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"FFEDIT Gotcha, or "The Flying Objects""

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bobs (246 posts)
Dec-03-01, 10:36 PM (EST) "FFEDIT Gotcha, or "The Flying Objects"" In the interest of helping others avoid problems, I'll describe something I've discovered and can attribute to FFEDIT.While working on MP3.0, I decided to pack the world files that I'd been changing. Since either Paul or I had changed virtually every .w file, I decided I'd just copy all of them and let FFEDIT do its thing. After all, it can read a binary and unpack it so it should recognize that it is reading a binary and NOT repack it, right?Never assume! (my new motto)After doing this and going back into the route editor to work on the Kalispell branch, I suddenly found several areas where, as I flew over objects, they disappeared from the ground, only to reappear, flying above my camera, away from me, twice as fast as I was moving, and UPSIDE DOWN. No, I was not on drugs. There were also flashes of pieces of structures hitting the camera, then all of a sudden they all vanished into thin air. When I turned around, some were back on the ground, others were missing.I replaced these tiles with the ones from before the FFEDIT compression run and all was well.Until today, when I found one more. So, I decided to investigate this a little further. This was in binary form, or so I thought, so I ran it through FFEDIT to unpack it and take a look. Imagine my surprise when FFEDIT said it was converting this file to a BINARY file! The new file was 5 or 6 times larger, and sure enough, was in Binary. Running it through FFEDIT again got the expected "converting to text" message and the expected text file. However, whatever caused the objects to do their strange behavior was still there in all 3 versions.The good news is that this particular tile is one neither Paul nor myself have changed, so I was able to get a copy from the original route and replace the problem tile.But, what is going on with FFEDIT? What did it convert the binary input file to? Obviously it is a format that MSTS can read, but it is also buggy.So, the moral to the story is to make sure you don't accidentally run an already-packed file into FFEDIT expecting to pack it, because the results may be, as they say, "unpredictable," and you may not be lucky enough to have a backup!
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Subject Author Message Date ID RE: FFEDIT Gotcha, or "The Flying O... cyberstorm Dec-04-01 1 RE: FFEDIT Gotcha, or "The Flying O... bobs Dec-04-01 2

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cyberstorm (87 posts)
Dec-04-01, 02:31 AM (EST) 1. "RE: FFEDIT Gotcha, or "The Flying Objects"" Dont know what FFedit does but this sounds like a classic "doesn't deal with negative numbers" problem. Your Y Coordinates have been negated incorrectly thats why things are upside down and above you.Just a thoughtTerry Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
bobs (246 posts)
Dec-04-01, 06:50 PM (EST) 2. "RE: FFEDIT Gotcha, or "The Flying Objects"" Yup, that's what I thought too. One or more of the coordinates have been negated.Well, Paul Doty found out how to fix this. While you can't select any of the items that float, apparently if you select something else in the tile, move it a little, and save it, all is well.FFEDIT is the utility used to turn shape and world files into binary files that are much smaller and load into the sim faster. When you edit a tile in the route editor, the result is stored in text form. You have to run FFEDIT to pack it into binary, although the text form will load just fine. It just takes longer. FFEDIT can also be used to unpack a binary to text. Apparently it has some other "features" we don't know about. It is in a subdirectory of the UTILS directory of TS. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

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