I am trying to convert my mod to the 1080 (it is currently working from the 687 exe). Since the XML Editor will not read my XMLs I'd like to be able to cut and paste chunks of my xmls to replace 1080 data without having to do a line by line retype.

However, the 1080 xmls are no longer arranged in orderly columns with each line number beneath the preceeding one so copy pasting has become an excersize in complete frustration.

My first question:

If I copy/paste all data from <Item>
to </Item>
like I've done for past releases should this work to give me a new, fully functioning xml set based on my mod?

My second question:

Is there any way to get the data back into ordered columns? Is this maybe the way the XML editor arranges the data?

Any constructive tips are most appreciated.

Hi

As far as I know the answer to the first question is NO!

Answer to your second question is DEFINITELY YES, but you will spend few hours, in many case when I needed to think about the best way how to change outdated xml files with implementation and adjustment of other files, the proccess took me about 4 hours, maybe 5 including the break

So you need to take a look how much different structure the 1080 xml files have compared to your files. Than try this:
1. make a backup of your xml!!! (needed to be said )
2. rename items.xml to items.txt
3. open items.txt in MS Word or OpenOffice(O.O.) - I use O.O. so I expect Word will do the same as O.O.
4. basically you can't have lines with zero as their "value" => no line with >0< !!!
5. because of 4 start with eliminating lines with >0< completely. This is a tricky one, but I found out you don't need to worry - you have backup of your file is anything go wrong So start from the beginning with item0 - NADA. Go line by line and use "find and replace" tool. Find specific line with >0< (example <ubClassIndex>0</ubClassIndex> ) and replace it with ! (exclamation mark for example) or any other EASILY DISTINCT mark!!!(#, ^, @ and so on) for the whole file
6. after doing point 5 through whole item 0 - NADA (usually starting with <usItemClass>128</usItemClass> and ending with <Scifi>0</Scifi> - RR mod case) you should have you items with line which haven't got any >0< as value. check it!(try to find ">0<") If you have you probably go wrong somewhere in point 5, but try to delete them. Or start again from point 3 using your backup file
7. now you need to create a MAKRO (hope this function is called the same name in english as in my) to get rid of the lines with "!". It's easy to make a makro in O.O. and I won't explain you how. The way you have to do it is:
7.1. prepare find function (find "!")
7.2. start recording your makro
7.2. press find button or find shortkey
7.3. when it finds ! press END to get to the end of the line, HOLD DOWN SHIFT key and PRESS HOME, PRESS BACKSPACE twice! this way you will delete line with ! for sure
7.4. repeat from 7.1. (press find, end, shift+home, backspace twice)
7.5. repeat 7.4 SEVERAL TIMES, believe me, you will same a lot of time is you repeat the proccess for 30 times, don't ehm, uhm, just do it!
7.6. stop recording your makro
8. now save you makro, name it as you wish - MYMOD for example
9. assign a key for your makro for easy way to start it (F4 I think was in my case)
10. now run your makro until you will get to the end of your items file. Just be carefull, don't press "begin makro button" before the makro finish or you'll mess your data!!! At the end watch to don't start deleting data - if you have makro which will search 30x for ! to delete the line with ! and at the end you will have only 25 lines with ! and you will press makro button, you will lose 5 lines of data, because makro won't be able to find 5 lines with ! but it will delete the data lines. The makro will just skip "find !" procedure and continue with "delete line" command. clear?
11. if you successfully deleted lines with ! open now items.xml from 1080 and copy whole item 0 - NADA to your newly updated items.txt
12. save your items.txt (don't change anything, just save it as it is, as text file) You should save during the proccess of changing the file, you know...
13. rename your new items.txt to items.xml and you are ready to use it with your editor

By the way you will probably need to update several files to, but it will be easy. if you update your items.xml successfully(you won't get error message from the EDITOR concerning items.xml but weapons.xml) just let me know, I'll write you what to do next

Good luck

Well, that sounds easy....

Sorry, had to whine a little there because I was hoping it would be a few simple clicks.

Thanx alot for the reply I will have to try this.

maybe you don't have to go through the whole process from point 1 to 13 but this way you will get your items to the format recognized by the editor.

Or the other way is to copy your items line by line, skipping lines with >0< and checking if the line fits there(if you have them in the right order). Believe me, the first way maybe looks a little bit difficult and long but it's more convenient than copy lines one by one. It's your choice

Any additional questions? I'll be glad to ask, expect EASY ANSWER or did I get something wrong???

