SHOULD NEVER DO WITH YOUR PLANET FILES

by Hazed

When you design a planet, you end up with map files for the planet and the space, and (optionally) message files to go with them. These files are in a special format that the editors, and the game itself, understand.

If you were to look at a map file outside of the editor, as raw data, you would see that as well as your location descriptions it contains all of the details of movements for the locations, the properties, and so on - everything that you determined in the editor is stored in the file. The file also contains lots of codes in pointy brackets that label the information. Those of you who are programmers or techies of some kind might recognize the file as an XML file.

So, those of you who know a bit about such things might think, "If it's an XML file, I should be able to make changes to it outside of the map editor - by loading it into a text editor, for example."

But you would be wrong.

You should never, Never,NEVER make any changes to your planet files using any program except the proper editor.

I cannot put this strongly enough. No matter how clever you think you are, no matter how experienced you are at working with XML files in other applications, don't do it. It's just too dangerous.

If you don't get things in exactly the right format, either the file won't load into the game properly, or it will load but will do strange things. Either way, your planet will be messed up.

An even better way to mess your file up is to load it into a word processing program such as Microsoft Word, then save it again. Word puts all sorts of formatting info of its own into files when it saves them, which is most definitely not compatible with the workbench editors or with the game.

So don't - the only program that should ever touch your map files is the location editor, and only the message editor should play with your messages.


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