The Underworld, by Bearded_Dragon, has changing names of Church 4. Contact him to find out how to change names without crashing the game.
His email: the_dragoon@hotmail.com

I have no problems as long as I rename only a couple of units (say, 8-12 sea towers.) But if I rename a real lot of items (e.g. 60-100 wall pieces), this seems to give the game a kind of "overload"... as if the scenario was carrying too much information around with it.

Under normal circumstances, a buggy trigger crashes your game immediately - while you play it. This case is so weird because it doesn't do that... it rather seems to work like a fuse, and the explosion only goes off later on, and only if I press the Save button.

Ingo

P.S.: Bearded Dragon's Underworld scenario crashes for many people (me too).

Haven't seen that before, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Remember that a saved game is not a snapshot of a map at a certain point in time, but is rather the current state of the game. In order to restore the exact state of the game, my guess is that when it saves, it has to take the starting map, and apply the changes that have happened since the game started. This would seem (to me) to include all the object-renaming, but condensed into 1 instant, which is a horrifying thought as we all know the dangers of renaming too much in a single trigger.

This raises something else that I am now curious about - if you recorded it and then tried to save the recorded game after the renaming, would it also crash ?

Either way, your observations seem likely, but I don't know how anyone outside of ES can give a definitive answer. The best we could do is get empirical evidence and formulate a theory that best fits the observations :/

I encountered the same problem with a scenario of mine.

I was renaming about 65 TWALL for a dam I had them split into 5 triggers to go off about 35 seconds into the game, the 35 seconds comes and nothing happens.

A while later I was testing and about 1/3 through the game I tried to save and It crashed. I tried for many days trying to find the bug.

About a week or two later I decided I didn't like the way the TWALL's looked so I took them out. Later that day when I tested It worked perfectly.

In conclusion I believe your hypothisis is correct, Nice Work!

DW

I've checked it out as well. It didn't crash when I tested it out, neither when I tried to save it, but I suppose I will soon run into it as well.

This is bad... I got me a whole bunch of hidden units. So whaddawedo now, Ingo? Leave the old names? The perfectionist in me does not allow that. Idea's, anyone?

mmm, perfectionism... now thats a word people are so obsessed with but will never achieve..

Im not saying taking u're time is wrong.. I just do what I can to the best of my ability. Renaming triggers for units such as these don't bother me too much but maybe others, I don't know.

I do not agree, that the computer crashes because of renaming hidden units. The crash is caused by too many of these units, but I ignore how many it supports. I played a scenario with a renamed OMTBO without any problem, but if you remember my review of the Swallowed Realm Ch. III. A scenario which is not overloaded, which has not many elevations but...

Quote my review:

"I was kicked out of the game far to often, which happened after being killed, going directly to load saved game,..."

"For my taste there were too many “OMTBO” shipwrecks"

Around Palador are 48 OMTBO, which were NOT renamed.

I rename a lot too. Most of the time i change palisade walls to Fence or other names.

I also had the problem you have/had if you make more then 60 renames in 1 trigger it will crash (well I don't know or it will crash at your place but here it does). I make 4 or 5 big rename triggers for walls and palisade walls.

That could be sollution but ....

Quoted from Tanneur99:

It's very well possible that it's enough to have too many of those units. But renaming them appears to make it worse. My problems did not turn up when I used those hidden units. Trouble began when I started massively renaming them - and it got better after I removed those three renaming triggers, thus giving the comp about 60 fewer renamed sea gate posts.

Ingo

Probably both, the number of units and renaming cause the problem. Did you try less renamed units? 30 (three triggers 10 effects each) instead of 60 renamed units.

This might take a while, but also might you try to reneame the same number of units, but make them not "beta units" if the game still crashes, you could try streching it between more trigs, or other things. There are a lot of renamed "betas" in people's scnearios, but they only crash when I save...HEY! Hmm. I remember. Ingo, exactly when does it crash? after the save? when you click "save"?when you click the menu? I'm curious, because in the case of the Underworld II, I crashed when i tried to load a game. this was simply because of my slow computer.

Any way, this may be important...

-crasher

crasher: It happens at the last step: I press "save game", enter a name, and then click "OK". At that last click of the "OK" button, the game crashes - so it's at the moment when the saving process really begins.

Interesting discussion, guys - I'm surprised to see how many other people had this problem, too. I do not think we'll get a satisfying answer from ES on this; they'd probably just say "What do you expect if you use unfinished and incomplete code that was taken out of the official game, and that was not supposed to be used?" And I guess they'd have a point there. Hidden units are fun when we find them and use them, but I guess we can't expect them to work as well as the units from the finished product.

Ingo

[This message has been edited by Ingo van Thiel (edited 05-21-2002 @ 01:53 AM).]

* Nods *

And the discussion rolls on... We should use a trial-and-error-basis, I think. One unit-rename doesn't hurt, two doesn't hurt, three... Well, you get the point.

Volunteers?

@ Ingo van Thiel

Uups, I take my comment back. The game crashed later with too many hidden units. Lost, back to saved game, crash, load AoK, to saved game, play.
Strange was, most saved games crashed the comp., but some did not.

Is'nt it possible to rename many units with just one change object trigger by dragging a selection area.(i'm not quite sure whether it works for walls though)

Did you by any chance change the ownership of the walls(that too might cause the game to crash)

[This message has been edited by Cknchaos (edited 05-21-2002 @ 11:14 PM).]

There's no area-effect with RU.

And I'm not sure about those walls...

Luke: It is possible to rename a group of units by drawing a box around them, rather than selecting only one of them. But this only works if at least one unit in that group has just been newly put onto the map. And it only works for units, not for buildings.

Quoted from Cknchaos:

I changed the ownership of a gate twice, but that is pretty much all ownership changes for lost units in that scenario. So far, I had no more crashes after removing those three renaming triggers - but I didn't test the latest version very often yet (only 4-5 times).

Ingo

[This message has been edited by Ingo van Thiel (edited 05-22-2002 @ 12:28 PM).]

Why don't you try renaming ordinary palisades and stone walls to see if the same poblem reoccurs.(then we'll know whether the problem is with the twall or renaming triggers)

@ Ingo

Auf der Web-Seite von Reyk habe ich unter "Bugs" folgendes gefunde.

"Bei "Objektnamen ändern" von Gaia-Objekten mit der Bedingung "Objekt sichtbar" kommt es zum Absturz des Test-Spieles."