How do you open a mansion in the level builder?

[RobSeegel]

3222353C3C500 wrote: OK but how will the export of mansions from the old format to HD be done?

Take a look at the

Editor and Custom Mansions

topic.. It contains export details and at least one possible pitfall.

[brell]

Thanks, but this seems to me a bit complicated method to get the old mansions to work with the HD application.

Furthermore: Am I right in that people with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) will not be able to make or edit any custom mansions until the HD editor is out after a few months?

[RobSeegel]

5C4C5B52523E0 wrote: Thanks, but this seems to me a bit complicated method to get the old mansions to work with the HD application.

Well... it's less than ideal, certainly, but complicated? Really? The only major complication is when the original mansion uses custom graphics. Essentially, it's:

1. Download/start rezycle
2. Drag/drop mansion on it
3. Rename/move directory to custom mansion directory

That's not *terribly* complicated, really. Granted, it is pretty inconvenient. This is something I had to do a lot of when editing the original mansions.  I ended up trying to do as many edits as possible (saving lots of backups), and exporting as close to the end of the process as I could. I ended up automating some of this through scripts, but it was intended for my specific needs.  I was looking at using Applescript to automate it in a more useful fashion, but still the basic steps aren't too bad.

I haven't checked recently, but do all the existing custom mansions have comments (in the forum) that mention whether or not they use custom graphics? That would be useful. It should be possible for a few volunteers (I'd volunteer), to go through all the custom mansions that don't use custom graphics, convert them, and zip them up. This way, the initial burden would be shifted to mansion designers (or volunteers) rather than players.

Furthermore:  Am I right in that people with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) will not be able to make or edit any custom mansions until the HD editor is out after a few months?

Yes, unless you take one of the options I've read online - none of which are all that attractive, and nothing I'd expect a casual Mac user to do - especially for the sake of one application.

Again, this is less than ideal, but it *is* the current situation. All that remains is to make the best of it where we can. On the positive side, some things have been fixed that were problematic before - the ladder glitch, for example, that caused issues with a lot of custom (and a few included mansions) was fixed in MM HD.

[brell]

I have been testing my custom mansions in the MM1 HD and have found a few issues, which propably can be fixed by making minor changes in the editor. I am sure that more situations like this will come up. A mansion builder that upgrades to the Lion will not be able to make these fixes until the editor has been upgraded. I'm sure we can live with that for a while and I hope Vern will focus on upgrading the editor a.s.a.p.
There is also the argument that the editor has from the beginning been a part of the game and should of course run smoothly regardless of the OS version.

[RobSeegel]

5747505959350 wrote: I have been testing my custom mansions in the MM1 HD and have found a few issues, which propably can be fixed by making minor changes in the editor.  I am sure that more situations like this will come up.  A mansion builder that upgrades to the Lion will not be able to make these fixes until the editor has been upgraded.

Is there anything I can do help? I will be happy to help convert and test at least those mansions that do not use custom graphics. There are already boards for each custom mansion, so I guess test reports for the newly converted mansions could go there. Knowing ahead of time which mansions have custom graphics would make things go faster. It's easy enough to open mansions in rezilla to check, but that's time that could be spent downloading and converting mansions.

Also, what sort of minor issues are you seeing?

I'm sure we can live with that for a while and I hope Vern will focus on upgrading the editor a.s.a.p.

I hope so as well. I'm considering creating a new mansion editor from scratch using a cross-platform language, that offers features over the old one that I always wished I had. There are a few obstacles with this though...

I know that Vern has obstacles of his own to overcome, some of which he's mentioned on the board. A key obstacle is that the underlying infrastructure has little to nothing in the way of GUI controls. This is one thing that stands in the way of porting the Builder since the goal is to make it cross-platform as well as the game.

[brell]

Thanks Rob but I will check my mansions and I think it is best that builders check their own productions before going Lion. However, since some builders do not seem to be around anymore, we might have to check their mansions and it is good if you and hopefully more players can do the checking. We have a lot of custom mansions that must be checked to see whether they work correctly with the HD version and this must be done by players/builders that are running OS 10.6.x or older.

One issue I have found is described here. Another one is in

Back to Square One

: When I press the return key to read signs I get a blank sign and the game stops with this message:

File: Sprite.c
Function: SWRemoveSpriteFromAnimation
Line: 42

This is very strange since all signs work correctly in

The Pirate Invasion

, which has a LOT of signs.

[RobSeegel]

3323343D3D510 wrote:   Another one is in

Back to Square One

: When I press the return key to read signs I get a blank sign and the game stops with this message:

File:  Sprite.c
Function: SWRemoveSpriteFromAnimation
Line: 42
.

I took a look at this and was able to fix the expanded mansion so that it worked. I took a quick look at the mansion before I converted it and saw a resource I was unfamilar with: styl  (in lower case). Do you know what this resource is used for? This wasn't the problem though.

If you go under the 'TEXT' resource directory in Rezilla you will see the sign data. I notice that your signs had names assigned to them, which is strange. When you extract these resources with Rezycle it embeds the

name

into the filename. Normally these resources just have a type, and it's a number. I'd expect this to extract as [number].txt. When I removed the embedded name from the file name so that it was just the number and .txt, everything worked as expected.

I'll write that down. At some point, converting won't be an issue, but it probably wouldn't be difficult to write a script that checks for common issues (once we learn what they are).

[brell]

I know now why this happened. BtSO is an old mansion from the time when builders had to use resource editors to make signs. I opened the mansion in the builder, cut the sign text and removed the old sign. Then I added a new sign and pasted the text and saved everything. Bingo!

I don't know what styl is. I don't have a resource editor now but perhaps I should download Rezilla again.

Anyway, now we know that if a sign behaves like this it is propably because it was made

in the old days

with a resource editor and needs to be remade.

[RobSeegel]

It looked to me as though the Name attribute was used to create a description for the sign, which is something the mansion editor doesn't do. It's really easy to fix, though, without an editor or resource editor if you know what you're looking for (in this case anyway).

You're right, though, anytime a resource editor was used to modify something in the fork, there is a chance for problems. Styl looks like it was a mistake - it has the same type and contents as TEXT, 14242.

[VernJensen]

Styl resources are, as far as I know, style information, like bold, underlined, italics, etc. These can be deleted. The game only uses TEXT resources, but some resource editors would automatically create Styl resources to go along with them. Just delete them.

Glad to see you guys got the problem figured out. There might be a few things like this that have to be fixed

by hand

for the conversion to go smoothly, but -- the simple fact that old mansions *can* be converted so easily to the HD format is actually a great thing. The old format was very old, and the new one will work on Windows as well as Mac, once the Windows version is ready. Same for iPhone/iPad.