I do not think that you need to delete the lines containing zeroes.

The new items.xml does not contain lines with zeroes simply because the XML-Editor deleted all of those (which sometimes confuses me when I did manual work on a XML, commited it to SVN, then used the XML-Editor only to find out the previously worked on file changed again though I did not touch its data, it was the XML-Editor deleting the zero-lines that changed the file again).
And items.xml does still have the /full/ index 0 NADA entry including all zero-lines, because otherwise there would be no example of all the tags that are usable in this XML.

The XML-files need to be UTF-8 coded to work with the XML-Editor, but other than that I do not know what else is needed.

Khor, what is the first line of your XML-files saying?

I appreciate the suggestion but wouldn't it be j easy to open the xml editor than just copy/paste each new change?


What I was hoping for was some blanket way to at least convert the items .xml (by far the trickiest one) to the old format so I could do a several line copy/paste (skipping and new lines then copy pasting passed them) and thus get through the whole list in one week instead of one month or so.

I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining here but if there is an easier way I'm looking for that.

@ Starwalker

The first line of my old (687) items xml says

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>

the second one says

<ITEMLIST xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

then it goes into the individual item list

<ITEM>
<uiIndex>0</uiIndex>
etc

Hmmm, the first is the same, but the second line in the XML-Editor generated items.xml simply says <ITEMLIST>.
The rest is the same.
Perhaps you should just try to change your second line and delete the URL-reference. But as PFM wrote, make a backup first.

When opened with WordPad (just to look, never to work on it), the first few lines of items.xml look like this (the indentations(sp?) are TABs):
EDIT: O.K., it does not show the TABS. <ITEMLIST> is flush left, <ITEM> and </ITEM> is one TAB indented, the other text is two TABS indented.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<ITEMLIST>
<ITEM>
<uiIndex>0</uiIndex>
<szItemName>Nada</szItemName>
<szLongItemName>Nothing</szLongItemName>
<szItemDesc>JA 2 programmers are the best there are... oh.. well maybe not since this message should never come up...</szItemDesc>
<szBRName>Nothing</szBRName>
.
.
[LOTSOFSTUFFINBETWEEN]
.
.
<MetalDetector>0</MetalDetector>
<FingerPrintID>0</FingerPrintID>
</ITEM>

I got error when I had lines with >0< except item0 - NADA(copying "new" item0 - NADA over old one didn't help me a lot) But give it a try. Don't concern what you have "in the first line", what is important starts from the line "ITEMLIST"

I still do some XML-work manually and that sometimes leaves lines with >0< and the XML-Editor does not complain.

@ Starwalker

Are you saying the xml editor should work with 687 based xmls?

What I get when I try this is


File: Merges.xml

Column 'firstItemIndex,secondItemIndex' is constrained to be unique. Value '311,312' is already present.
Column 'firstItemIndex,secondItemIndex' is constrained to be unique. Value '311,312' is already present.



File: CompatableFaceItems.xml
ForiegnKeyConstraint Constraint2 requires the child key values (various numbers are listed here) to exist in the parent table.


File:German.AmmoStrings.xml
Column 'uiIndex' is constrained to be unique. Value '0' is already present.


Etc. etc. etc.

you're one lucky guy

ForiegnKeyConstraint Constraint2 requires the child key values (various numbers are listed here) to exist in the parent table
is error when you don't have INDEX in the file (uindex or something)

Get index there(I did it manually) and this error will disappear, or at least it worked in my case

File:German.AmmoStrings.xml
I just copy AmmoStrings.xml over and rename it to GermanAmmoStrings.xml

File: Merges.xml

Column 'firstItemIndex,secondItemIndex' is constrained to be unique. Value '311,312' is already present.
Column 'firstItemIndex,secondItemIndex' is constrained to be unique. Value '311,312' is already present.

You have one possible MERGE TYPED TWICE!!! delete one of them (two times is item 311 possible to be attached/merged with 312)

ou, by the way, this means you don't have to change your items.xml file!!! So my procedure is all wrong!!!

No, I do not say that, because I do not think that it is true

But Madd Mugsy himself did not need that long to fit the XMLs to work with his editor, so there should be an easy way. When I am at work tomorrow, I'll use the SVN-Logs, though I fear he did not go into detail.

