STRANGE CHARACTERS MESS UP NEW PLANET
by Hazed
Before we took our news break, a new planet was linked into the game that did not appear correctly. It showed up when you did a DI PLANET, it had an exchange that generated jobs and the owner was able to fiddle with the economy.
But when you landed on it, the game couldn’t find the location where you were supposed to go and you wound up in limbo.
Very odd!
Alan pulled the planet out of the game so he could look at the problem and figure out what was going wrong. It took him a while but eventually he found it. The first location on the map had something weird about its description: it contained a couple of strange characters that were not letters, numbers or punctuation.
The game didn’t like these characters and didn’t know what to do with them, so it stopped loading in the file when it got to them. This meant that the planet appeared in the game, but with none of its locations. The solution was to remove these unwanted characters and after that the planet could be linked again.
That leaves the mystery of where the characters came from. If you type a description into the location editor, it won’t let you add anything strange. But there are two things you can do which could bypass the editor’s restrictions.
The first is to write your location descriptions in a word processor program, which does allow all kinds of unusual characters, then copy n paste it into the editor. The most likely strange characters that will show up if you do this are curly quotes: the left and right bending “speech marks” and ‘apostrophes’ that programs such as Word use by default, unless you wade through its options to find out how to turn them off.
It’s perfectly acceptable to write your text in a word processor like this – I do it myself – so long as you take care not to incorporate characters the game doesn’t like, such as those dreaded curly quotes.
The other way strangeness can appear in your files is if you load the actual map file into another program and make changes to it outside the editor. You shouldn’t do this, not ever, because the risk of messing up the file is huge. It’s just not worth the risk.
