Overview.exe refuses to work unless I run through builder

BeigeAlert

I'm currently writing another little external tool that will run overview.exe, output the images to a temporary directory, and pop-up the resulting image so you can quickly preview what the overview will look like without having to leave the editor.

Hit a bit of a snag though... for whatever reason, if I run overview.exe either from within eclipse or through a .bat file on my desktop, it rage-vomits a ton of "can't open file" error messages at me. It looks as though it isn't able to load a single file from my map (models... materials... xml... nothing!) When run from builder though, it works just fine!

I've double-checked, and overview.exe is getting the exact same arguments passed to it. I had task manager running when I did a "re-build" in builder, paused it when I found "overview.exe" in the process list, and noted the command line arguments it started with. I then ran a batch file with those exact paths, and it didn't work.

What could be preventing overview from reading any of these files except when run from builder???

EDIT: Hm.... the plot thickens... It works fine if I run it from command prompt (well I say "fine" I mean, "lots and lots of typing" :P )

Mendasp

In the "Start from" parameters in Windows it requires to be in the NS2 folder (or the folder with the resources). or the second parameter (that is usually "ns2") to be the path of the folder with all the resources (if you start from the overview.exe folder this is "ns2" :P )

Soul_Rider

don't forget "quotes" in the path to deal with spaces etc.. The tools really freak out in NS2 if spaces are not accounted for.

BeigeAlert

Mendasp wrote: »

In the "Start from" parameters in Windows it requires to be in the NS2 folder (or the folder with the resources). or the second parameter (that is usually "ns2") to be the path of the folder with all the resources (if you start from the overview.exe folder this is "ns2" :P )

Not sure I follow you. I'll test it out more tonight, but what I gathered from looking at the "builder_setup.xml" file was that Overview.exe takes two arguments: 1) the path of the .level file, and 2) the desired destination of the images generated. Based on my testing of using command prompt only, this holds true. I suspect that the execution directory of these commands matters now... oops!

EDIT: Aha! That's what it was. You've gotta run the program out of the "Natural Selection 2" folder. Working now!