Thanks for the update

Had to update again, the current patch managed to get memory addresses placed in a way which broke the address finding heuristic for game init code.

First post here.

First of all, thank you Neiv for providing us a hope for returning to meaningful modding even though the Remastered seemed to have shut us out. I'm a longtime mapmaker but only recently returned to this stuff after years of hiatus. After jumping through a few hoops I've managed to use SAMASE to compile an executable for my current project but I ran into an unexpected issue. One of the campaign maps packaged in with the rest of the stuff crashes on load - when I click Start after briefing. The issue is persistent. The minidump is at the following cloud link.

https://cloud.mail.ru/public/DoVe/JKYrPbEDj

Oddly enough this same map is fully loadable and playable when I play it as a custom game (choosing the .scx from which the scenario.chk that I later imported came). I have two more maps imported to replace the stock campaign and they both work fine. What may cause this and what may need to be done?

The map in question replaces Terran mission 7 in Brood War. The others imported so far are replacing Protoss 3 and Terran 6 in Brood War if it matters. In the past I never encountered any problems replacing stock campaigns in MPQs.

Thanks in advance.

Did you set the player's race to zerg in the map that crashes?

The crash seems to be from game trying to play invalid music. With campaign maps, the game selects starting music cycling on map id, e.g. 1st map plays terran1, 2nd terran2, 3rd terran3, 4th terran1 again.

But if the player's race is a race whose first campaign mission is normally later than the current map - so
Episode 1: Zerg/Protoss
Episode 2: Protoss
Episode 4: Terran/Zerg
Episode 5: Zerg
the game ends up cycling songs "1/0/-1".

For terran/protoss, the music id just underflows to other races and should work, but zerg tracks are ordered first in the internal data, and underflowing from there will actually crash the game.

Yes, exactly.

Ah, the power of rock 'n roll - it can even crash programs. Looks like the code isn't very robust if it allows such things to happen, innit? Then again, the creators of the game probably did not foresee that their creation would eventually be picked apart like a matchstick house and made to do some very odd things.

Ahem, yes, I was aware of the map id / music connection. It would have been kinda hard not to notice, given that I was tinkering with replacing built-in campaigns since, well, forever. But I was not aware of this bug (?) you described because I was mostly replacing Episode VI campaign with a mostly Terran set of missions (I chose ep6 because I needed something with 10 missions and a bonus one, instead of 8 with a fork at mission 5). When I did replace the Episode IV for another campaign I think I was setting the player race to Protoss regardless of what was on the map, even though the player only controlled the Protoss for the second half of the campaign only... So that means I narrowly avoided a fatal crash that would've been inexplicable for me back then (in 2002...)

I suppose everything related to music is hardcoded so there is really no way around except switching to using Terran / Zerg campaigns instead of Protoss / Terran? I'll only have about 18 maps' worth so it's not like I can't be flexible with placement. Short of that, I will (reluctantly) change the race of the player in that affected mission even though it really should be Zerg because the player has Zerg economy for the majority of the mission.

Thanks for the help! I was thinking of the cause for half the last evening / night and, suffice to say, was nowhere near discovering the true cause. Ah, the wonders of discovering hidden pitfalls in SC modding even 20 years after the game's release. So far the only caveat regarding the built-in campaigns that I was aware of was that the briefing interface was set to that campaign's race regardless of what the human player's race in the actual mission was, so for the entirety of my previous campaign, I was running mismatched sets of Zerg briefing room and Terran interface in the missions.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 9 2019, 8:26 am by IlyaSnopchenko.

Another thing I ran into. I've attempted to dabble in the Firegraft button editing. So far I haven't done much - just to start, I set Aldaris and the two unused units to have Basic buttonsets, and removed Consume from Infested Duran by giving him the regular "Ghost hero" buttonset. But when I import the .fgp file from the exe/mpq created by Firegraft and attempt to launch the self-executable I compiled for the mod, I get this error:

Before that, when on the first attempt I bold and made some more changes from the get go I got the same kind of error box but with "32" instead of "d". I even checked what the buttonset 32 was, it was Zerg Hive - which I came nowhere near when editing.

Can anyone tell me where is the mistake? I know Firegraft'ing works with SCR, I've seen it done here. Should I have imported any other files except the firegraft\*.fgp?

I'm sorry I look so dumb but all my editing skills/mores are from 15 years ago and I feel like an old geezer coming to a teen party and attempting to look relevant.

Attachments:

Ah the error message is bad since it shows the buttonset number in hex instead of base 10. Try checking buttonset 14 (Or you can type 0xd in firegraft's goto box). Or maybe it's referring to unit 14? Not sure.

Firegraft does sometimes add corrupted/blank buttons that samase doesn't like, there's probably one somewhere there.

Thanks. I tried it again and went back to having "invalid buttonset 32" (I guess that's 50 in decimal speak). Weird thing is, this time I started from scratch and didn't even edit any of the buttonsets, just changed around which unit used which. I did not touch the buttonset 50 (reaver) but I did change something peripherally related to it - I tried to make a second carrier hero out of Warbringer reaver unit (since carriers and reavers share some of the mechanics anyway). So I set that unit's buttonset to that of a carrier and then edited the order requirements for any orders pertaining to Carriers. And got this.

Oddly enough I did get the error (though pointing to a different buttonset) even if I didn't do any of this and just cleaned up some stuff like I did initially. Can anyone help me find the root cause and/or do the correct modification for me?

This is all so new and unknown for me... for the longest time I had no use for button editing, but now I'm totally at sea.

Could also be a bug in samase. If you can share the .fgp file I could take a look at what's going on there.

Thanks Neiv! Here's the file.

So one more question, how do I use plugins with Samase? Just place the .qdp files inside the archive? If yes, at what path?

fgp goes in `moddirectory\firegraft\`, plugin files like aise and mtl go in `moddirectory\samase\`

Thanks. I have a bunch of old plugins laying around, just need to make sure of which does what.

Only aise and mtl work with scr currently, as far as I'm aware. Old plugins won't work with anything past 1161.

So Thundergraft is a no go? And I'm pretty sure I want to know what MTL is...

From my discord:
Remember you also need a file simply called `plugins` (no extension) in `moddirectory\samase\`. Mine just has two lines:

I know you were onto something when I tried playing Hydra. To be honest, I did disembowel the exe file and did find the mtl.qdp and mtl.ini there, though I wasn't sure of the exact limits of functionality imbued in this utility. But I decided I'd rather ask than just pilfer stuff from somebody else's work.

Okay, the buttonset error was a samase bug. (It didn't accept fgp files that only changed what buttonsets units link to without touching the buttons themselves) I updated the exe in the first post.

Thanks! I'll get to testing that in a few hours (after work), and tell you how it goes.

UPDATE: It works. It's my modifications that don't.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jan 24 2019, 10:52 am by IlyaSnopchenko.

Another crash caused by... not sure what. It repeats after loading saved game and continuing???

I can't check crashes the way Neiv does, but from your description that sounds like you might have loaded a save game after you made changes to some script that was used during that game?