Rant about apparent DB1/DB2 conflicts

Whine whine whine whine cry cry cry cry.

edit: So the crazy "solution" from below was fixable by deleting a file that has nothing to do with the WAD itself at all.

To be clear, I worked around the problem I describe below (edit: twice), but I wasted so much time trying to do so that I'm right pissed about it.

So I had this problem and I pulled out as much hair as was cut the last time I was at a barber shop (it stopped up their vacuum). The good news is I found a workaround. The bad news is I don't see any hope of a fix, what with CodeImp's apparent hostility toward DB1 (haven't dared try to ask about it on the DB forums for hopefully obvious reasons).
Problem is exactly what it says on the tin: After saving a WAD in Doombuilder 2, Doombuilder 1 won't load from it or save to it.

See, I'm trying to make my first WAD for Vanilla Doom II (not counting the dozens of test maps where I played around with the editor). I've been using DB1 because I can work much faster using it than DB2. I'm most comfortable with using it for nearly every bit of mapping I could possibly need. But I really wanted to use the linedef curve plugin in DB2 to make a semicircular staircase, among small other things.

So I loaded my map up in DB2, saved it, ran it in ChocoRenderLimits, checked it out, and it seemed to work just fine for what I was testing (though visplane counts get scary sometimes, something I've been working on a lot lately)

Satisfied, I was going to continue editing in DB1 so I tried loading it up and lo and behold:

Could not browse the WAD file contents in this file.
Error -2147221504: Invalid assignment. Forgot an assignment terminator?

I wanted to punch someone. It would have been satisfying. I'm not learning DB2 and abandoning my favorite editor to do an entire WAD minus one-half of a level just because of something so stupid, and there's no way I'm abandoning a map that seems to be coming along this well (though having never made a serious map, I wouldn't know that 100% for sure).

Thinking it over, I'm wondered if loading the map in another editor and resaving could fix this, so I grabbed SLADE and, in my haste, got version 3 (edit: that is, an old beta), which does not have a map editor. Since it opened the WAD, I tried saving with it anyway, but no dice - DB1 won't open it. Since version 2 apparently *does* have a map editor though, I grabbed it as well and tried opening up my WAD. Not only does it open up, but it shows up just fine.

I decided to save the map with a different name as a precaution. What possible precaution? I have no idea, I just did it because I felt like it.
I try to open up this WAD under the new filename and it opens up just fine. I fly around in it a bit and then try to save over the bugged file (which I backed up, by the way) but once again, I get an error. *This time* it says it can't save because of the "Invalid assignment. Forgot an assignment terminator?" crap. Turns out, when I tried to save under the original name, the bugged WAD was present, so it tried to put the map inside the WAD instead.

However, I save in a new file without failure and I'm able to load from it in DB1 once again.

So something DB2 does when it saves a WAD is incompatible with DB1, and if you edit a DB1-made WAD with DB2 and save it, it breaks it for DB1, and you just might have to go through all of this mess.*

Most frustrating was finding google results for this problem with no solutions whatsoever, just abandoned threads. So I wrote this thing.

Ugh. -_- /noobrant

* And here is where I'm wrong, of course. It is a bit crazy to think that one vanilla WAD would be different from another vanilla WAD (and I don't know shit about WADs so I wouldn't know if other kinds of WADs are different from vanilla, etc. though I'd imagine they would be). Apparently I could have skipped all of this crap just by deleting/moving/renaming/etc. the DBS file created by DB2 because CodeImp decided to use a completely different DBS file format (from what I could see when I opened it up in Notepad++) in DB2 from DB1 (and why wouldn't he, seeing as he doesn't support DB1 anymore?). It's really kinda silly that an editor won't load a perfectly fine WAD just because it sees a config file that has nothing to do with it but is in a different format than it expects.

Enzo03 said:

I grabbed SLADE and, in my haste, got version 3, which does not have a map editor.

There actually is a map editor -- in the SVN builds, not the old 3.0.2 beta -- but I wouldn't recommend using it yet, since it's still incomplete, experimental, and not entirely safe.

Sounds like you opened your map in DB1 without closing DB2 or something like that.

Strange. Although I have DB2 closed, DB1 still won't open the version of the WAD I started in DB1. By this I mean I opened it up in DB2, saved it, then closed DB2, then tried to open it in DB1. However, when I made a new WAD with DB2, made some random sectors, and saved it, closed it, DB1 had no complaints when I tried loading it.

So I tried testing what you have said and left DB2 open. It still didn't have this problem.

Too much of this and the headscratching will leave me scalped by midnight.

