I wasn't sure where I should post this, here or in the topic for the RMXP project converter.
I've been playing around with the project converter and the beta engine the past couple days, trying to convert projects, and I wanted to post my experiences and report a few bugs I've found.
A few of the projects I've converted simply hung at a black screen or immediately crashed. Reviewing the log files, it seems that the projects I tried were mostly trying to load data from MapInfos.rxdata, which obviously doesn't exist. Any script that reads the name of a map would do this. Commenting that line out usually allowed the project to run.
The first problem I found was, when using switch statements, at some places in my code I had something like:
case a
when 1..5:
puts "It's between 1 and 5"
when 6:
puts "It's 6"
when String:
puts "You passed a string"
else
puts "You gave me #{a} -- I have no idea what to do with that."
end
Notice the colons after the case statements. ARC doesn't like these and crashes when it encounters them. RMXP however would run them just fine. This is pretty unimportant, but I figure it's worth mentioning.
A massive problem I ran into was trying to convert an old beta build of my project. This is mostly an ungodly hacked together mess, and I'm eventually going to refactor the whole thing and build it off the base ATOA 3 battle system, but I wanted to try and convert it anyway.
It kept crashing with weird errors, but I eventually figured it out. The problem was that I had used an old version of ForeverZer0's Gemini script editor to edit the Scripts.rxdata. It was a long time ago, and I remember there being a bug where it would improperly inflate/deflate certain characters, namely Japanese characters. It would replace them with a bunch of garbage data, and when reloaded and saved again, it would replace that garbage data with even more garbage. Reviewing the individual script files, I found that many of them were HUGE, like 5-6 MB's each. Most of these were just filled with that garbage data, it was mostly characters like: ƒ¼Ã
Anyways some of these 6 MB files, after I manually removed all the garbage data, were only 40-50 KB, so there was an obscene amount of junk that Gemini had inserted in there. Not hating of Gemini or ForeverZer0, it's an awesome app, but anyone who had used Gemini on their project should beware of this bug.
Anyway, after many hours, I finally got the project to run! However it would crash with a Runtime Error when I tried to pause/bring up the menu. This may have been due to the use of several external scripts and libraries I was using, but I really don't know. I'm not too concerned with getting this particular project working, I'm more concerned about the next bug I found.
The refactoring of my project is based on ATOA 3.2 (
http://save-point.org/thread-2136.html). RMXP runs this with no problems. However, when I convert it to ARC, it, as well as a clean ATOA 3.2, it immediately crashes with the error:
code converter not found (ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8)
I thought that one of the files might be in the wrong format, so I used an app to manually convert all the script files to UTF-8. However I still get the same error. Any idea why this would be happening?
In any event, great work guys! Congratulations on releasing the beta version of the engine, keep up the great work! I'm sure once the editor is done and a default set of ARC scripts have been written for us to build off, we will run into less problems. But this is progress!