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memes4lyfe

why does doom builder 2 delete my maps?

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I will occasionally open a wad only to find no maps in it. but it still takes up hundreds of kilobytes of space. how does this happen? And can I reverse it?

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Are you sure you're opening the wad in the right format? If the wad has UDMF maps in, for example, and you open it as a Doom: Doom format, it won't show anything. Try opening them in Slade.

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Or just get Doom Builder x, because original one hasn't seen updates for 6-7 years. Interface is almost the same, so you won't see much of troubles. Also, save frequently. 

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8 hours ago, Misty said:

Or just get Doom Builder x, because original one hasn't seen updates for 6-7 years. Interface is almost the same, so you won't see much of troubles. Also, save frequently. 

how is it different? does it not delete maps randomly?

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I have lately occasionally experienced Map 01 being deleted, never any others, and I use Doom builder X. It hasn't been a big deal because I  haven't actually changed Map 01 in some time, so there's plenty of backup, but it's weird that a map that hasn't even been opened suddenly disappears. It's happened maybe five times.

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A WAd file contains a pointer to the directory, which can be placed anywhere within the file. Typically, it's at the end of the lump data. In POWER (2).WAD, the directory is located at 0x8F45C, which is 2,288 bytes before the end of the file. Each directory entry is 16 bytes (filename=8 bytes, offset=4 bytes, size=4 bytes).

 

2,288 divided by 16 = 143. A WAD editor shows 143 lumps in this file with blank names, and zero-byte sizes, and with all offsets at 0x0. Except for the header, the rest of the file is completely filled with 0x00.

 

If I had to guess, this is what I think happened:

The tool started writing the WAD file. It had this information:

  • It knew the WAD contained 143 entries.
  • It knew how big each lump was, and how big the directory had to be.

It opened the file for writing, and allocated enough space to hold the WAD header, the WAD directory, and the lump data. Then, the program stopped abnormally, before it could write the data.

 

This is a very fast way to write a WAD file, but, apparently the program can crash inbetween file space allocation, and data write.

 

There is nothing in this WAD file to recover. Always make backups of your WAD data.

 

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it's okay. i just re-did all my hard work. I also uploaded it to doomworld to preserve it. the link is right here if you're interested: 

 

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