Bug In Restore!

You might remember Context/Restore...

I just noticed a very annoying bug in Restore of Context/Restore fame. Apparently, it doesn't have enough memory to properly do big prices, and I'm not sure why. I have alot of expensive outfits, so it's really, really annoying. For example, A Turn Jet System-200 is supposed to cost 3,000,000 creds. But after I run it through Restore, it comes out as 420,012,000. Now, as a computer engineer, I believe this is probably a problem with memory overflow- probably something simple like using a short int instead of a long int, but with Dr. Ralph gone, is there any hope of getting this fixed?

-me fears of the prices in Sephil Saga...-

I think as well that overflow may indeed be the reason, though overflow would usually give a result in the restricting range. The problem lies with ResStore, not ConText, right?

You don't need to fear the prices... that much Money earned has been raised somewhat comensurately.

But indeed, that's what I found strange to- it should end up in the restricted range if it was a 2 byte overflow error. So who knows? Still, somehow the value is getting corrupted.

I'm pretty sure the problem is just with Restore- I haven't noticed any junk coming out of Context and I check those values much more thouroghly (usually) than the restored values.

-Sorry for the delay-
I tested ResStore with some high outfit price values, and everything comes out fine for me. What I did is ConTexting the Nova Data 4 outfits, modified an outfit price in the text file, and dropped it to ConText, rinse and repeat for a number of values between 32767 and 2,000,000,000, including 3,000,000.
Anything unusual about the file you're attempting to ResStore? Is it really big, or something else that may be relevant?

Zacha Pedro, on Oct 6 2004, 09:14 AM, said:

-Sorry for the delay-
I tested ResStore with some high outfit price values, and everything comes out fine for me. What I did is ConTexting the Nova Data 4 outfits, modified an outfit price in the text file, and dropped it to ConText, rinse and repeat for a number of values between 32767 and 2,000,000,000, including 3,000,000.
Anything unusual about the file you're attempting to ResStore? Is it really big, or something else that may be relevant?
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No problem- thanks for looking into it.
The file I'm working with is pretty big (approx 400 outfits and growing), but that shouldn't be the problem. I do have a bunch of cells on the outside of the given resources, things that only matter to me- but that may be screwing things up. I'll check it out and get back to you. If that is the problem, it is really strange that it should only mess up the prices- I haven't noticed any other problems.

Nope- I eliminated all the extra columns, resaved it, and Restored it, and the prices are still messed up for all the high-value items. Also, I noted that it doesn't happen just on prices over 32767- even an item with a cost of -10000 (a loan) is jacked around, and a more conventional item priced at 10000 got converted to 112000. However, fuel, priced at a modest 550 is fine. Could my copies of the programs have broken themselves? I checked all the spreadsheets, before and after text conversion, nothing is getting screwed up there.

In case of doubt, redownloading ConText/ResStore cannot harm, I think.

If that doesn't solve it, well, I suppose you don't feel like letting people peek at your work, but you could make a copy of the spreadsheet, remove all but the outfits in the copy, replace all outfit information but price with always the same generic outfit information (thank God spreadsheet editing software). Then check if ResStore is still giving you problems with that "expurged" copy. If it still does, would you see a problem in sending it to me by email so that I attempt some investigations? Email is LebPierre (at) WanadoodotFR (not com, for obvious reasons, and yes, I'm paranoid about spam bots, this is my main and only email address, and it'has been free of spam so far).

On thing that seems interesting: the corruption seems "decimal": it has a tendancy to respect zeroes, and a digital corruption wouldn't do that. Since the file that ResStore imports is a tabbed text file with the numbers put "just like that", I suspect the problem may lie in the parsing. Also, I didn't test with negatives, will do it.

I use ConText/ResStore all the time and have never encountered this specific problem. Nonetheless, I have encountered difficulties of this nature being caused by the formatting of data in my spreadsheet. For example, I once formatted all shďp prices to use commas after every third digit to ease perception of thousands, millions, etc. When I dumped my spreadsheet to a text file the comma formatting was propagated into the text file which caused problems. Based on that experience, I have a few suggestions:

• Make sure your spreadsheet format of those large prices is plain vanilla.

• Look at the text file dump from your spreadsheet with a text editor to see if anything looks weird and that the price values are being represented as integers.

• If possible, have your text editor display all special characters that would normally be invisible (tabs,spaces,linefeeds, etc.) to see if anything nasty is present.

If that doesn't clear things up, then the great god Murphy must really be pissed off at you.

This post has been edited by Arturo : 07 October 2004 - 01:27 PM

Arturo, you're a friggin' genious (not that you aren't as well, Zacha). That was it, by golly- I had some formatting turned on for the prices- comma separators. I don't even remember doing that. I was creating this particular sheet to be my master sheet, so I was probably trying to make it nice.

In any case, I was going to just send the whole outfits spreadsheet to you Zacha- not much you could do with it without all the descs and crons and everything else, but it might have been fun to look at. I can still send it to you if you're interested.

Well, the board comes through again! W00t.

This is indeed no longer necessary; I suspected a problem of such a kind, with the translation between spreadsheet -> tabbed text. Nice work Arturo!