Author Topic: Moving Areas into a hak  (Read 511 times)

Legacy_kalbaern

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Moving Areas into a hak
« on: May 24, 2013, 03:54:28 pm »


               A few years ago, as an experiment, I'd placed a couple of my seldom used areas/maps into a serverside hak. They seemed to work fine until I recently tried to add another 50 or so (initially had only 5 in hak). Now, the transitions for these maps nolonger work. Is there a specific sequence to removing areas to a hak serverside I'm missing perhaps?
               
               

               
            

Legacy_Lightfoot8

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Moving Areas into a hak
« Reply #1 on: May 26, 2013, 04:33:25 pm »


               interesting.  

If memory is correct.  Transitions are set up via the name of the area and the tag of the object to transition to.    I currently do not have the game installed so i can not look into it heavily. so I will just give some pointers to hopefully get you on the right track.  

There are two possible causes, that i can see.  according to how the Area is stored in the .are file.  

1. Stored by Area Name.
Area names are not straight forward.   All areas have at least one name that it was created with. This name does not change unless you make a copy of the area.   If you ever rename an area, it ends up having two names separated by a colon.  ie.  "Created Name : Display Name"

Therefore if you are making copies of your areas  via the toolset to place in the haks you may be changing the Created Name of the area and messing up the transitions that way.  


2. Stored by Object ID.  
I do not really  think that the areas are by Object ID, in the Hak, Since Object ID are not generated until the game starts.  If they are stored by ID then it is because the Toolset is calculating out what ID they are going to receive once the game starts.   Area ID's are simply the first ID's assigned after the module itself.  The module is ID 0, followed by ID 1,2,3,4,5,... For each of the areas.    They are assigned in alphabetical order for each of the Areas, By created name,   not the Display Name.  So if  the area Target is being stored by ID, you could be running into a problem when you are adding areas into the  module.   If the creation name of the added  area was  less then the created name of an area in the hak.  The toolset would not be able to update the information in the hak.   But again I do not think this the case.  The problem is most likely with the Created names for the areas,  Something that is  really not shown much in the toolset or game.  The display name is normally what you will visually see in toolset.

Hope that gives you a place to start.
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Legacy_kalbaern

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Moving Areas into a hak
« Reply #2 on: May 28, 2013, 07:16:16 pm »


               OK ... some interesting peculiarities have been found. It did have to do with the naming of areas, but not due to copying them or exporting them into a hak and removing from the module. It has to due with the fact that some of the newer areas I was trying to add to my serverside hak were using a color/alt code prefix to colorize their names IG. I've been using a color code prefix to have my area names display in yellow as I've been updating them the past 6 months. This moves them to the top of my area lists both IG and the toolset which is handy in the toolset especially to see which I still need to finalize (was updating loot and foraging module wide) and lets players no not to bug report non-updated maps. '<img'>

Exporting and adding these areas into my serverside hak however would break their transitions and, if I tried to do a module build from the toolset, it corrupted the whole module each time. Removing the color/alt code prefixes and re-exporting them all and then deleting them from the running copy after adding to the hak fixes the issue now.

Long story - short, don't use color code prefixes in anything you want added into a hak.