I have been using scmdraft 2 exclusively to create my map, never used any other map editor. Over the course of development I have saved backups at certain points, which at the time of course worked perfectly well. Now with the latest version of my map, I can move around the map, place units, edit unit stats, strings and triggers without any issue, but when I click on the locations view on the left I get this error:
"Something bad happened, would you like to save a diagnostic file?"
After clicking yes or no, the program crashes. The diagnostic file doesn't have any nicely human readable information as to why the program crashed (as I'm sure everyone here knows).

Now the really odd thing is that you would expect that this is some kind of map corruption, so I should be able to go back to older versions and continue working from there. Except when I open up my old versions, and click on locations, they also crash. It dosen't make sense to me that multiple backup maps that were 100% functional at the time they were made, will now crash when attempting to edit the locations in them? So this is making me think something is wrong with scmdraft2 itself?

Also if I click "Permanent locations" under "Display Options" it will crash straight away also. However if I open a map in which the locations work fine and expand the location list (the + sign), then open up my map, I can see all of the location names fine, but if I try and click on one of them it crashes then.

If I protect my map, and then unprotect it such that all the strings are wiped, then I can open up this newly cleaned version of the map and edit the locations without any issue. However doing this obviously loses all my strings. I've just been using Unused Unprotector and ProEdit4.0 to do this, and they both seem to wipe out all of the strings from the map (including comments in triggers). If I had a program that could just wipe the location names, that might be enough, and I could grudingly re-enter them all by hand, but losing all of my strings altogether isn't realistic.

I also tried opening the map in good old staredit, which removed a bunch of illegal units, but that lets me edit the locations. So I tried renaming the most recent locations that I created to some other names, saved the map and opened it, but that didn't help at all.

I can't get starforge to work on my computer (Win 7 x64) - simply won't install properly, complains about missing dll files.

Anyone have any ideas as to what I can try to reclaim my map?

Edit:
I've looked through this forum more and found this post http://www.staredit.net/topic/9103/ where their solution was to reboot their computer and it came right. I tried this already, and it didn't help. Also in that post they said they crashed on many many different maps - I only seem to crash on versions of my own map.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 14 2010, 11:54 am by Lanthanide.

Delete the backup database.
Try reinstalling Scmdraft. Use a newer or older version.

You should be able to install Starforge if you googled for the missing dll files.

Also, did you go over 1024 strings? Although ScmDraft is supposed to be able to handle that it will most certainly result in map corruption.

Btw. protectors don't remove all strings. They keep every string visible in game.

Finally you can try Xtra edit or Fartyedit which are both mods for Staredit but have a lot more features in comparison.

If you can't find any of the mentioned programs/dlls just ask. We can provide them.

Thanks for the fast and comprehensive reply!

Oddly enough, this looks like a Windows 7 problem. I dug further back through the forums and found this post: http://www.staredit.net/topic/8966/ where someone else was having other crash problems with locations. Darkling said to set compatibility to win 98 and that'd fix it. So I just set the compatibility mode to Win XP SP 2 and ran it, and it worked fine on that map. I cleared the compatibility mode setting, so it is running regularly, and now it works fine again without any issues .

So looks like some weird Windows 7 incompatibility problem, rather than my map being corrupt (which was indicated by the fact that my old backups also were inexplicably broken) and for some reason running it once in WinXP compatibility mode fixed it? Very very odd.

Also for the record I'm at just under 800 strings in use, so the 1024 limit shouldn't be an issue here.

I guess this can be locked now.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 14 2010, 12:19 pm by Lanthanide.