And he told me that the editor itself should take out lines with zero-values, thus keeping items.xml smaller than the 4MB it had earlier.

To bad he is not around these days...

By the way, the editor is more susceptible to strange entries than the game. Double entries in attachments.xml (for example) do not harm the game, but they stop the editor from starting.
You can hunt down the double entries manually and delete one. perhaps the second '311,312' in merges.xml should have been a '312,311'?

@ PFM
I'll try that. If you are right this could save me a ton of reworking stuff I've already had working and as such a hell of a lot of time.

Thanx alot man.

@ Starwalker

I'm going to try to start it with PFMs suggestions. It may (should take hours of maybe over a day) but if I am successful I will post here so that anyone with a similar problem might be able to reference this solution. In the meantime if you could figure out how Mugsy converted his that - I'm sure would be a big help.


By the way, are there any new lines of data since the 687? I mean ar there any new values that were not represented in the 687 version? If there aren't I may just be able to copy/paste my whole files into the new format and thus save weeks of work.

I'm not sure, it's your task to check this, but they are rearranged

Try it and run the Editor. If you don't get error message you will end with editor running. If you get error message (index out of array or something - I don't know what kind of error is this) I can't help you. For me it was more convenient to convert update xml file to new one even I knew I would spent few hours with it compared to endless search for bug which I don't know anything about

After replacing a lot of the problematic files with ones taken directly from the 1080s tabledata folder I'm left with a bunch of child value (whatever) needs to exist in the parent directory. I think this is because I trimmed out a lot of the items .xml so it would load faster in both notepad and the map editor. I will now try to add about 1000 new nada items so at least the child (NPC inventory for example) directory can have these numbers represented when the parent (items) file calls for them.


Does this sound like it might work?

I did indeed have quite a few redundant entries in my Merges.xml (probably due to the fact that I had to do a lot of messy copy/pasting the last time I updated my xmls) and taking these out has caused the xml editor to no longer list merges.xml as a cause for it's failure. So thank you much for that.

But I think because a lot of the item numbers the NPC inventorys and compatable face items call for do not exist in my (WW2) mod the editor is locking up.

You think I'm on to something?

Here's what Mugsy put into the SVN-Log:

698 -removed "unused" entry from ItemClass.xml
711 -xml files updated to work with xml editor
734 -XML files trimmed: Zero and empty string values removed
Items.xml should be much smaller now and load faster. (860 KB instead of 4.2 MB)
-In a trimmed xml file, the first entry still contains all the tags.
This should be usable as a reference for anyone editing the files manually.
741 -Other files trimmed by editor
758 -Added xml version information to xml files

There were some more log entries, but they had nothing to do with your problem.
As you see for SVN 711, Mugsy was not very specific

I do not understand the SVN 698 comment, because there is no ItemClass.xml. Do you have an "unused"-tag in your 687 items.xml?

How did you 'trim' a lot of items from items.xml to make it load faster? Are there any gaps now that are not filled by NADA items?

I don't really know what you mean by an "unused" tag in my 687 items.xml? I took the existing xml and added my data line by line (or rather entry by entry) because trying to copy paste my work into the new .xml caused a runtime error I was not able to figure out. Please clarify what you mean.

I trimmed a lot of my xmls, but the items.xml was the worst. I just deleted everything passed item #350 (because at that time I had no items needing any of those slots) then closed the remaining line before <Itemlist>. It made scrolling through the xml and loading it about 100 times easier and removed alot of the modern items I had appearing at Tonys and Bobby Rays without having to chop both of those mammouth lists.

My xmls work great with one exception I know of. The rod will not attach to the spring for some reason but I planned to figure this out through use of the xml editor.

They all load into XML notepad without a problem (even the Merges xml that until today had duplicate entries.





The good news is that I have definately gotten somewhere. I first added a bunch of nada items and was naming them to item numbers above those I had. I have been doing this all night (much to my wife's delight) but then hit on the idea of just replacing the offended .xml (Tonyinventory) with mine that has all valid item numbers. After trimming the question marks and other lines out of the header this worked fine but my latest error reads:




Unhandled error. Please report this error to madd Mugsy

Error:
Unexpected end of file has occoured. The following elements are not closed:xml.
Line 78693, position 12.


