Something useful, no? An Unit Validator for RTW

[RedFox]

Export_Descr_Buildings.txt and Descr_Strat.txt ownership validators by RedFox
Check THIS thread!

Tell me what you think.

[DimeBagHo]

Excellent. I tried it out on the latest version of XGM and it picked up a couple of bugs.

I noticed a couple of minor problems: (1) It finds an error if a faction has a merc unit in one of its armies in descr_strat.txt, but has no ownership in EDU. I don't think that causes any problems in-game. You only get an ownership problem if the faction is supposed to be able to recruit the unit but does not have ownership. (2) Both validators seem to have a problem with the use use of 'greek' in the EDU unit ownership line. In XGM the unit 'greek general's guard cavalry' belongs to 'greek, egyptian' but both programs give errors. The EDB one only gives an error for romans_brutii. The DS one seems to be giving an error for all Greek factions.

One thing that would be well worth adding: check descr_rebel_factions.txt. I often forget to update that when I cut old units or change ownership. Other possibilities would be checking that unit descriptions exist, checking that UI cards exist, and checking campaign scripts.

Thanks for making this RedFox. It will definitely ease some of the pain of finding bugs.

[RedFox]

Thanks a lot for the quick report Dime! I just started programming 3 days ago and the Split algorithms to identify factions and cultures are still very basic and crude. For example, in order for the EDB validator to correctly detect factions, there can't be any spaces in descr_sm_factions 'factions' line, it only separates a certain amount of tabbed lines. I'll be trying to make it more efficient and generic though.

I'm already planning on creating a simple script checker that will scan all script files and see to it that console_command create_unit command creates units for the right faction and character.
Could you PM me the files you used in checking, so I can try and improve it?

[RedFox]

I finished and perfected the Parsing code. You can get the final version from Here. I will be adding an extra module to scan descr_rebel_factions.txt while it scans EDB in the next version.

I will also start working on a script parser, that scans all given .txt files that contain script data for unit errors. That should be all that the community would need at the moment, unless you got any other good ideas for files that need parsing?

[RedFox]

For those who like to create new campaigns and are annoyed by invalid character names: Go Here