TM2 can still be improved too. Regarding the Preserve Trigger thing I found, another small section trim (FORC I think), and probably a couple of other things I'm forgetting.

EDIT: String merging, string color control.

Example:

"Holy damn that Ultralisk is a major piece of crap!"
and
"piece of crap!"

can be considered part of one string and merged.

"<red>Some fading text."
and "<grey>Some fading text."

can merge and become "<grey><red>Some fading text."

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 29 2011, 10:45 pm by Heinermann.

Frankly those enhancements would be very marginal savings in most cases. The preserve trigger one could be useful, from the perspective of slightly reducing the processing when it iterates through the actions, as it'd no longer be an action.

Fiddling with the strings, though, is getting into functionally altering how the map actually behaves, rather than stripping out un-needed data as it currently does now. It seems like this could potentially cause bugs in unexpected corner-cases. If this was done, it should be an enhanced mode that wasn't enabled by default. I probably wouldn't use it for my map, unless there was a significant size saving - not worth the risk of introduced bugs that are very hard to track down (since it's not something you've specifically done in the map that broke it, but an external tool which you don't understand what it's doing).

I don't see how string merging could introduce bugs when no functionality is altered in any way.

The small things add up, which was the philosophy of TM2 in the first place.

Fix tm2 for vista first!

There's a clear difference in what's happening, though:

• One is simply removing data that is unused / isn't needed
  
• The other is taking data that is used, chopping it up and changing references to save space
  

In terms of risk analysis, the 2nd is clearly more bug-prone. Whether it actually results in bugs is another matter - obviously any piece of buggy code can be written without bugs - and yet bugs still exist.

I don't have access to vista or windows 7 to figure out what is wrong. :\

If implemented I think it would be safe ... it is a few extremely specific cases that it would change at all. It already recycles strings (and thus rebuilds the string section), so it is already doing that second one ... The only difference here is the algorithm'd find redundant parts of strings and merge those if possible.

I like these. The Preserve Trigger trim will also result in a protection side effect which will make all preserve triggers in the map unpreserved since editors can't handle the flag yet.

Then, the second one may be kept in mind, while making a map. For example if I want to make an ingame menu which shows current line in white and all the rest in gray it will save half of my string space! (Or as another example with menu where I want to put '>' before the current item.) With this thing one may do right/left text alignment using almost 0 additional string space. Also maybe one may think of some tricks with <remove beyond> char. And... it's even possible to use one string for 3 same strings of the same color: gray, maker's choice and cyan.

Conclusion: , it's time to update TM2 and make it Win7 friendly!

Post has been edited 6 time(s), last time on May 30 2011, 8:53 pm by Wormer.

We can do teamviewer and you could use my computer :0

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 31 2011, 3:02 pm by xboi209.

That's not how that works... It's like trying to help your friend find their lost wallet through a phone call.

Fixed the quote for you, by the way.

Right, but doesn't scmdraft 2 recycle strings anyway? So your string optimizations may not actually be achieving much, in many cases?

SCMDraft sucks at strings. There is no editor that is good at them.

Can't you just get Win7 and fix it?
It's annoying how I had to use TinyMap1 whenever I wanted to protect a map merely because TM2 is dead.
Of course, I know it's not that easy, but the program is kinda hard to use with it crashing out.

How am I supposed to just "get" Win7? I don't have money for a new computer, and I couldn't even pirate it because my laptop can't handle much more than XP. :\

I can ask around and see if anyone'll let me use their computer for an extended period ..

I can get TM2 to work on both Vista and W7, I've posted about it several times. It's frustrating, but it does eventually work.

I think it actually might have something to do with the custom map having sound files in it. My latest attempts seem to be that changing the options to prevent wav file compression makes it work without crashing, although it still doesn't work 100% correctly - the slide-out box doesn't slide out with the compression results, and when the program is first loaded it expands very slowly instead of quickly like it does on XP.

I would love to see some kind of string concencration, anyone have details on manually putting this in your map?

Let's make tinymap3.

I'll help. xD

Make it Vista/7 compatible

I can just update TinyMap2 ... I'll see if anyone will let me borrow their computer this weekend.

Also Farty, since I've started up development on DSNight again, I've been using Tinymap more in Windows 7. It appears to be the wav file compression that is crashing it. When I individually select the wav files and tell it not to compress them, I never get any crashes (still get other weird visual glitches in the program, but it does work).

Note that this is fine for my map, because I actually used Tinymap to compress the wav files a long time ago, and then used an MPQ extractor to extract the compressed wav and added it back into my map, so I don't actually need Tinymap to do any compression on them anyway because they're already compressed. And no, I don't believe that is contributing to the crashes at all, because I was using the same system back in WinXP and never had any crashes, and I can take the current version of my map and compress it with Tinymap on an XP machine with compress wavs enabled with no crashes.

This would also explain why compressing Blizzard melee maps doesn't crash - because they're no wavs included. Still doesn't explain why that workaround would sometimes allow your map to be compressed immediately after, though.