posted 10-10- 07:38 PM               

I seem to remember there where some issues with par files and the last two plane packs?

I faintly remember the discussion on the fsarea51 mailing list but I can't be bothered to wade through 5000 emails ;-)

Was it something to do with the SDOE loading files in the order they are in the parfile?

Exactly what does SDOE do and in what order to launch a mission?

I hoping someone can answer these questions so I can address the problems with CTD's, mismatches and par files.

A couple of weeks after SDOE was released I wrote a program to extract files from par files. Recently I've re-written the guts of the program so I've now got some more elegant classes to do the same and will soon extend then to build / manipulate par files. I'm halfway through writing a set a base classes to mess with sm files. I may turn the lot into COM objects if anyone wants this.

Hopefully this lot will make the basis of an app to build / add / check parfiles/smfiles, test the SDOE structure, generally things to help sdoe plane builders. At the same time it will give me the chance to play around will lots of Ide-like app design that I never get to do as a database/web developer...

Interesting?

posted 10-10- 07:58 PM               

TS

posted 10-11- 12:01 PM            

Maybe the utility you're working on will fix the bug seen that Tailslide mentioned for building parfiles.

The order that SDOE loads files is the following (to the best of my knowledge):

posted 10-11- 01:37 PM               

When I did Conteat Pack 1.1 and the WWI packs par files I found some interesting things that were causing the mission breifings to get garbled. To my knowledge the only problem we have had with par files expecially after all my testing was the garbled mission texts.

What I found to be causing the garbled mission text was basically training missions for planes that in turn didn't even include the targetted aircraft.

ex.
The Hurricanes missions worked fine in contest pack 1.1 as long as its missions weren't in a par file. After careful examination I found that one of the missions, I believe the air to ground mission, didn't even include the hurrican. It was simple the spitfires air to ground mission stuck in the hurricaes folder. What was even more bizzare was having the hurricanes missions in the the par file also messed up the spits mission breifings.

To rememdy the whole situation with Contest Pack 1.1 and keep me from hand editing every mission for all aircraft I simply took the offensive missions and left them out of the par file to be dropped into the appropriate directory. Seeing as the missions are very small this didn't effect the size of the end result in anyway so it was a happy medium.

In closing I would like to point out that the par files worked perfect for 5.3 without any of these glitches so IMHO there isn't a problem with par files.

posted 10-11- 02:49 PM               

To: fsarea51@egroups.com
Delivered-To: mailing list fsarea51@egroups.com
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 15:08:12 -0500
From: "Michael S. Harrison"
Subject: RE: [fsarea51] 5.3b Patch RC2

You guys aren't going to like this (probably), but based on the problems I found when helping Whirl put together the contest package, I recommend that you make the plane pack a .par file-less package.

Two reasons:

1) There is a problem with the parfile code not finding some files. I've fixed this in our code but can't estimate when the fix will be generally available.

2) You shouldn't have problems with users having incompatible files on their drives. When sending out par files, there is always the possibility of the user having a raw file which overrides the "new" files you just distributed. This wasn't much of a concern many moons ago, but now that everyone and his dog are putting out planes, it becomes more of a concern.