Ground textures vanish in toolset

[t-ice]

I have an odd case, where at least a couple areas show up without the proper, and properly elevated, ground in the toolset. These are exterior areas. The areas in the game show right though, at least for now, but I haven't saved them in the tools as they stand.

Any help?

[Curmudgeon]

Do these areas have .TRN files?

[t-ice]

Yeah, they do. Just looks like for some reason the toolset isn't loading it, but the game is, or something.... Placeables are there and in correct locations, as is the walkmesh. But the ground is just the flat green plane. I would presume if I bake the area in the toolset like this it will break.

Some files of these areas have somehow become to have lowercase extensions, and they were specifically the trn files (ie. Trollmounts.trn and Trollfjord.trn whereas most are like KeczullaWalls.TRN) But re-naming them to uppercase didn't help.

[Curmudgeon]

Perhaps you have corrupted .trn files. TRNs are used exclusively by the Toolset, and are not loaded by the server client.

Try duplicating the areas then baking the copies?

[t-ice]

Well, crap. Any ideas what could corrupt the TRN files, so as to avoid in the future?

[CloudDancing]

I read in the NWN forums it happens because too many textures are used on a tile area (if it just per tile that is disappearing.) So if you manually go through and replace each tile texture sometimes it helps.

However I had that problem happen to a mod I was working on for tsm early in the day and it simply was corrupt and had to start over with a fresh copy.

[Curmudgeon]

Well, crap. Any ideas what could corrupt the TRN files, so as to avoid in the future?

Toolset crash?

[Zelknolf]

Well, crap. Any ideas what could corrupt the TRN files, so as to avoid in the future?

There's no workflow in any end-user-facing program that's designed to corrupt a file. We only do that on purpose when we're testing error handling. Thus, you won't likely get a standard corruption-making workflow. You're thus probably asking the wrong question with "How can I not corrupt files," when the question you're likely to be able to actually act on is "How can I set myself up to recover when it happens?"

To that I say that version control is usually your best bet, with regular backups being a reasonable runner-up. The former is very good at spotting which things have changed, when, and how-- letting you make targeted rollbacks to the last "good" version, but has a slight learning curve. The latter tends to require very hamhanded rollbacks, but anyone who knows how a mouse works can do it.

[t-ice]

Running WinMerge on TRN files from the version of old Exodus mod I had against the current versions show that they are identical. Corruption has happened a long time ago, perhaps all back when I mirrored the Exodus mods on my computer, now maybe three years back, and gone unnoticed. I'll have to see if I can find a backup old enough or if the areas are lost...