"Edit" madness
Rosemont_Line
🖼️ 1 images Traveler
Ok, this problem cropped up for me originally ages ago, but just with my cruddy beginner/experimental maps for the most part... I haven't seen it in a LONG while, but suddenly it's back with a vengeance and I have no idea what causes it or how to solve it.
So you have something - a landmass, a desert contour, a lake - on your map. You want to change the shape of it, so you go to the proper tool (landmass or contours or whatever), and hit "E" for edit. The program dutifully asks you to "Pick start node:". So far so good.
HOWEVER... when I click the mouse button to tell it just where that start node should be, it goes bonkers.
The start node jumps to a seemingly arbitrary point in the existing landmass/contour/river/what have you. It doesn't matter where I click, the starting node gets created in that same spot; it REFUSES to go anywhere but there. Even if that point is really far away from where I'm trying to click, it still jumps over to there, and just draws a really long line from there to wherever I'm clicking. If I actually go through with my edit and right-click to finish, it draws landmass (or whatever) all the way from the point where I clicked to that point that it jumped to along the line. Sometimes, if there are multiple landmasses or rivers on the map and I try to edit one, the "I will go to here no matter where you click" point gets stuck in an entirely different landmass or river, one I'm not even editing. So I'm trying to edit a continent way over on the western edge of my map, and every time I hit "Edit", the starting node leaps WAAAAAY over onto, say, some little island far to the east.
Basically, over the last couple of days, I have had this happen several times, usually after doing some other kind of work (exploding and re-joining landmasses or moving a bunch of stuff around)... I would assume that something I'm doing is somehow causing this, but I have no idea what, or how to fix it. The only way that I have found to "rescue" a map once this starts happening is to delete entirely the entity that has fallen into this problem. Re-loading a previous saved version of the map also makes the problem go away; fortunately this has been possible due to how many times I've saved this map as different versions for trying out different things, so I haven't lost too much actual work to this, but still, it's infuriating, and has pretty much completely stalled my progress.
Any thoughts?
So you have something - a landmass, a desert contour, a lake - on your map. You want to change the shape of it, so you go to the proper tool (landmass or contours or whatever), and hit "E" for edit. The program dutifully asks you to "Pick start node:". So far so good.
HOWEVER... when I click the mouse button to tell it just where that start node should be, it goes bonkers.
The start node jumps to a seemingly arbitrary point in the existing landmass/contour/river/what have you. It doesn't matter where I click, the starting node gets created in that same spot; it REFUSES to go anywhere but there. Even if that point is really far away from where I'm trying to click, it still jumps over to there, and just draws a really long line from there to wherever I'm clicking. If I actually go through with my edit and right-click to finish, it draws landmass (or whatever) all the way from the point where I clicked to that point that it jumped to along the line. Sometimes, if there are multiple landmasses or rivers on the map and I try to edit one, the "I will go to here no matter where you click" point gets stuck in an entirely different landmass or river, one I'm not even editing. So I'm trying to edit a continent way over on the western edge of my map, and every time I hit "Edit", the starting node leaps WAAAAAY over onto, say, some little island far to the east.
Basically, over the last couple of days, I have had this happen several times, usually after doing some other kind of work (exploding and re-joining landmasses or moving a bunch of stuff around)... I would assume that something I'm doing is somehow causing this, but I have no idea what, or how to fix it. The only way that I have found to "rescue" a map once this starts happening is to delete entirely the entity that has fallen into this problem. Re-loading a previous saved version of the map also makes the problem go away; fortunately this has been possible due to how many times I've saved this map as different versions for trying out different things, so I haven't lost too much actual work to this, but still, it's infuriating, and has pretty much completely stalled my progress.
Any thoughts?
Comments
Multipolys: If you copy these, you can get duplicate entities, which can mess things up (I'm not sure how it could lead to the behavior you are seeing, though).
Smooth Entities: If you trim these while smooth, the original frame stays out there, and can cause unexpected issues later.
Let us know about these two, and maybe others can chime in with more things to look at.
Steve
I'm rusty on terminology; it's been a LONG time since I concerned myself with learning just how things work (I got the program years ago, learned what I could, and have taken more than one giant hiatus from working on maps - or the story/RPG that they are for - since then, due to other things in life getting in the way), and to be honest, there are a few things I never completely figured out in the first place (I had intended to come back here and ask for more details on exactly the steps involved with exploding a landmass in order to make major changes then stitching it back together, for example... but then this problem came up and smacked me in the face, so I posted about it instead). What I'm dealing with is an ordinary landmass made with the Landmass drawing tool, using the "land light green bitmap". ALL of the landmasses, large and small, on my map are made that way.
Now, the most recent time I encountered this problem (last night), it occurred after I made some alterations using explode. As I said, I don't think I'm entirely doing that right; I think I might be missing some steps in the "put it back together when you're done" section of that process, so I dunno if I could have borked something while doing so that caused this issue. Once I was done with my alterations, I used line to path, then multipoly, to turn all those little green lines back into a solid landmass, and it was after that that the Edit start node began going crazy.
Though, as I mentioned, I have had the same problem with contours, as well, usually after moving them around or doing SOMETHING to them, but there isn't one specific, consistent action that seems to trigger the problem...
I did copy the landmass to another sheet before exploding it, then made the changes, then deleted the original landmass on the "Land" sheet, THEN moved the new, altered landmass to take its place on the "Land" sheet. So the problem you mentioned with duplicates is a possibility, I suppose.