Danger of opening in Normal then HWA

I have a HWA project which I accidently opened in normal MMF, changed a few things and saved it.

Is this going to break my application?

Its possible.

Non HWA may not know to re-save things like shaders and effects.

Worst case scenario; you'll be able to manually repair the game by opening two projects (or 2 MMF's if it's crashing) and piece by piece extract your resources and MMF code.

Clickteam should see this as a reason to separate HWA mfa's.

and you should see this as a reason to backup your work.


I'm sure you could have tested this without a forum thread :P

I have MMF2 set to make backups, five of them. What it does is each time you save over the old file, it changes the name of the old file to Fil.001. It will also renam all others to make room for the shift. The oldest ones have the highest numbers and the newest ones have the lowest numbers. You can use this to get your old work back. ;)

100 backups for me :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SEELE

Clickteam should see this as a reason to separate HWA mfa's.

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or at least show a warning dialog when opening hwa-modified mfa's in standard mmf

If you resave the game, there are definitely some errors that could crop up. I did a test by opening my largest HWA project, saving it as non-HWA in standard, then reopening it in HWA. The pixel shaders still worked fine, but all effects that used transparency (blend coefficients) were now "forgotten".


Currently have about 3 gigabytes of redundantly backed up files!

Yes, re-saving a HWA-made .mfa in the standard build can cause irreversible damage (the file may always crash when you run it).
As Seele says, your only option is to copy & paste everything into a new file.

This is not a reason to separate HWA mfas though - this is a reason to merge the HWA and standard MMF2 builds.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MuddyMole

This is not a reason to separate HWA mfas though - this is a reason to merge the HWA and standard MMF2 builds.

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Well said!

I agree i said in another thread i think they should be merged. If it's just going to be the HWA effects and not much else then they should get merged. If there would be a more advanced layering system with masks and layer modes etc available to be controlled with the event system without objects and various other new things for nicer graphics then keep them separate.

With HWA it feels limiting to me right now because of the way you can't stack effects, store them in layers and save those etc and have to use workarounds for this like coding two effects as one etc yet similar apps allow it and make it easy to do and i hope HWA gets this feature also at some point. Basically though i just don't think just the effects is worth making it a separate app or at least how it is now. Don't get me wrong HWA effects are great but there should be other advanced graphics based options like people have suggested if it stays a separate app to the standard version, if not then just merge them in my opinion.

I only use the hwa version now, and since you can compile in both standard mode as well as hwa mode in the hwa version aren't they already combined?

I say the only thing left to do is removing the standard exe completely.

The way I switch between runtimes in the same project is by having two groups that manage effects. One for compiling in hwa mode and one for standard. I enable the appropriate group before compiling.