I think this is an error in the items.xml so I checked it with xml notepad and it loads fine there and gives me no clue.

I am hoping someone here can give me such a clue.


I have been playing this xml set since about the middle of April when I finished the update from my previous set and I have experienced no item weirdness apart from the aforementioned rod/spring crap. I've actually had quite alot of fun with this items mod even with the overall storyline in it's undeveloped state.

Sorry, as stated above, I do not know what Mugsy wanted to say with that cryptic log entry, either


There may not only be Tony-references, but from other dealers as well...
But adding NADAs after item 350 was a good idea for a start


Please send me your items.xml.

It's on the way.

I received it and had a look.

At four places (items 81, 360, 361, 362) the <ITEM> was indented with spaces instead of a single TAB, though this should not matter.

What's really screwed is that there are a lot of gaps between item-numbers, for example there are no items between 1028 and 1053, or between 1055 and 1063.

I think you need to fill all the gaps with NADA items (just shorten the descriptions to keep the size down somewhat), because the editor dislikes gaps.
I think your 'Unexpected end of file' occured due to the editor expecting more entries since the last one had the number 1063.

EDIT:
Try this, if it does not screw up your game, you can use it to fill the gaps (just don't forget t change the item-numbers)

<ITEM>
<uiIndex>997</uiIndex>
<szItemName>Nada</szItemName>
<szLongItemName>Nothing</szLongItemName>
<szItemDesc>Index 997</szItemDesc>
<szBRName>Nothing</szBRName>
<szBRDesc>Nothing</szBRDesc>
<usItemClass>1</usItemClass>
<NotBuyable>1</NotBuyable>
<BigGunList>1</BigGunList>
</ITEM>

I tried to take a shortcut and only add the items it was asking me for in the TonyInventory hang up. I will fill the gaps with nada items and maybe even use tabs instead of spaces if you think that will help.

Thanx for looking at it. I haven't tried to see if this one works in the 1080 but I want it to work with the editor as well so I will follow your suggestions and write back here with my results.

I've filled all the gaps with nada items all the way up to and including 1063. Now I get the same error message as before only this time it is :

line 129811 position 12


Since this number went up and I added a lot of items this leads me to believe there is a mistype on the 129,811th line of data in my .xml and at the 12th character from the left side of the page.

Is this the way those error messages work?

I could multiply the 122 lines of data in the items.xml by 1063 and add two lines for the header and the <ItemList> comment to try to find which line 129811 is but is this the correct way to go about troubleshooting this?


Edit:


I just did that and when I looked at how many lines of data are in the whole .xml it only reads 129686!

I think I'm lost on this one...

Considering your last error message before that (line 78693, position 12), it is just /behind/ the </ITEMLIST> at the end of the file. A typical error-message when the end is not found, because the program does not know where the error began.

The items.xml that works with the 1.13 XML-editor has first line <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>

Your XML has <xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8">

Perhaps those '?' are there for a reason?

EDIT: you should get Notepad++ for manual editing of XML-files, it has line numbers

Now it definately seems like it wants to run. It almost loads but then this error message:



Unhandled error. Please report this to Madd Mugsy.

Error: '>' is an unexpected token. The expected token is '?>'. Line 1 position 37.




appears.


Any ideas?

it looks to me like editor wants "?>" indtead of ">" somewhere in the file(s), probalby very first line in the files, example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>

that's all I can think about right now

Did you place only the first question mark, or both?
Compare the lines in my earlier posting carefully, there are '?' at both ends.

EDIT: Yes, position 37 is directly behind UTF-8"

I first copy/pasted the line directly from your post, then in case you mistyped something I copy/pasted it right from a working 1080 xml.

It sounds like I am very close to having this work.

If you have any ideas I'd love to hear them.

Well, how does your first line look like now?

Is there anything in front of it (Space, TAB)?

I vaguely remember that somewhere in the past something (not JA2) made problems when there were SHIFTed spaces instead of normal ones (not that the user could distinguish them...).

Sorry for the delay, long Thanksgiving weekend with no internet.

The first line of my xml starts at the very first space in the very first line of the xml. I've looked at it in Notepad++ and it shows a lot of the line in red but the first word in blue. I don't know what this means.

If anyone has any ideas on how to make this work please respond here.

Mine looks like this:

Mine looks the same except that it does not have the <? and ?> highlighted in yellow.

