Mime Theater

[BentonGrey]

I'm having some bizarre troubles with something I'm working on.  I've generated the captions for the missions using M's rumble room tool, and that worked fine.  However, when I go to add them to the dat, either through his language tool or through FFEdit itself, the new captions apparently aren't being added.  I've checked the .txt file, they are in there, but they aren't being incorporated into the .dat itself.  What's going on?

[BentonGrey]

This may be EZScript related somehow, but I can't figure it out.  Does anyone have any clues here?  I know that the captions aren't being compiled because my FF log gives me a report saying that the game can't find any of these lines of dialog.  The missions play, but all the cutscenes are mimed, with no dialog.

[yell0w_lantern]

The only thing I can think of is that you don't have your output dialog pointed to the right folder.

[BentonGrey]

Nope, I've tried it pointing to the lang/english folder, tried it pointing to a cutout, tried it blank, AND tried M's tool, with the correct mod selected about a dozen times.  This is mighty strange.  I'm going to try to replace the scripted guts and see if that changes things.

[JKCarrier]

Do you happen to have any "Speaks Telepathically" lines in there? I remember running into some glitches with that when trying to generate captions.

[BentonGrey]

Ahhh....I believe there just might be, JKC.  Thanks man, I'll modify those and take a look.  At least it's a start!

[BentonGrey]

Urg.....okay, I tested several things...no luck.  I removed the "telepathically" tags, added the characters physically to the mission, and double checked all of their entries in FFEdit.  I also reran the Control Center to make sure everything was branded, even though I doubted that any of that would have a real impact on this.  I also copied the lang folder into a fresh mod directory and tried to compile it there, no luck.  I then started removing the new entries in the captions.txt one by one, hoping to reveal something by process of elimination.  No luck again.  I removed all of the new entires, and I even replaced the captions.dat itself with a blank FFX one.  Still no successful compile. 

I absolutely don't get this.  I haven't touched this mod

Spoiler

(PCTales)

since I restored it after my reformatting, so I'm not certain that maybe something didn't get weird when I restored it, but it shouldn't have.  If it HAD, it seems like putting it in another mod folder might change things, but that was a dead end.  The only difference, as far as I know, from the last time it worked is that I added another mission by John Jr.  There's nothing obviously apparent in it to cause something like this.  I'm going to try and test my other mods later tonight, see if they can compile. 

Any clues?

[John Jr.]

Adding to the mystery:
The mission played normally when I added it to my new mod, but it "lost" the captions when I try use it in its right mod,

Spoiler

PCTales

.
I'm stumped!

[GogglesPizanno]

One thing you might check is to make sure its not duplicating encounter/Story names. I think this came up once before.

Like when 2 EZScript missions share the same story or encounter name, the captions might generate ok, but since the naming convention is going to be the same you will get a set of captions with dialogue that matches one mission (and it should work ok) but  that doesn't match the dialogue for the other mission (which would cause problems). When the dialogue and the dat dont match, they don't display properly in my experience.

[BentonGrey]

That's not it, Goggles, although that is a good suggestion.  I've checked the actual file sizes of the dat, and it isn't changing, even when it needs to compile all of the missions of the entire mod.  It simply isn't compiling.

[stumpy]

Hmm. Obviously, check that none of the language DATs are set to read-only (in Windows). And check that the TXT file is 1) really named with .txt (and not .txt.doc or something where Windows is hiding the real extension) and 2) check that the TXT file didn't get some non-standard characters in it somehow (e.g. unicode characters) that might be causing the compilation process to abort.

Other than that, you might want to set the output folder to something else (some temp folder) and see if the language file is generated there. Then you can copy it over. Sort of a clunky hack, but it might let you know whether the issue is that the DAT isn't being generated with the right content or if it's just in the wrong place somehow.

I am assuming this is the speech or captions file. Have you tried with the strings file, for instance slightly changing the description of an attribute or something and checking that that works? Checking the language compilation for another mod (like FFX) might be a good idea.

Sorry many of these are sort of obvious, but it seems like language compilation issues usually boil down to something minor that was forgotten or isn't set up quite right...

[BentonGrey]

Okey doke, I've done some more testing, and I can answer Stumpy's questions, plus provide a bit more info:

Check and check.  The txt files are actually txt files, and the dats are not read only.

I've tried that already, unfortunately.  I mentioned it earlier, but I didn't say it very clearly.   I've tried a few different variations, and have had no language files show up.

The problem file is the captions.dat.  I've been doing some other experimentation, and it seems that the strings.dat has compiled at least once during this mess, but I'm going to add some other stuff and see if I can confirm that it is compiling while the captions.dat won't.  I have tested the lang folders in some of my other mods, and they seem to be compiling just fine, but in terms of strings and captions.

[Previsionary]

Hrm, are you sure FFedit isn't reporting any errors whether through a pop up or FFedit.log entries? If something is stopping it from updating your files, it usually tells you where the error is. On the same token, have you attempted to have someone else compile your files? It's a strange error to have. I've had my problems with lang files not updating, but that's usually been an issue when I was using m25's lang tool.

[BentonGrey]

Hrm, are you sure FFedit isn't reporting any errors whether through a pop up or FFedit.log entries? If something is stopping it from updating your files, it usually tells you where the error is. On the same token, have you attempted to have someone else compile your files? It's a strange error to have. I've had my problems with lang files not updating, but that's usually been an issue when I was using m25's lang tool.

Well, weird error indeed, Prev!  I have had JJ try to compile them as well, but he's hit the same thing.  Here's the latest:  I tried pointing FFEdit at a different directory again...and this time it worked!  The catch is, before I tried to add it again, I went in and got a really good look at JJ's encounter names.  Some of them had the same name as their markers, while one had the same name as a character.  That might have been causing weirdness.  Either way, it seems to have worked!  How bizarre! 

[John Jr.]

To add to the weirdness. Remember, the Mission always played just fine when I added it to my new mod. Just take a look:

I used the "marker with same name as villain and mission" routine in my LSH mod, and it worked. So, I don't know what was wrong, but wasn't it.
Anyway, it worked. Thanks to Benton, stumpy, Goggles, Prev, JKCarrier  and YL for the help!

[BentonGrey]

Well, naming is a tricky thing.  Sometimes it can cause bizarre quirks and bugs, and sometimes it can work just fine.  I've had that kind of wrinkle show up a few times.  That may not have been the problem here, or it may have been that with a few other factors, but the important thing is that I finally got the stupid files to compile!

[John Jr.]

Well, like they say: "I don't believe in witches, but they exist!"
So, I'll use different cs names, just for insurance...

[BentonGrey]

Yeah, anything you can do to cut down on the number of variables that COULD go wrong is a good idea.  I forgot to mention, M's language tool still wasn't working, hence the use of FFEdit.

[John Jr.]

Since I always use FFEDit I believe we just discovered why the captions only played outside PCTales...
M's language tool  don't liked my story...

[BentonGrey]

Well, it's not just that, since I tried FFEdit earlier too.  There was definitely some weirdness here.