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Hi.

When saving a film in 1.6, if I used or played a plug-in with a name longer than 31 characters, the film will not play again. It seems 1.6 changes the name of the "required map" to a strange, truncated name with a #-sign and some numbers, inside the film file itself, so when Myth wants to run the film, it can't find the plug-in.

The only way around it is to open the actual film in HexEdit, copy the strange map name, paste that name on the plug-in and then the film plays fine.

Mac OS X.

Any way to get Myth into the modern world where it can deal with plug-in and file names longer than 31 characters? I think the plug-in in questions was originally named (minus quotes) "Bushido - Ouishiana Temples (Solo)" and was changed by Myth to be "Bushido - Ou#348538" or something similar (inside the film - it did not change the plug-in itself).

The solution to this problem is NOT for the end user to make the plug-in name smaller or shorter but to fix Myth so it responds like a modern application. Just in case someone out there was going to say, "Well, all you have to do is just..." As if that's actually a solution.

Since I have enough knowledge to rename the map it's not a huge issue but it is annoying that Myth 1.6 can't digest file names longer than 31 characters. This could possibly have an effect on other things somewhere else, as well.

Thank in advance chaps.

Myth has always had a limit of 31 characters for plugin names. I am not sure if this limit is documented somewhere, but its essentially a map-maker's bug to name a plugin longer than that (and especially you can't see the full name in Myth plugin dialog anyways since its not wide enough). This is not something unique to Myth II 1.6.

On the other hand, it would be possible to update Myth II to support longer plugin names - at least internally. However, doing a brief search through the code it reveals that a lot of code will have to be changed to support this enhancement. The biggest problems are the encoded names in the files themselves.

Did you know that in addition to the filename, each Myth plugin also stores its name near the beginning of the file itself (in the data). And did you know that the space allocated for this is exactly 32 bytes (1 byte being reserved for the value 0 which indicates the end of the name - making the max length 31). And after this information comes other data, which cannot be simply overwritten by the longer name because then it would be corrupted!

I am surprised it is even possible to build a plugin with a filename longer than 31 characters, without creating all sorts of other problems (perhaps the fix should be in Fear to disallow this?).

Edit: I also just double checked my plugins folder, and all 372 plugins that I have have names smaller than 32 characters. Also, the version of that map that is in my plugins folder is called "Bushido-OuishianaTemples_v1" which is within the character limit, and works fine (and does have the solo and co-op meshes). I am not sure why yours is named differently.

aside from any space concerns, bungie would have made it that way because until the arrival of osx the maximum character limit in a file or folder name on macs was 31 characters.