Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Compiling Errors Twice as fast!

An interesting week since my last post on the status of Aeon and awakening the Kraken or better known as Identifier List Full error. This error occurs when the number of functions in an #include exceed the compiling capabilities of the NWN game engine, resulting in an out of memory error. The system I have been integrating in Aeon is the Shayan Subrace Engine (SSE), which funny enough has nearly 400 functions in one include (made up of other includes). When added to a mature world well it crashes out the tool set in a rather dramatic way with the memory error.

Now I better digress a bit on this and share the joy I currently have in having built myself a new PC, to build, game and do a lot of photographic processing, photography being my new hobby. The specs of the machine were put together by one of my best mates BarryTheHatchet for his own machine and after some research I ran with what he had.

  • Intel I7 8608GB Ram, generic stuff but not over clocking
  • 2 x 1TB WD Caviar Black Drives
  • ASUS P57pP55-DE motherboard (sweetness in a board and it glows blue too)
  • Generic ATI 5770 PCI Express Graphics card
  • Blue Ray Reader/DVD burner
  • Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit OEM
  • Antek case and 650W power supply

So what does this all mean in regards to NWN, no much except that now I can get the out of memory error twice as fast and with a nice eerie blue light emanating from the case.

OK enough with the digression about my crashing my machine rapidly instead of slowly. The solution according to one of the designers of SSE is to "Be a high end oracle/unix person, recompile the code replaying constants and integers with Macros and"... Well ummm Iwish but I crossed checked my resume and realised I am a geologist working for an Oil Company in Risk management and the closest I come to UNIX is when I audit someone.

Not giving up easy and overwhelmed by the response, I decided to just break up the mega include, which funny enough works, until that is it wants to touch nw_i0_spells and apps_include, former bioware spells and the latter is part of the Fast French data base system. Screw with either and well the Kraken awakes, wraps my machine, glowing with a nice blue light, in it's code based tentacles and sucks it down into the deep ocean.

So I am at an impasse and being a stubborn person I am not willing to give up, especially when I can sense that I am close to turning the Kraken into Squid Rings, big ones though.

Right, time to go get a harpoon and go hunting!

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