Hello Mauti,
first I wish to thank you in general for your efforts to keep the Mac-RS/R6 and also GhR community alive and kicking; but foremost let me say a big THANK YOU for all your conversion work both in the mods and patches area which benefits the Mac users with access to almost every PC mod or patch ever created. I rarely ever experienced problems with any of the mods I downloaded from your site besides the usual memory issues in the beginning of my RS gaming times when I had extremley little RAM. Also I have learned that some problems can easily be solved by an occasional Re-Install of RS (people who download much will some day suffer from file corruption, as I learned within this forum). And now here's the bad news: In the early morning hours this day, February 23th 2003, I downloaded the five freshest mods you recently converted. Relaxed and joyful I watched my DSL connection suck the files quickly out of the net using Internet Explorer 5.1.6. I do know that using IE may cause downloading difficulties while accessing the files via FilePlanet's public servers if there would occur the necessity to wait in line. But at the time I wanted to download, there was no waiting required so I guess this cannot have caused incomplete downloads or whatsoever (download manager told me every file was complete). After StuffIt had the files unzipped, I put them in my mods folder, disconnected from the net, quitted all applications and re-started my computer. But with the congo mod as well as with T88 death from behind, HunterForce, The Bridge and TUS Expansion Pack I encountered several times one and the same problem: Having started RS, I went to the Options screen, made ONE of the five new mods the only active mod (mind you, in the 'unavailable mods' list lurked around the CS2 weapons mod, DTD Operatives and DTD Screenkillers) and when I wanted to go back to Main Menu it happened: The screen froze in the Options Menu and stayed so for several minutes. I am quite patient and can assure you I know that some splash screens need their time to load but I guess that what doesn't show up after seven minutes will never do so. Well, I had to restart my mac and tried again and again with each of the five new mods only to consider the same annoying freeze within the Options screen. Therefor, I decided to do some hearty re-install of RS/UO (then restarting again) which I afterwards patched with the 1.0.1 Patch (restart) and the 1.0.2 Patch (restart). Now here are my system stats: i-mac G3 with 350 mhz, 320 MB RAM (virtual memory 990 MB) of which 250 MB are allocated to RS, Rage 128 graphics card (only a meekly 8 MB of video cache, I know I know
), OS 9.1.1 and QuickTime 6.0. But before doing the re-install, I rescued my saved RS, UO and Classic Mission campaigns to put them in the save folders of the fresh install. I tested the game in medium detail level with some other map mods of considerable size, Operation Umberhulk 1 and 2 and ST6 1 and 2, which typically require lots of memory. It ran smooth as usual with those maps ( besides some minor lag on one outside area of the full ST6 2 map which I always encounter). Now IMHO the problem is not located in my system but in your conversions. I do not want to offend you, always keep that in mind, especially because I for myself have never done successfully any conversion. But once I tried to create a homemade Black Thorn conversion using the tips franx posted in this forum. (You know, buying the PC version of it, handing it out to a buddy with PC, then let him burn the files on cd and so on). Therefor, I do at least have some knowledge of the principles of converting. Assuming that you do your conversions in the way described in your recently posted tutorial which is congruent to franx method, the work consists of removing those nasty little control chars from the beginning and the end of certain text files in several folders like actor, kit, text and so on using a line stripping program, e.g. TexEdit Plus and to convert the wav. sounds to system sound files with SoundApp. When looking into the folders of the above mentioned five conversions, I detected control chars in some places where they shouldn't be: In .stp files, in the ModContents.txt for example. Now I want to know if maybe some uploading problem is the reason for your probably correctly done conversions appearing incomplete in FilePlanet or if you really should have forgotten to strip some lines. I will try to fix the files I downloaded using my conversion tools and if this works I'll let you know. Meanwhile I would be thankful for advice and help from you. Please accept my excuse for posting such a big thread but I think the more info you get the better you can help.
Let's see what we can do!
Rookie
