APCD Adventures Chapter 234 or so - Stock Panos

[Adelade]

Was able to have a nice long day with APCD today and encountered some troubles that caused a delightful mix of headache, incredulity, frustration, and in the end amusement, triumph, results and maybe even some useful teachings. Since there is at least a slight chance it would be useful to someone else (and also because the end part was really funny - at least to me) Im going to tell the tale. Not forcing anyone to read it, but it was indeed a bit of an adventure.

I was working on an update of an existing course, one where I was generously given freedom to do basically as I wished, and one of the things I wanted to do was changing the panorama if I could find one that fit the setting. I realized that one of the stock ones could actually fit really well, the Ocean Cliffs one, I tested it out in APCD, I would need to turn it so the Ocean side was in the correct direction, which one can do within APCD. Worked fine when previewing in APCD, but then I checked in Links and the pano hadnt turned at all, the ocean was showing towards the inland... Back in APCD the ocean was showing in the correct direction upon reopening the program and course, so clearly that pano turning feature simply doesnt work at all, it only appears within APCD as if it does. Well no matter, I thought, and went to extract the pano with Links Extender to turn it in Photoshop instead, thats when the nasty surprise hit me - stock panos dont show up in Links Extender...

Being an update of an existing finished course, turning the plot to fit the pano was not an option here. I was briefly considering if I could take pictures of it within Links to stitch together into a new file.... but even if I managed that I bet it would be impossible to screenshot in a way that no quality was lost, and I think the stock panos tend to be on the lower end of quality to begin with... I wasnt keen on trying that. While wondering if I should just give up and try find some other pano, it naturally occured to me just how perfect that pano would fit if I could just turn it... I really wanted it now...

I thought I'll have to settle for asking around in the community, perhaps someone had found some way to extract or acquire those stock panos as individual files, or if someone had found a way of turning panos, without me feeling any real hope for it. But then I remembered something, hadnt I seen some special tab in Links Extender about panoramas maybe? It turns out I had, but I didnt think it would actually work. It wanted a library file, well I found pansky.lib in APCD and tried. It worked and didnt work at the same time... It gave me ONE stock panorama file. Not the one I wanted. How teasing. I tried it several times, through a lot of Links Extender crashes, error messages and reboots, for over an hour I kept trying it in lots of slightly different ways to see if things would change. Most of the time it just gave this one particular panorama, occasionally one of 6 others. So I had 7 of the 13 stock ones, but still not the one I wanted, and I was pretty sure I had gotten all of those 7 at least twice each. It seemed like it just didnt want to ever do the other ones. So frustrating. (Cant you please just work?)

I have a mod program for file explorer so that I can see previews for .tga files (SageThumbs), and one thing I had noticed was that the preview of the extracted file often seemed to flicker a bit in the first second or so after being created, sometimes briefly showing a preview of what looked like it might be one of the panos I hadnt gotten before (it was somewhat hard to tell, panoramas are really wide files and the previews as a result are quite small). Eventually, one time, I was absolutely SURE I saw the one file I wanted, before it flickered to the most commonly extracted panorama. I cant quite describe the frustration (if not to say outrage), it really was as if some higher power was toying with my sanity, flipping switches to turn the file I wanted into another one! (What have I ever done to you?!)

I tried copypasting the file at various times during the flicker time, I tried deliberately closing or crashing Links Extender during it, I even tried cursing at the file as it happened - still no luck. Finally I tried opening the pansky.lib file in Notepad++ to see if I could find anything sensible. Now, I never really use Notepad++, I basically dont know the first thing about coding or programming (I dont even know if those are the correct terms to describe it), so I didnt expect to find anything except a ton of indiscernible garbage language. There sure was a lot of that. I tried ctrl+f searching for some words that might describe the file, but it found nothing. Just as I had decided to give up for real, I half-heartedly tried ctrl+f for "13" as a last insignificant thing to test, since there were 13 stock panoramas. It predictably found loads of 13's, way too many, but I went to the very beginning and very end of the text and at the end I actually found something... no way. Among all the garbage symbols and whatever there was a "PAN13.BTC", I knew the .btc format from other APCD dealings and knew this was it, its some type of file that holds information for the .TGA file along with some data sort of surrounding it.

I had noticed that the last panorama in APCD's list "Tetons" was the one most commonly extracted, so I figured maybe if I manage to corrupt something about the library file concerning pan13 and pan12, maybe the flickering thing will "get stuck" on and extract file 11, which was the one I wanted. It felt like a pretty dumb plan, even if - despite not having a clue about what I was doing - I sort of managed it, it felt more likely to corrupt the whole file to the point where extracting anything at all wouldnt work, but I didnt have anything to lose. I just.... deleted a whole bunch of text - including a ton of indiscernible garbage - between the first mention of the 12th file and 13th file, laughing at how stupid and doomed the attempt was. Guess what. It worked.

L M F A O

I cant believe such an utterly clumsy and ignorant hack actually had me defeating the almighty devil of computing error and tribulation. HA!

If anyone else should ever feel the need to turn (or otherwise edit) a stock pano, here they are in TGA: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v98quri5vems ... GSLZa?dl=0 If someone sees this after the download has expired and want them, try sending me a PM or asking around. (Or repeating my process)

Whole thing reminded me of Eddie Izzard's piece on computers/printers, if you want a good laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKQzqwn-jIM

[sagevanni]

Some times you just never know.............................

Sage....