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PostPosted: Tue Nov 25, 2003 9:59 am 
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Young
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Joined: Wed Oct 22, 2003 8:54 am
Posts: 10
Got another question. But first let me say thank you to all of you who have helped me with all of my other questions. I have learned so much from you guys, and reading these forums and the tutorials. I'm pretty sure I've seen this question answered somewhere before, but I'll be darned if I can find it now. So if it has, I'm sorry for asking it again.

The map is almost where I want it to be, and while I've been working on that, everyone else has been building the cities. We're at a point where we'd like to start freezing the buildings. We're using RunUO, if that makes a difference. But I know as soon as we freeze, I'll find something I want to change on the map.

So now that I've gone the long way around the apple cart to get to my question, here it is. If we freeze buildings, making changes to the statics files, and I re-run the map through Dragon and DragonSP, will I lose those buildings? And if so, is there a way I can not lose them? Is this the part where I'm going to have to learn about static diff files? hehe

Thanks again for putting up with all my questions. :)

Kurrgan


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PostPosted: Tue Nov 25, 2003 2:04 pm 
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Joined: Sun Jun 02, 2002 8:01 pm
Posts: 1473
Location: CO, USA
Once you start freezing buildings and such it is HIGHLY recommended that you do not use Dragon and DragonSP any more. You've gone past the point of no return, basically.

There are two main determining factors:

1. Most of the time, small tweaks to the map will be required in WorldForge to get the map itself as perfect as it can get. If you run Dragon on this map, you'll lose those tweaks. Additionally, if you change the elevation of some the land, you may end up with floating or sunk statics due to the old statics being calculated at the old elevation.

2. When you run DragonSP it gives the option of clearing the statics out of the existing statics files. It's a catch-22. If you say yes, you've just lost your buildings. If you say no, then you'll effectively double your statics count, ending up with a lot of duplicate items. Neither situation is good.

That being said, there are workarounds.

In case 1, you use the fix file. This file allows you to override what Dragon does to each tile. You can tell it to absolutely put a particular tile instead of calculating from the bmp. Do a search in the forums for more details. You still may need to worry about elevation problems though.

In case 2, you could melt your existing statics to your world save file (or ideally, a separate file). You could then freeze more items in without losing the others. There's still the drawback of introducing duplicate items and overlaps if you are not careful. This would require quite a bit of work, and I do not recommend it.

As you can see it's basically not worth doing unless you know exactly what you are doing and are willing to go through the headache of it. I'm sure even most advanced mappers avoid these methods.

Long story short, don't do it. If you are wanting changes, you're best bet is to work within RunUO for the statics (since you can freeze/melt there) and use WorldForge for tweaks to the map. If you are wanting huge changes to the map, I suggest making a new map0.mul and copying the parts over with UOCopy. That's another subject that's searchable.

-Ryandor


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