Howdy, I'll cut straight to the chase:

I have a good amount of detail objects in this map, and I wanted to add a time of day switch option; I've done both numerous times, and feel that I know how to do it relatively well.

The first few times I did the time of day, I simply duplicated the BSP first added the new sky to the .scenario, set the new sky in the second bsp for each cluster, blah blah blah. Then when you type "switch_bsp 1" in console, or hit the time of day button I put into the pause menu, it flips to the other BSP, and vice versa.

Well, when I was making an old map I did as an experiment called Selenium, I did the detail objects independently on both BSPs, or rather, they were duplicated and placed BEFORE I added detail objects.

With this map, I thought I'd save myself some time, and make it cleaner by duplicating the BSP AFTER I placed the detail objects, since doing them separately not only takes longer, but the objects can't be guaranteed to be identical in their placement.


SO - on to the current problem: I had everything working, yay, all is well. I open the .scenario_structure_bsp tag in guerilla, and without changing ANYTHING I save it as a second file, "<myname>_dawn.scenario_structure_bsp". At this point, they are identical. I add a slot for BSPs at the bottom of the .scenario file (like every other time), and reference the "new" (identical) BSP tag. So far so good. Since it doesn't have a custom sky yet, there shouldn't be any differences between the two BSPs, I should be able to switch between them at will with no issues, and the weather, background sound palletes, and detail object palletes should be the same.

However, when I built the map, no tool errors were displayed, but when I opened the map to test it in custom edition, it gave me an exception.
I opened the .scenario in sapien, and here's the debug error:

03.19.14 23:24:05 a hobo pc 01.01.00.0609 ----------------------------------------------
03.19.14 23:24:05 reference function: _write_to_error_file
03.19.14 23:24:05 reference address: 401b13
03.19.14 23:24:05 Couldn't read map file './a_hobobeta.map'
03.19.14 23:24:05 CreateDevice succeeded with refresh rate = 0
03.19.14 23:24:05 Sound card doesn't meet minimum hardware requirements. Disabling hardware option.
03.19.14 23:24:06 Increasing sound decompression buffer size to 1048576 bytes
03.19.14 23:24:07 local player 0, weapon (0x0), deleted unexpectedly
03.19.14 23:24:07 EAX: 0x00000000
03.19.14 23:24:07 EBX: 0x00000001
03.19.14 23:24:07 ECX: 0x00000000
03.19.14 23:24:07 EDX: 0x00000000
03.19.14 23:24:07 EDI: 0x0018E978
03.19.14 23:24:07 ESI: 0x00000000
03.19.14 23:24:07 EBP: 0x0018E850
03.19.14 23:24:07 ESP: 0x0018E844
03.19.14 23:24:07 EIP: 0x76FEE9E4, C2 08 00 90 ?????
03.19.14 23:24:07 EXCEPTION halt in \halopc\haloce\source\tag_files\tag_groups.c,#3157: #3 is not a valid scenario_detail_object_collection_palette_block index in [#0,#3)


With that error, I decided, "oh, hey, maybe I'll just have to do it separately, no worries, maybe it doesn't like a new BSP with all those things already added to it. I'll just delete the second BSP reference, and build a new one from the original BSP, just like the first one."

However, after deleting the second BSP reference, I get the same error in sapien, and Halo CE still exceptions when opening the map. tool says the map has decreased in size by the appropriate amount, so the second BSP is definitely gone, but the error has stuck around.


Any ideas as to what I can do to work around this? Also, is adding a new BSP with detail objects already included going to mess up the map for some particular reason?

Halp Plz!!!11!1!

Hmm.... Well, it can be the item_collection itself that it is corrupted, not the bsb necessarily...

True, except that between the points of "it b workin" and "it b broked", nothing about any of the individual tags mentioned has been changed. Between point A (working map) and point B (stupid errors), the only things I've done are to duplicate and reference a working BSP - except that now suddenly the engine has an issue with that BSP :/

If I where you, I would delete that 2nd bsb and try to do the process from the beginning, and see if the error still occurs. If yes, then there must be something wrong either with one of the bsb, or the collection_tag. Maybe it has to be apllied exactly in the same areas at both bsb's for them to work? But you said you tried that... I can't really help you in this one.

well, I know I can always just start from the beginning with a normal BSP, and duplicate it then and whatnot. However, if there's a way to make it work this way, it will cut time in half for any future maps I want to make this way, which will be quite a few.

generally, when you get a palette error it is referring to the list of tags that you build for a type of tag, before you place it. For example, a scenery palette would contain a list of each scenery tag in the map, and then scenery is placed in the scenery block with all the xyz and rotation values.

For DOBCs, I know that they are listed in the scenario tag, but are only placed in the scenario structure bsp tag. I'd be curious to see what happens if you go into the scenario tag, and just duplicate one of the DOBCs in the palette multiple times, then see what happens.