Modding?

[EatYerGreens]

I'd like to simultaneously thank you for the advice but also let you know that I did a trial-run anyway. I made a backup of the files, in that state and tested it out with the excess stuff stripped out. (it was all carriage returns, not tab characters)

What I was still dubious about was, about a page or two down from the data were two rows of three of those box-shaped non-characters (I'll use D's to illustrate)
----------

D D D

D D D

---------

but I chopped them anyway, along with the rest.

The campaign still loaded okay but, so far, I'm only interested in the heir names problem and never progressed more than about 1 full turn. I'd really need to let it autorun for half the day to confirm that no lurking problems remained.

So, a caveat for anyone else - my junk characters are not necessarily the same as yours and I was lucky... this time.

Backup what you have, chop out the suspect stuff, then test thouroughly.

[caravel]

Programs like the gnome editor appear to use those extra tabs to facilitate the addition of new units. They are absent from the build prod file though. I tend to edit that with a text editor anyway, as gnome has an annoying habit of corrupting it a lot more than the unit prod. I've noticed some of those box characters in the unit prod before. I leave them there as they're not read AFAIK.

[Raz]

I always delete those lines anyway. Whenever I put a new unit in though, I just copy and paste another unit and edit it in gnome, rechecking the file after editing just to make sure that no other lines (or characters) have been added.

[macsen rufus]

Hi EYG,

I've never seen the pages full of CRs but the three little boxes do occur regularly, and they do cause crashes. Another handy tip: do your editing in Gnome, save, re-open the saved file in Notepad, kill off garbage, resave, OPEN A NEW GNOME editor (leave the first one OPEN) and reload the file. If you have fatal garbage in the file, or if deleting it affected the format, the second editor won't load it, but you still have a copy open. There's a few times I've closed Gnome and wished I hadn't as I was unable to reopen the file, meaning I've had to go back to a too-old backup and re-edit recent changes....

The sort of "garbage" I most often see is a short section of an entry from further up the file tagged on at the end. This is usually separated by a blank line from the last visible characters of the real data. But as Caravel warned the tabs are very important, and the real data can have trailing tabs, so don't delete everything back to the last visible character of real data, only to the first visible character of garbage. Since following this rule I've had far fewer problems!

If in doubt, take a look at the end of a default prod file using Notepad, and highlight the end of the data to the end of the file -- you should see a section of "blank" data highlighted.

[caravel]

This is why I always look my build and unit prod files over using a text editor such as notepad++. With this I can reveal tab and space locations. Every tab signifies a column (in the tab delimited list), removing a tab, any tab, sends the whole list completely out of sync.