wrong DECORATE + wrong ENGINE = wtf?

Hi again.
Me and my friend were trying out the 'weapon reasource.wad' and in zdoom (dont remember the version, must be the latest) it did not work at all, so we lurked out the answers on the internet, the answer was that the coding language is not finished, and just keeps developing. the new ports (under development and newly released) are just keeping trashing old code of decorate that the authors dont belive any one is going to use. and im finding intrests of applying new weapons in my wads (say an arsenal of 16 weapons total).

what should i do?

You basically have three options-

• Update the DECORATE scripts
• Lodge bug reports in the relevant forum and cross your fingers

• Use an older version of ZDoom

WTF are you babbling about? The old DECORATE format is still supported for compatibility reasons. Things that were working in an official release are still supposed to work in other official releases, such as ZDoom 2.4.0 which has just been published today.

If it doesn't, it's a bug. Stuff from the WRW should work without problems.

Not if the WRW is still the broken 2.0.96x version. I don't think that it'll throw errors but a few things won't work.

Gez said:

WTF are you babbling about? The old DECORATE format is still supported for compatibility reasons. Things that were working in an official release are still supposed to work in other official releases, such as ZDoom 2.4.0 which has just been published today.

If it doesn't, it's a bug. Stuff from the WRW should work without problems.

any decorate code works on zdoom 2.4.0 ?
well thats something! we tryed out weapon resource wad about 2 weeks ago

this is what happens...


Execution could not continue.

Script error, "wrw.wad:DECORATE" line 5614:
"NOALERT" is an unknown flag



so it might be the broken version, vere can i find a working one?

D_GARG said:

this is what happens...

Execution could not continue.

Script error, "wrw.wad:DECORATE" line 5614:
"NOALERT" is an unknown flag

so it might be the broken version, vere can i find a working one?

Why in the world is an unknown flag a reason to abort a program? And to think I got flack over aborting for missing columns in textures, sheesh.

Quasar said:

Why in the world is an unknown flag a reason to abort a program? And to think I got flack over aborting for missing columns in textures, sheesh.

The same reason why a C compiler refuses to continue if there's an error. The engine just enforces that the definition files are ok before they are used. It normally collects all errors before aborting but there's still a few old remnants where these are treated as fatal syntax errors.

Which doesn't help much with a WAD that was made for an unofficial and obsolete version and is no longer maintained.

For the case of flags at least it just seems like they could be ignored if the key isn't in the table (or array of strings, which ever ZDoom uses :) Worst case is that something doesn't have the precise behavior it was meant to exhibit, which could be hand-waved with "well it's old and non-standard so go figure."

I don't think that this would be a good idea. With the exception of a tiny amount of really old and obsolete mods the only people who will ever see these messages are the modders themselves. And I think we all know what will happen if they aren't forced to fix their bugs.

Too often they don't think about looking at the console. They start their mod, it starts up normally, they release it and the error is out.

I think it's too bad already that I can't make missing actor references fatal. This was something older versions could not detect so when I upgraded the code so that it could it was too late. Far too many mods out there contain such problems, including high-profile releases like KDiZD.

It probably wouldn't hurt too much to add the 96x flags to the list of dummy flags. They don't have to be supported, just ignored.

"NOALERT" is a weapon flag. But the WRW used it on non-weapons. And the old parser had a bug to let it slip through. So no matter what, it's not possible to change it because it would totally mess up the handling of this flag.