A message comes up when I try to put down a location, "A terrible thing has happened" and it asks me whether I want to save or not. If I save, the file can no longer be opened again, if i don't, I lose all the progress. While this is been occuring randomly, such as changing a comment in the trigger or preserving a trigger, this one is specific to my next added location. The location is numbered 129, the next one up is 154, both well below the limit. What should I do?

In the past, when this happened to me with triggers (especially working with the trigeditor), I just do things in different order and segments, but I can't really do that with locations. I've gone and checked all the single pixled ones and deleted them all, but nothing is helping.

You have some corrupted strings, I believe, or you're maxed out on strings. Why are you commenting?

It's also probably that you're editing strings which are recycled. All sorts of nasty things can happen. The key is to learn how to NOT COMMENT.

SCMDraft is notorious for messing up when you go over 1024 strings. Try opening in starforge, or xtra edit.

I'm not sure whether or not the new version of scmdraft is any better, as they seem to get worse as you update, but that's just what I've seen happening recently.

I'm sure i'm well over 1024 strings... According to the string editor, i have 1334 of them. I comment because I have hundreds if not over a thousand triggers >_<, and I'm still early in the game, lol... I can no longer open the map in xtra edit because things got messed up when I interchanged between forge and scmd.

I just did this:
made a copy and deleted the triggers I last made
created some triggers
paste those triggers back in

I now have a few more locations, but just a couple more down the road the same thing is happening.

What can I do about corrupted strings? I also have a LOT of recycled strings.

SCM, xtra, and forge aim to do more crazy stuff, but they screw up everything I make. I'm wondering why bother with anything except staredit until at least one of the others seems to pass beta phase. Do you get roadsigns also? Saying that it could not save a memory when you try and play?

I recommend you go back to an older version of your map via advanced -> backup database. When scmdraft 2 messed up your map there's usually no way to fix it.
Don't go over 1024 strings if you want to be safe and avoid switching editors.

Yeah, I kept backups and went back to them, but apparently these problems have been seeded from earlier as well. I ended up troubleshooting by deleting all the triggers via trigedit in a backup file and it would tell me a few things that are wrong, then I would go delete and recreate those triggers in the normal map and it would work... until the next time it happens again.

Something else happened when I deleted all the trigs via trigedit, though. Some of the locations I have suddenly have no identity, as in they had no name. And deleting those will stop the prompts of "error" something "string (# here)" something else.

but yeah, after you told me not to switch from editors (at least try not to), I haven't done so.

The reason is your locations are named the same as some of your comments, or the strings are linked. If you delete one, or change one, it will change in EVERYTHING, including the ones you didn't mean to change. Recycling strings, IMO, is stupid for SCMDraft to do all the time. If it could handle having infinite strings, then just starcraft crashing when you play a map with too many strings, that would be much better than scmdraft crashing.

Use something like osmap or Uberation to delete all your comments, possibly all your location names too. Then go back and rename them, omitting the comments. In a large production (like you are doing), comments are entirely useless to use on EVERY trigger.

May I suggest blank comments, I dunno if they take a string or not

Blanks also take a string. But only 1 for every blank comment.
So you can as well name all triggers that have something to do with spells "Spell (Ice, Fire, counter, etc.)"
That's a great way to a) keep trigger lists short (less scrolling), b) still have some kind of structure, c) and to keep string amount low.

I know what all my triggers do by their conditions and actions. If I put a comment in, I can't easily see these things anymore, and don't know what that trigger does/where it needs to go. Since some genius invented the scroll wheel, there is no need for comments.

I see. All the comments have been very informative. i ended up cutting all the trigs, making a ton of locations, then paste the trigs back in.

i intend to omitt all the comments upon release. If I have anything any different, it'll get real confusing for me. I seldom use the scrolling wheel because it doesnt move fast enoung

you can change how many lines it moves at a time, you know.

In mouse settings. Control Panel > Mouse.

if that happens again, try opening an scmdraft that's not extracted. and then from that scmdraft open the file.

in my case, scmdraft would open my map half-way and then start freezing. so i opened scmdraft from compressed folder (the download itself) and it opened fine. then i saved the map in different name.

Yes, I understand I can change my scroll line increments, but I don't want it to change 20 lines when I'm surfing a website. Plus it's difficult to be faster than using the scroll bar when you have so many things going on. I wonder if bliz realized the potential of staredit from players when they released SC. There's no "move to bottom" or "scroll to top" things.

So Rockz, you're saying that if you for some reason or another decide to leave SC for about 5 months then get back into mapping suddenly, you will remember what all your triggers and such were for exactly in your old map? Comments wouldn't help at all? Also, if you have triggers with a lot of conditions/actions you'd basically be going through about 3 triggers per scroll. Hmm, i wonder how long it would take you to find your that 1 DC you wanna change, which just so happens to be trigger 378/521 for Player 1... o.0

Yeah scrolling's nice, but i think adding comments to triggers here and there would help... and if you say its open source comments will help people understand what things go 2gether/ how specific aspects of your map work.


yea, move to bottom and top would be awesome >.< (and so would an 'or' *shakes fist at blizz*)

Use scrollbars.
It takes you 0,5-1s to scroll wherever you want. Top/bottom np anyway and if you know your triggers you can use it as "fast forward" to get near the trigger you want to edit, then actually get there using your 4-lines-scrollwheel.

well, considering I keep a txt file of my DCs, yes, it's easy to find, since I just use ctrl-f. What I'm saying is that if you understand how triggers work, you can just look at it, and figure out what it does.

Let's put it this way. The only reason I ever name locations is because they get named anyway (location 0, 1, etc...).

It's not that I don't understand how triggers work, and I'm sure that's not the case for most people who comment. It's just that there are so many things, it's really complicated to look at one trig from the other when the only difference between the two is a switch or a DC number. You, however, may be much more talented at doing so, I dunno.

And if all you ever use are the default names, location 0, 1, 2, etc... I don't know about you, but I use shortcuts all the time. I group my locations with names to their similarities. Whenever I want to find a location, I just hit the first letter, then use arrow key up and down a few times or so.

But anyway, back to SCMD. So if I've no comments and no locations named, it should be OK? The string limit thing... If I i look at the String Editor, I have 1397, so I'm past the limit. Would it make a difference if I were to take out all names and comments?

yes. If you can bear it, I suggest using something like uberation to unrecycle the strings and get rid of comments n such. You can put them back in later, but be careful with how much you actually put in, and whether or not you need to comment it.