shipyard broken in Tezaeded

auxroot · Post by **auxroot** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 8:14 pm

I can't view the ships for sale at Tezaeded! I can see all the upgrades, but when I press 3 again to view the ships, the progam stops responding and the system mouse cursor shows up instead of the Oolite cursor. The only way to get back in is to press cmd+F, which is the command to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode. It doesn't toggle that, but it makes Oolite respond again. I tried deleting the shipyard.plist and the shipdata.plist and that worked, but then Oolite crashed as soon as I exited the station.

I figured that Oolite would rebuild the plists when it started up but it didn't, so I had like five pages of ships for sale and no ship on the splash/startup screen.

I'm running v1.65 on OS X 10.4.11.

auxroot · Post by **auxroot** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 8:21 pm

Okay, I tried erasing only the shipyard.plist. I didn't get the crash this time. But then I travelled to Tiriusri, and the shipyard was empty. It seemed fine in Orarra, though. I don't understand why the game hasn't generated a new preferences file.

Post by **another_commander** » Sun Jan 20, 2008 10:01 am

It is absolutely A Bad Thing erasing any internal file Oolite uses. You do not resolve a problem this way, you simply postpone it for later. Probably Oolite has already complained in your game log about .plists missing or being invalid. On top of that, the game does not generate any .plist by itself.

The problem could be caused by some OXP messing up. Try running the game without any OXPs and try again at Tezaeded. In fact, you don't even need to go to Tezaeded. If it works on one shipyard, it should work on all. I think you just happened to notice something wrong on Tezaeded.

auxroot · Post by **auxroot** » Sun Jan 20, 2008 5:23 pm

Oops! I'm used to fixing problems in lots of programs by forcing new preferences this way.

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 10:04 am

Well, probably you are making things worse in a lot of other programs as well?

I have to say that you seem to be the victim of a huge misunderstanding. A ".plist" has nothing to do at all with preferences! "plist" is the abbreviation for "property list". (Although property lists may be used to store preferences, this is by far not their only use. And they would be located in your preferences-folder, not within the application!)

A property list is a way of "outsourcing" certain parts of the game-code, in order to make it easier to modify. Therefore all files within Oolite that are named "blabla.plist" are an integral part of the gamecode! If you delete them, the game doesn't work anymore. It's as simple as that. You could as well delete the whole Oolite.app. And of course neither the complete application nor parts of it will regenerate themselves after being deleted. How should they do this?

So the bottom line is: Please don't touch anything (especially don't delete it) that you haven't understood properly.

Post by **Eric Walch** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 1:23 pm

auxroot wrote:
Oops! I'm used to fixing problems in lots of programs by forcing new preferences this way.

With preferences stored in a separate preference folder it is generally working. But think, were should the program get his default set of a clean preference file from ? :

Yes, ... from a clean copy stored somewhere in his own code. When you delete this you are screwed up.

But maybe you mend an other file that was deleted? It is possible to make a copy of the .plist files that are in oolites internal Config folder and put it in the addOns folder. From this moment on Oolite will use that plist as default and you can edit that one. When something gets crewed up with that file, you can just delete it and Oolite falls back on his internal plist.