A multi-pronged attack on converting a TGF game

[Pixelthief]

Heres my issue. Gridquest, seen here:
http://create-games.com/download.asp?id=7169
is a neat little game of mine, very epic scaled, all that jazz. For those who played it, you'd know. But I want to rerelease it compiled in either MMF1.5 or MMF2, because the game suffered from instability & crashes that haunted TGF.

The problem, however, is that the game is a serious clicking feat; it uses somewhere in the realm of 4000-5000 lines of code in a single level to serve as the engine for the game, something that nearly broke TGF. Hence reworking major parts of the code is out of the question.


In order to update it to MMF1.5, I've taken all the neccesary extensions, and everything loads EXCEPT for the INI object, of all things. One of the games .INI's works fine (if I delete the level-loading .INI, the game will run, just without data), so it cannot be the object itself failing to load, but instead something it is doing. Unfortunately, it spans 400+ events on its own.

When I try to run it in MMF1.5, it will crash, stating KCINI.cox had an error @ Offset: 000010bd
This will only occur once it reaches the games engine level, and the rest runs fine. So something inside that code works in TGF, but does not work in MMF. Does anyone know of a function or limitation of the MMF INI object that wouldn't exist in TGF like that?


Next, my further idea is to port it into MMF2. MMF2 is a bit more stable. However, the game relies heavily on the 1000 global value & 1000 global string objects, which do not exist in MMF2. So unless some kind soul can find the source for these, and either convert them or help me convert them, I cannot load the game file in MMF2, either. And as the game uses 1000+ lines of code involving those two extensions, they cannot simply be removed.

So I'm left at an impasse. Whats easier, fixing a broken INI object, or converting two MMF1.5 extensions to MMF2.



What is interesting to note, is that if I remove the 1000 values strings objects from the MMF2 version, it WILL run/compile, not receiving any "KCINI.cox" error. So if I could get updated versions of those objects, I'd be able to release an EXTREMELY spiffy game!

[Pixelthief]

erm, in the case of the converting-to-MMF1.5 thingy, I determined this through sheer luck and deleting lots of code one piece at a time:

The offending lines of code look like this:



Run in TGF or MMF2 this runs fine, run in MMF1.5 it does not.
Removing the "Set Current File to" event makes it run (but this is crucial to gameplay; it is how the game switches levels when traveling off the side of the screen). There are 4 events like this (for each direction). Only when all 4 have this event removed, does the game function, when even 1 has this line still in it, it does not. Nothing is wrong with anything except the "Set Current File to" line

yet the very next pieces of code use the exact same line, with the only difference being "gstring$(6)" instead of "5"


now what the heck is different in TGF, MMF, & MMF2 with the INI object that could cause this

edit:

urgh, it appears to be a problem with the global strings object in MMF1.5 being very unstable, and I can work around it by loading the strings into temporary locations, but it might require a substantial rewrite. Converting to MMF2 would be much nicer

[Werbad]

If you copy the MMF1.5 extensions into the Extensions/mmf1 folder you should be able to open the file and replace them.
But this could take a very long time depending how much you have used the extensions...

[Pixelthief]

yah, but that doesn't help fix the problems. Either I need an MMF2 version of it or I need to find out why the MMF1.5 version, which is the same, does not work.

[Werbad]

You can use MMF2's global values and strings instead. You can have unlimited of them.

[Yves]

1000 global values has been converted for MMF2, but not 1000 global strings :

http://www.clickteam.com/testfiles/mmf2/kc1000gv.zip

[Pixelthief]

ah thanks, all my googling didn't turn that one up.

1000 global strings looks insecure and flimsy enough as it is, I'll just rewrite that part of the code.

[Atom]

1000 global values has been converted for MMF2, but not 1000 global strings

That seems like a useful extension but it doesn't seem to display/work with decimal values.

[Pixelthief]

By the way, want to see something scary? This could take a while:

[Yves]

That seems like a useful extension but it doesn't seem to display/work with decimal values.

This extension is not very useful, as MMF2 has unlimited global values. It has been converted just for compatibility reasons for the ones who want to quickly port old MMF1/TGF1 applications that use this extension.