Introduction Text Woes

For a project of mine

Some of you may know that I'm working on a plug-in that adds capital ships to CTC. For the record, that's what I've been doing in my spare time. Before he abandoned the medium and capital ship portions of CTC, Josh had in mind a system that would use separate char resources for the fighter, medium and capital ship classes. Using one of those resources would enter the pilot into that class. I'm taking the same approach, which requires writing a new introduction text for the capital ship char, but that's where things get sticky.

I've written up a desc that is 7,969 characters long in Word. I exported that intro to a text document to get rid of some of the special formatting that screws up WinNova, copied that into EVNEW, made a char resource that referred to the new desc I had made, booted up Nova, made a new pilot, entered the ship, and was greeted by a crash to the desktop. I'd kinda like to know what's going on here, as I've heard that Pace had a desc in Arpia II that was ~8,600 characters long, and Josh used an intro that was about as long as mine for CTC:F. (CTC: Fighters) I started cutting out parts from the end of the desc and identified a point at around 6,827 characters where Nova stops crashing and instead cuts the desc off at 6,718, where it cuts a word short.

Any ideas? I have a lot of <PN>, <PSN>, <PNN> tags along with {G "his" hers"} expressions in the desc. Could these be messing up Nova?

Are you using any special characters? I seem to remember some weird things caused crashes.

Word says Josh's intro is 7382 characters, counting spaces, with a bunch of Gs and <PN>s and one <PSN>. If taking out special characters doesn't fix things, try pasting Josh's desc 1000 text on top of yours (save yours elsewhere first, of course), just to make sure there isn't something wrong with the desc resource's "wrapper."

Oh, 7382 characters with spaces. Heh, in that case my desc will make even Pace jealous at 9620 characters long. It's cut off at exactly 8112 characters. It looks as if I created a monster.

I didn't use any special characters, if you're talking about stuff like copyright symbols and letters with umlauts.

I don't quite know what you mean by "wrapper," Dr. Trowel. I haven't heard that term used with the desc resource before...

But I have been wondering, is there a known limit on the number of tags and expressions you can have in a desc resource? I have quite a few of those in mine, I'm going to try counting them and see if there's a pattern.

Edit: 50 name tags and 26 "true, false" evaluations without the cutoff point and 36 tags and 21 expressions before the cutoff point. In terms of powers of two, I don't see anything there...

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 01 June 2008 - 04:55 PM

@jacabyte, on Jun 1 2008, 05:44 PM, said in Introduction Text Woes:

I didn't use any special characters, if you're talking about stuff like copyright symbols and letters with umlauts.

What about curved quotation marks? If you wrote in Word, it may have added them automatically.

@jacabyte, on Jun 1 2008, 05:44 PM, said in Introduction Text Woes:

I don't quite know what you mean by "wrapper," Dr. Trowel. I haven't heard that term used with the desc resource before...

I think he's referring to the parts of your dësc resource other than the actual text (the parts that 'wrap' it), though dësc is a simple enough resource type that I have a hard time imagining anything wrong there.

@david-arthur, on Jun 1 2008, 03:49 PM, said in Introduction Text Woes:

What about curved quotation marks? If you wrote in Word, it may have added them automatically.

Ah yes, that kind of crap. I've heard about those little boogers causing trouble before, and I kept hitting the undo key after I typed one to make it a straight quotation mark. Unless I missed something, there shouldn't be any.

@david-arthur, on Jun 1 2008, 03:49 PM, said in Introduction Text Woes:

I think he's referring to the parts of your dësc resource other than the actual text (the parts that 'wrap' it), though dësc is a simple enough resource type that I have a hard time imagining anything wrong there.

Ah, but if there was something wrong with the resource itself, wouldn't it cause problems no matter how much text I had in it?

This problem has me stumped. Perhaps I'm squinting too hard...

@jacabyte, on Jun 1 2008, 06:01 PM, said in Introduction Text Woes:

Ah yes, that kind of crap. I've heard about those little boogers causing trouble before, and I kept hitting the undo key after I typed one to make it a straight quotation mark. Unless I missed something, there shouldn't be any.

It wouldn't hurt to paste it into Notepad or something else lacking 'smart' features and do a search and replace.

@jacabyte, on Jun 1 2008, 06:01 PM, said in Introduction Text Woes:

Ah, but if there was something wrong with the resource itself, wouldn't it cause problems no matter how much text I had in it?