Gez said:

There actually is a map editor -- in the SVN builds, not the old 3.0.2 beta -- but I wouldn't recommend using it yet, since it's still incomplete, experimental, and not entirely safe.

Yeah I was a little confused at first and figured that what I had gotten was some older version.

The standard Doom map format saved by one editor is going to be exactly the same standard format as any other editor. Otherwise the game wouldn't be able to read your map. So DB2 isn't saving your map in an incompatible format, something else is messed up.

Enzo03 said:

So something DB2 does when it saves a WAD is incompatible with DB1, and if you edit a DB1-made WAD with DB2 and save it, it breaks it for DB1, and you just might have to go through all of this mess.

It's a long-shot, but you could try deleting/renaming the wad's .dbs file then see if DB1 will open it (using Ctrl O instead of the recent files list). If that doesn't work, could you post the wad? I'd like to see what's going wrong.

I decided to rename the .dbs file for the level instead and it loaded right up. I decided I'd look at the .dbs files from DB1 and DB2 in notepad++ and surprise, surprise, they look completely different (but have a similar format, I suppose).

...

Making myself look more foolish every day I swear :)

So the .dbs file's been corrupted somehow, should be able to spot the error if you copy/paste its contents into this thread.

By the way, how do you make doombuilder 2 NOT make these files:
.dbs
.wad.backup1 (& 2 & 3)

I think greyghost told me how for db1 once, but think db2 is different.
It basically buries my wad names in a bloated sea of redundant files, making it harder to quickly find one in particular.

gggmork: This won't answer your question (and I'd like to know as well, or at least have the ability to send them to a custom sub-directory, somewhere out of sight), but I've got .WAD files set to launch with ZDoom automatically. It kind of makes the little icons in the list 'pop' visually, which minimizes the drowning-in-backups-of-backups look that occurs by default. *Shrug.*

These little guys:

DB1: (opens in both)

type = "Doom Builder Map Settings Configuration";
config = "Doom 2";

MAP01
{
	addwad = "";
	addtexdir = "";
	addflatdir = "";
}

DB2: (opens only in DB2)

type = "Doom Builder Map Settings Configuration";
gameconfig = "Doom2.cfg";
strictpatches = 1;

maps
{
	
	MAP01
	{
		
		grid
		{
			background = "";
			backoffsetx = 0;
			backoffsety = 0;
			backscalex = 100;
			backscaley = 100;
			backsource = 0;
			gridsize = 32;
		}
		
		
		resources
		{
		}
		
		
		plugins
		{
			
			stairsectorbuilder
			{
				
				prefabs
				{
					
					prefab1
					{
						name = "[Previous]";
						numberofsectors = 1;
						outervertexmultiplier = 1;
						innervertexmultiplier = 1;
						stairtype = 0;
						sectordepth = 32;
						spacing = 8;
						frontside = true;
						singlesectors = true;
						singledirection = false;
						distinctbaseheights = true;
						flipping = 0;
						numberofcontrolpoints = 1;
						applyfloormod = true;
						floormod = 0;
						applyceilingmod = true;
						ceilingmod = 0;
						applyfloortexture = false;
						floortexture = "";
						applyceilingtexture = false;
						ceilingtexture = "";
						applyuppertexture = true;
						uppertexture = "-";
						upperunpegged = true;
						applymiddletexture = false;
						middletexture = "-";
						applylowertexture = true;
						lowertexture = "-";
						lowerunpegged = true;
					}
					
				}
				
			}
			
		}
		
	}
	
}

I played around a bit when I saw the stuff about the stair sector builder. I tried using it in my map, but deleted the result because for my purposes it was easier to just roll my own. But when I used it on my test map, I get exactly the problem I described.

edit: My conclusion is that at least some plugins for DB2, such as/including those that add stuff to the DBS file, could cause these problems. Not necessarily all of the ones that add stuff to the DBS file, just some, at least one in this case, since I have no counterexamples for the stair sector builder plugin.

The DBS file for a map that loads in both editors just fine looks like this:

type = "Doom Builder Map Settings Configuration";
gameconfig = "Doom2.cfg";
strictpatches = 0;

maps
{
	
	MAP01
	{
		
		resources
		{
		}
		
		
		grid
		{
			background = "";
			backsource = 0;
			backoffsetx = 0;
			backoffsety = 0;
			backscalex = 100;
			backscaley = 100;
			gridsize = 32;
		}
		
	}
	
}

config = "Doom 2";

MAP01
{
	addwad = "";
	addtexdir = "";
	addflatdir = "";
}