DescentBB

I was working on adding some bots to a level for lan games with my friends and I planned to use matcens to spawn bots every few minutes (like that Robo Fight Mission Pack did forever ago). I have put matcens in levels before and even put several in a level but that was about 8 years back and for some reason now they aren't working now.

When I try to add a matcen to the level I click new matcen and enter in all the information and close the window but it seems D3Edit doesn't save the information I typed in. When I open the matcen window again the new matcen is there with all the default settings.

I have used D3Edit v1.1b8 & v1.1b8j by Nirvana and v1.1b10 by Atan. None of them work. My only guess is that it's a bug with Windows XP because last time I created matcens I was using Windows 98. I don't have a win98 machine handy to test it out on either.

Anybody have any ideas?

Personally, I've not had a problem with XP. But, it's been so long since I've used the editor, I couldn't fill you in on any tips.

sorry.

Hmmm... I'm almost to the point of wondering if I should bother editing descent anymore...

Are you remembering to update (recompile) you mn3 file after each time you alter the d3l? If you have, you might try recompiling a new mn3 file each time you want to test your changes. I went through a time where over-writing the mn3 would do me no good and it would either corrupt or simply wouldn't \"take\".

the editor, even with Atan's improvements is still buggy. At least is isn't crashing every 5 minutes. Good grief those days were horrible.

I am saving and updating the mn3, it but it's D3Edit that doesn't seem to remember the changes. I can type in the settings then close the window and open it again and they will be gone.

I just tried it with a new level with a default room and it seems to have worked that time... silly D3Edit. Maybe something's broken with the level. I'll have to tinker with it some more and see if I can find out anything else.

If you have the guts, you can set up metcens via scripting.

Ya, I did that once, I might do that again because the default matcen settings don't leave the matcen continually active. I was going to test it first though, I don't see a need to be spawning bots all over the level when players are only in one area. But depending on what D3Edit means by only making the matcen active when players are nearby I might need to script them. I was hoping this project would be quick and easy.

fulano wrote:I have used D3Edit v1.1b8 & v1.1b8j by Nirvana and v1.1b10 by Atan. None of them work.

Erm. Maybe you should have a quick look at the calendar.

Those versions are much more than just outdated.

http://www.descentforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2577

Oh my goodness I never knew Atan kept working on it! I rarely go to descentforum.de due to the fact I don't speak German. Thanks!

Is that the latest and greatest version of the sdk on that page that anybody knows of?

Doh!

thanks Thomas, I totally missed the revs he posted.

So much for my powers of observation.

I wish Atan would release the source to his changes of D3Edit. It is kind of hard to fix/improve things.

Jeff.Slutter wrote:I wish Atan would release the source to his changes of D3Edit. It is kind of hard to fix/improve things.

I'm not Atan, and I can't promise anything, but I think that's something that can be discussed.

So the newer version is less buggy but it still resets my settings for no reason I can see.

For example I want the matcen to create 8 types of bots. I change the number of object types to 8, then I start selecting the bots I want it to produce but every few clicks it resets the entire production list back to \"none.\" I'm having this issue with several of the string fields in the matcen window.

I doubt whatever bug is causing it would be that hard to find & fix if we can get the source code...

I reduced the number of objects being spawned and it worked.

Next problem is the bots don't seem to want to fly around and explore, even though their AI settings were almost copied from the purple D3bot which would at least explore the room it was put in.

As far as I can tell I don't need any path or AI nodes. Any ideas?

Is the 1.5 dev team thinking of updating D3Edit?

Do they need to? D3Edit is open-source last I checked.