Does your file look the same as Starwalker's? If it doesn't try to add <? and ?> in the file. If it does can I take a look at your file(s)? Can you upload them somewhere?

It does look the same except my <? and ?> are not hilighted in yellow. Everything else is exactly the same.

I will send you an e-mail with it attached.

@PFM

I tried sending the .xml to your e-mail adress but it keeps bouncing back. Do you have an alternate e-mail?


I might just have to either keep on working from the 687 or do an item by item entry to fit the 1080 version.

Ireally don't like that option because it requires me to have all of the entries from the 1080 and this means I will have to go through and 'disable' them from the WW2 mod. It also means that all my games will load slow because of the massive ammounts of especially sound files that come with the newer versions of the 1.13. I'd greatly prefer a trimmed down version of the game for ease of play and error proof item rendering.

Check PM, I sent you another email address. But editing with Editor is much faster than manually. I also changed a lot of stuff in my mod and instead of hours doing this manually I spent 1 or 2 hours doing this with Editor. It's your choice

I would very much like to use the editor. I know this could be a real timesaver especially with files that have 'child directories' attached (not sure if this is the right term). However, about 290 of the first 350 items in my xmls are changed radically so this means that I would have to manually enter this data in the xml editor for each of these items. I'd also prefer to have all modern items eliminated because this would both help the editor to load faster and insure against any modern items 'leaking' into my mod.


I'll look for your PM.

I get error loading your items.xml because I used JA2v1.13 1080 build. But it looks like the problem isn't in your items.xml file. Can you send me other your modified files? I don't need pictures, just xml files with which I hope I will be able to load the editor.
The error message was because of merges, attachments and tonyinventory files

Cool!!!!!!!!


I had a feeling it was in other .xmls.

I'll send you the lot.

Hi,

I just send you your working files!!! Check your email. If you still have problems with them, the problems aren't because of you xml files.

You are THE MAN!!!!!

Thanx a million! Not only have youork but you've made it a small file size which is very good for working with.

I see you had to convert it to the new type layout but I think if I use the find feature this won't be the end of the world when I have to manually edit something.

You have my sincere thank you for doing this. Let me know if there is something you need.

Now this is really weird. For whatever reason the new xmls have assigned all my vests as helmets and all my helmets as vests.

I doubt if there was a fundamental change here but when I load the old exe with the new file the are correctly assigned. I'm hoping this does not point to some problem I might have in the future.

Correcting this in the editor will be easy but I'm worried there may be more invisible errors.

One thing I did do out of the ordinary is to start the game by using a 687exe before I transferred the data folders to my 1080 install. This was an out and out error on my part but I can't see where it would make such a clean and drastic shift.


Any ideas?

as long as your pants didnt swap with your vests , oooh , bit draughty

I'm definately stumped on this one.


A lot of my vests are appearing as helmets and vice versa.


When I look at the individual xmls (outside of the xml editor) they are all classes the way they are supposed to. If I run my xmls in the 687.exe they function like they are supposed to but something in either the 1080 or the xml editor is changing these around.


What is really weird is when I go to correct the problem in the editor I can change the number but when I hit save it changes back.


I am new at using the xml editor. I hand crafted all my xmls in the past so perhaps it is something I'm just not doing right in the editor that is making these strange a game breaking errors.


Anyone with any ideas please respond.

I just sent you other files, try them and let me know if you still have any problems.

I forgot - you need to check every changed file because some have/are "blank" attachment and so on.

Blank attachment?


Do you mean they are asking for an attachment that does not exist in my mod?


Please explain.

I tried change some of your items - vests that have helmet status and helmets with vest status - and they stay changed -> when I change the type of armour from vest to helmet and saved the file, after restarting the editor they stayed changed.

Blank attachments I mean that they don't have any attachment assigned. Example: open items/attachments/full list and look at the first line. There's M1 Carbine with blank attachment. The possible attachments to the M1 Carbine are "bipod, blasting cap, detonator, duckbill, flak plate, small caliber silencer and sniper scope". It means you have to choose one of the possible attachments.

Is it clear?

Cool, so you mean the editor should now accept my changes?

I was not aware that some of the attachments were no longer assigned to some of the items. I may be using the regular 1080 attachments.xml instead of mine.

Thax for spotting that. That could have gotten messy.