New Race Viewer/Profiler (ESP) Utility Released

[ColdSteel]

Andr�s,

Yes, it does work okay with the DevNullGoldMod on my PC.

No, I still don't have the new Version up yet because I'm working on some other changes that Raynor had suggested. I should be able to get Version 1.2 up by this weekend sometime.

Thanks again.

[Atrocities]

This is a very cool program. Thanks.

[ColdSteel]

I just released a new Version 1.2 over in the mod area.

quote:

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ESP Version 1.2 Released
SE4 Race Viewer/Stats HTML Generation Utility
Here's a new Version of my ESP utility.
1020470304.zip
Here are the changes since Version 1.0:

Version History.

v1.2
- Removed exit confirmation.
- Added yes/no choice for initial default path search on first load.
- Added status message to display HTML generation directory location.
- Added status message to display current search path on load.
- Changed main HTML index name from 'main.html' to '0_index.html'.
- Added status Messages for search directory change command.
- Changed the file select dialog to a directory select dialog.
- Increased size of status area and added word wrapping for multiline Messages.

v.1.1
- Added error checking and error message status window.
- Changed initial startup to provide feedback before searching for default dir.

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Andr�s, try this Version out and let me know what error message you get for the Zorians. Thanks.

-CS

[ColdSteel]

You're welcome, Atrocities.

[ 04 May 2002: Message edited by: ColdSteel ]

[PDF]

With new Version I had a crash while the prog were examining Andr�s Lescanos races... an error in a Nostropholo files ...
Strange things is that v 1.0 worked all right through !

[Andr�s]

Ok I continued to test, now with the new Version.

Error message it shows is:

Traceback (most recent call Last):
File (<string>, line 199, in onGen
File "HTMLgen.py", line 190, in write
IOError [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor

What doesn't look like much help.
The status line shows:

Generating HTML for RaceName


It generates succesfully RaceName.html, but not RaceName_Ships.html

What I did was remove that race and try again.
I repeated that 7 times, removing the romulan, vandron, SW-REB, SW-TF, ygath, zorian and regency before the program runned succesfully.
Number of htmls generated seems to be constant: 161, the error always seemed to appear before attempting to generate the 162nd file.
My guess is that it is some variable overflow generated because of the large number of races I have installed.
(I had re-installed some races after the previous test, so total number of races I have now is larger than what I had then, I guess that then removing the devnull mod removed enough races to make the difference back then.)
Now I have 78 races only in the main races dir.

To confirm that it is related to the total number and not to those races in particular, I re-installed them and removed other 7 races and the program worked ok.

Probably this is the same error PDF has found, I bet that he also has many races installed.

[ 04 May 2002: Message edited by: Andr�s Lescano ]

[PDF]

Andr�s, indeed I had the *same* (senseless...) message and lots of races installed (TDM, yours, Atrocities'Trek races, DevNull, Hadrian A races, etc etc ...)
Perhaps when I ran ESP 1.0 I had less and so it worked ...

[ColdSteel]

Thanks guys for the bug reports. That gives me some idea of what may be going on. I'll do some testing.

Andr�s, do you by any chance have any race set .bmp graphics files stored in the RaceName directory? For some reason it looks like it thinks RaceName is a race directory and it shouldn't do that unless there are some race graphics there.

Thanks again,

-CS

[ColdSteel]

Okay, I did some testing and confimed that it is indeed the number of files causing the "bad file descriptor" error 9. Interestingly, if I run the program in the command window mode (Command Window in background), it works just fine, no matter how many race files there are.

From this, it appears to be a Python bug. I can always just enable the command window mode on the next release to make the error go away but I'd like to find a nicer fix than that if I can. I'm going to play with it some more.

In the meantime, just be aware that if you install more than 80 race sets on your PC search path, the current Version of ESP will error off. A temporary work-around is to set the default path lower down so that the program processes fewer files at a time. I'm working on it...

If any Python guru out there has an idea what causes this error, please let me know.

-CS

[ColdSteel]

Good news Andr�s!

I was able to find the problem causing ESP to crash when more than 80 races are processed. I should have a new Version up shortly with the fix.

Turns out that the problem was in the HTMLgen module and not in my program after all. Every time it wrote out a HTML file it printed a confirmation message to sys.stdout. The problem is that it apparently expected this message to go to a DOS command window but my program is not running in that mode. So instead it goes to an internal Windows buffer and once 160 such Messages are printed, the buffer fills up and the program gets hosed.

Fortunately, Python modules like HTMLgen come complete with the source code. I was able to track it down, comment out the offending code in the module and, whoooha, it doesn't crash anymore.

If you're a programmer, it's times like this when you feel really good (you programmers know what I mean).