Bho on 14/10/2005 at 10:50
Hello all. In my quest in attempting to run my mission with garretloader, i realised that the TDS FM's on my computer (SV and Townhouse) have a file called conid.txt under the Conversations folder. I have not been able to find anything about this on these forums, and for the life of me cannot realise how this file was made and what purpose it serves.
Gonchong on 14/10/2005 at 12:05
It's generated by T3. I just put it in the zip because everyone else did :p
I think it is a total count of conversations, which will be unique to your mission as you add more goals, notes, etc. I may be wrong...
Ziemanskye on 14/10/2005 at 12:15
No information on what it actually does, but we can test the differences easy enough - here's what mine contains:
Which should include the counts for both Schism and Townhouse (assuming it's not a left-over that GL forget to rewind on me)
and it was as follows in the Townhouse zip
Crispy on 15/10/2005 at 07:47
Mine contains "1 279". I've only ever created one custom conversation.
Maybe it tells T3Ed what number to use as a conversation ID next? So if you have 100 conversations (numbered 0 to 99, presumably) it will record "100" there, indicating that it should use number 100 for the next conversation.
Hatching-a-plan on 21/10/2005 at 02:19
Why do none of those answers sound feasible? Why would a program create a file that contains the amount of conversations in the FM? Do any of the OM's have this file? Also it seems unlikely that the file would tell Thief which number to use next for numbering conversations. More than likely its just some useless file created by thief. :thumb:
Crispy on 21/10/2005 at 05:34
Quote Posted by Hatching-a-plan
Also it seems unlikely that the file would tell Thief which number to use next for numbering conversations.
Unlikely? Why? The editor needs some way to keep track of which conversation ID number to use next - having two conversations with the same ID number would be a recipe for disaster. Granted, the same effect could be achieved by looping through all existing conversations looking for an unused number, but you know how many conversations there are, and how long they take to load! So that isn't really practical.
The next best approach, then, is to record the lowest unused ID number somewhere, and just increase it by 1 every time a new conversation gets made. It's a very fast, efficient, and above all easy way of doing it. (The latter is important, because us programmers would much rather be slack. The less code we write, the less bugs we create. :thumb:) In T3Ed's case, that "somewhere" just happens to be conid.txt. Where else are you going to store it other than in a simple text file?
Anyway, I think we can agree that conid.txt can be safely ignored. :) I didn't package it with my mission, and everything still worked fine.
Ziemanskye on 21/10/2005 at 09:59
I'm not entirely sure that's what it is.
I am however completely willing to concede it's redundancy when distributed with a FM.
We don't need it, but thankfully it's tiny so I don't think it's something to worry too much about.
