Popcycle.dat strange behaviour
-
I have been working on developing my popgroup.ymt generator today to include the ability to generate a new popcycle.dat file. Unfortunately on testing it all traffic was broken in the game, despite the generated code being functionally identical the code that was already in it.
Long story short I ascertained the problem stems from the text being copied from excel, after copying the original popcycle.dat into excel, then copying the sheet and pasting it back I got the same results. Presumably the game doesn't like the formatting that is in the file.
My question is does anyone know what the formatting expectations are for the popcycle.dat? I know the file normally has everything spaced out in a nice to read table, but I assumed the game would ignore all those spaces when reading the file.
Any help would be appreciated, as this could potentially make traffic selection considerably easier for a lot of people!
-
@ItsJustCurtis take a freah vanilla file that works and your file that doesn't work and look at them both in Notepad++. The problem wouldn't be spaces, it's probably extra code hidden that excel creates. Notepad++ is for codeing and will show you all the characters in the file. Had this with blindly copying dlctext from files. One of them had an extra character invisable to openiv.
-
I do use notepad++ already, do you know if there is an easy way to compare the two? Given the messed formatting it will be impossible to do it by eye
-
Notepad++ has a compare plugin.
-
Turns out it's the way that excel pastes tables to the clipboard, there's something in there that tells the clipboard that this is a table and not just lines of text, and GTA doesn't know how to parse that data. Joining all columns in a row to a single column fixes it.Ignore me, I'm an idiot, the excel sheet was removing leading zeroes from all numerical values by default. Need to investigate further but I'm pretty sure this is it.
-
Nope, completely barking up the wrong tree. Even with the numbers corrected it still didn't work correctly. After much back and forth, using the notepad compare plugin, I eventually found that the trailing spaces created by excel in empty cells somehow messed with the way the game read the code. A quick trim function to eliminate those spaces has now sorted the issue, and the traffic is now working perfectly