The suggestion was that this particular dësc resource was somehow corrupt, and that that was the real cause of your difficulties, with the length of it being just a coincidence. Apart from the fact that this would be a rather large coincidence, right at the moment I can't think of any way in which a dësc resource could be corrupt.

Tools -> AutoCorrect Options -> Autoformat as you Type -> Replace as you Type ->"Straight Quotes" with “Smart Quotes”

I just saw that. Would be very nice to use in the future, no?

Anyhow, I recopied the text I had in a notepad document into EVNEW, and found a space hidden in a line break. I deleted that space, and was allowed to see one more character in the word that's being broken off. The total of all the characters before the cutoff point: 8095. The cutoff point will change when characters are deleted, so for some reason or another I'm being limited to 8095 characters. I know Pace has gotten more characters in a desc than that, so I'm beginning to wonder if EVNEW is playing some sort of trick on me. I'm going to put the desc into another plug-in and see if that helps. If it doesn't and I don't get anymore suggestions, I'm going to try to transfer this desc to my Mac and see if using Mission Computer instead will make it work.

I remember once testing the limit of the size of a desc (I was trying to make a desc that would show all set ncbs). I think what happened was that EVNEW cut it off at one point in the editor, but then saving it cut more off. Or maybe that was the game. I don't remember.

8095 characters means its really 8096 with the 00 terminator, which doesn't make sense. 4096 would, but it should be 8192.

Well, in any case I'm moving on to seeing if MC will do the trick.

Edit: Craters. I just tried MC and, for some reason, SimpleText inserts "invisible spaces" between every word so word wrap doesn't work; lines are broken off in the middle of words instead of at spaces like they should be.

I'll contact Josh and see if he'll get the text into MC and then a plug-in for me. It should make things a heck of a lot easier for me than trying to do everything in house.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 01 June 2008 - 06:52 PM

Why not make an image containing the text and set it as a startup image? No character limit problems there.

Except for readability size.

Right. 9620 characters on a single image... I recommend a microscope.

Except that due to pixelation that wouldn't work.
I just checked and about 1000 characters can fit comfortably on an 800x600 screen. So this could be used to slide some off to put the desc into the usable range.

What about a desc AND 4 Images? Would that be enough space?

Just tested, yes there's a limit of 8192 (not 8191) characters and they all displayed for me. 8193 crashes. I'd suggest splitting it in two and using a mission to display them when you start. That is, if you don't want to trim it at all.

@lnsu, on Jun 1 2008, 06:56 PM, said in Introduction Text Woes:

What about a desc AND 4 Images? Would that be enough space?

That's what I meant to say.

@guy, on Jun 1 2008, 07:04 PM, said in Introduction Text Woes:

Just tested, yes there's a limit of 8192 (not 8191) characters and they all displayed for me. 8193 crashes.

Actually, that makes sense, since the game only care about the characters, not the terminator like it does with the fixed-sized resources. Is it just EVNEW, or are some fields cut off on one less than a power of two while a few are cut off exactly on?

@guy, on Jun 1 2008, 08:04 PM, said in Introduction Text Woes:

Just tested, yes there's a limit of 8192 (not 8191) characters and they all displayed for me. 8193 crashes. I'd suggest splitting it in two and using a mission to display them when you start. That is, if you don't want to trim it at all.

With or without spaces?

That's weird, though. The cutoff point is taking out other bits of text in the desc that I can see with EVNEW. There does appear to be a point where it crashes but the cutoff point is dead set at 8095 characters. And Pace managed to get a desc into Arpia II that was 8900 characters long. (I just looked it up.) With or without spaces, that's longer than this alleged limit. What gives?

In any case, I'm not going to put an image or a movie into CTC unless it's slideshow like what was done for EV Nova, or a movie to show off graphic expertise. I believe it eliminates the feeling that you're taking part in a story instead of just watching it like a movie or a book. It will also blunt my ability to use wildcard tags like <PN> which are essential to a third person story like the one I'm writing.

Edit: Looks like I just made my 6000th post...

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 02 June 2008 - 10:30 AM

With. Counting them without is not helpful or relevant.
You can tell how many characters a desc has by looking at the size of the resource and subtracting 37. The max size would thus be 8229. The largest desc in ARPIA is the acknowledgements with a character count of 8016.