Parse error

[Dune]

A strange thing happened today. I made a new landscape, did some crops renders, worked ok, saved and opened on another machine to do a better total. Parse error on line 4076 (about), and almost all connections were broken  . I managed to reline, did some crops again, worked ok, and it will now go to the other machine. I'll tell you what happens.
One thing that could have been the problem is a connection between the first surface shader containing color and the color input of the next surface shader. But I think that should be no problem.
Anyway, what does parse error mean? Caused by a loop? But then the line would have been red when trying to connect, wouldn't it?   
Oh, and when I reopened 2 cloud layers were gone and a population. Vanished completely 

[Oshyan]

Parse error = error in reading the contents of the TGD file. Usually caused by non-English characters (accented characters, etc.) in file or node names, less often caused by some kind of corruption, like a very stroke-heavy Painted Shader that fails to save correctly or something.

- Oshyan

[jo]

Hi Ulco,

As Oshyan says, this is usually due to non-English accented characters in the project file. The easiest way to fix something like this is to open the project file in a text editor (the project file is just XML) and go to the line mentioned in the message (i.e. line 4076). Most text editors will have something which allows you jump to a particular line. The problem character should be on that line or very close to it. If you change the character to something else the file will load but of course the change might have some effect on a particular node. Most often we see these problems with file paths so potentially some node won't be able to load a file.

If you are able to find the error I would be interested to know what it is. We need to make this more robust until such time as we support a wider range of characters/languages.

If you still have project you can send it to me and I'll look at it. I'd only need the project the file, not any assets etc.

Regards,

Jo

[Dune]

Thanks guys. I found the character: Intérieur (in an object). But there was only one mentioned and when reopening the tgd another parse error appeared. And another one, and another one. So not all where mentioned at once. They were indeed French é's. Replaced them all and it opened fine. Thanks!

[Oshyan]

Glad to hear it. We do hope to improve the handling of these kinds of characters in the future.

- Oshyan

[jo]

Hi Ulco,


The XML parser stops when it runs into a problem, and that's where the problem gets reported as being. We can't make it continue and accumulate the errors. Might be worth doing a find and replace, or at least a find, if you run into that sort of problem in the future.


Regards,


Jo

[mhaze]

That is worth knowing as I've had similar errors before.

[Dune]

Thanks Jo. Luckily there were only 7 or so é's.