Changing Anis

[The Toad]

Just a quick note to say that downloading anis from your site and changing the shirts worked fine, BSJC. I'm back on the fairways at last!
Thanks!

[The Toad]

Back again I'm afraid, BSJC.
The first few shirt changes worked well, but the latest attempt failed. Using the Golfer Utitilty I extracted three .bmp shirt files from CasualJoe, added names and logos in PaintShopPro and added them using the 'Add Files' command. After I clicked on 'Save' a lot of the dates in the 'Dates' column changed, apparently randomly, as did a lot of the numbers in the 'Size' column - many of the latter gained a minus sign in front of them. Any attempt to use the saved player in Links 2003 caused the program to crash, unsurprisingly. Even worse, the corrupted figures can't be altered - I tried to replace the corrupted L_S01 files but got an error message.
Exactly the same problem arises if I try to change female anis' .tga shirts using the Golfer Utility, with the additional vexation that a lock sign appears next to the player's name.
I've attached pictures of the error message, a list of corrupted L_S01 files, and the corresponding original uncorrupted files. Any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong, or why the Golfer Utitlity keeps slapping locks onto things? Does the colour depth in the .bmp and .tga files make any difference?

[Big Sexy JC]

Toad,

I didn't visit the site for a couple weeks and it seems like I've missed a lot. Ive had happen what you are experiencing one time and it took me forever to figure out the cause. It caused me to re-structure my entire file layout on my HD to keep it from ever happening again. The golfer utility has a file length limitation of 100 characters. That means that as you open paths to drill down to apparel or anis it's counting characters of those paths.

Once you exceed 100 the utility will simply not work properly. For example, the path to the game is 58 characters (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Links 2003\PolyAni). If you have subfolders within subfolders from the PolyAni path (like I originally had) and you start creating anis with long names (Christian Bezuidenhout is what caused my issue) and then grabbing textures with long names (L_S01_SHIRT01_CLR_10.BMP) you surpass the 100 character limit and essentially break the golfer utility.

I'm suspecting this is your issue. If I'm wrong we can go back to the drawing board, but that was the issue the only time I've ever seen that error in 100s of hours using the golfer utility over the years. Below is the path that got me. 125 total characters and over a week of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why the utility randomly stopped working, then would randomly start working, rinse and repeat.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Links 2003\PolyAni\New Ani Files\Christian Bezuidenhout\BMPs\L_S01_SHIRT01_CLR_01.bmp

Once I figured it out I moved the \New Ani Files to the root of my C:\ drive and the issue never happened again.

[The Toad]

Thanks for that, BSJC - it sounds hopeful!

I've been trying to save CasualJoe with altered shirts under:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Links 2003\PolyAni\BSJCCasualJoeAltered.l3
which takes the number of characters to 101 even without the additional shirt reference, such as \L_S01_SHIRT01_CLR_01.bmp, and obviously exceeds the '100 character maximum' limit.
If I make a separate Ani folder at the root of the 'C' drive, copy any anis that I want to change there, use the Golfer Utility to change them, and then move the changed Anis back to the PolyAni file, that ought to make the path shorter. I'll have a go and see what happens. Fingers crossed!

Thanks again!

[The Toad]

Making a new folder on the root 'C' did the trick! Thanks again, BSJC!

[Jimbo]

Do we have one that throws his putter?

[Big Sexy JC]

Good Toad. Glad it worked for ya. I had a feeling that was the answer.