Fantastic Worlds hates me

Xuenay · July 1, 2001, 23:39

As some of you might remember (probably not, though), I started making an War Of The Ages scenario a long time ago. Due to a harddrive crash, however, I lost all my work, and only recently decided to start all over. I've done some little work on scenarios before, but the only bug I've encountered so far has been the infamous memory leak, which fortunately is nearly harmless if you know how to handle it.

However, lately I've began to get a lot of wierd bugs. First of all, the changes I had in the rules.txt file suddenly got erased. Back to default units, improvements, and advances. I hadnt done much work, so I figured that it wouldnt really matter, as long as this wouldnt happen again.

Then the next problem. Suddenly, the game started ignoring the changes I made to the units. I'd start up the scenario, and see that my Baby Settlers and Bunkers had been replaced with normal Settlers and Marines. I tried what happened if I inserted the changed units into the rules.txt file that Civ2 loads on startup, and it crashed. I further played around with the units, figuring that I had illegal values in some of the units. Finally I just turned all the units to "Test Unit 8"'s, planning to return my edited units one by one to find out which one was causing problems. But to my suprise, the game ignored this all-test unit 8 configuration as well, once again loading the default units. Then I copied the units section of the rules to an another scenario, and it worked with no problems. Puzzled, I renamed the folder from agewar to agewr, and suddenly it all worked. For now.

Next problem: when I edited the city improvements in the improvement editor, I got an error saying something along the lines of "I/O error writing to rules.txt" once I hit OK. I opened the improvement editor to see if it had saved the changes, and it looked like it had saved some of the changes, but not all of them. I went to rules.txt to make the changes manually, only to find out that the entire @IMPROVE section was missing. Maybe I accidentially deleted it while playing around with the units. Ah well. I opened the improvement editor, did the changes I wanted, cut & pasted the @IMPROVE section from the original rules to the rules.txt file and hit 'OK' in the improvement editor. Everything went without problems, and it saved the changes I wanted.

Okay, I got tired from fighting the game so I closed down Civ 2 for a while. When I returned to working on the scenario I found out that loading the scenario now caused Windows to complain about an illegal function. Other saved games pasted into the folder produced the same effect, so the problem must be with rules.txt. Again.

I think I'll just forget about making the scenario...