Error When Loading Publishing Screen

When I open the publishing window I get an intermittent error that says "*you* (my name) is not a valid integer" where "my name" is the name I entered for my character.
When this error occurs the publishing window is blank and I have to quit the game and reload it to fix the problem.

Although I can't see the code to know what exactly is causing this I suspect you're trying to assign a string value to a variable that can only take integers.

Unfortunately I don't know exactly how to reproduce this error as my attempts to deliberately re-crate it have failed.

I'm running v3.2.1.235 with winXP-sp3.

EDIT: Thinking back, I seem to remember that when this error was occurring my publishing dept was not yet fully upgraded, and I may have had an upgrade under construction. I tried testing this with an earlier save where my publishing dept was at level 1 with an upgrade to level 2 under construction but still cannot intentionally reproduce it.

This post has been edited by Seriously Unserious on Feb 3 2012, 07:33 PM

sometimes i had that bug too it was very annoying ^^

I just got that error again.

my publishing dept is fully upgraded so that obviously has nothing to do with it.

The actions I took leading up to the error were:

1- started a graphics app task

2- opened the publishing window and changed production of Line 1 to a different game

3- hired a couple of employees including 1 publishing employee and 1 graphics employee
a- opened hire window from publishing window and hired a publisher
b- opened manage employees window from hiring window
c- opened hiring window from employee management window
d- hired a graphics employee
e- opened employee management from hiring window
f- closed employee management window

4- advanced the week

a- got a number of employees offered jobs elsewhere and had to give them a raise to keep them.

5- opened the warehouse to check stock

6- closed the warehouse

7- opened the publisher window (this is when the error occurred)

I will do these exact same actions again and see if I am able to reproduce this error.

EDIT: I followed this list of steps and still could not reproduce it. I'm not sure at this point if my actions have any bearing on when/if this error occurs. It seems pretty random at this point.

This post has been edited by Seriously Unserious on Feb 3 2012, 08:50 PM

Thanks for the error description. I think I know what it has somethng to do with.
It probably has something to do with which employee is defualt selected(should be *you*) in the listbox when you enter the publisher. As i reuse objects and indexes there might be something going wrong in some way and there might not be an index up an running when entering the publisher and *you* do not have an index at that time for some reason.
So much for my attempt at doing a fast, nice and sleek class/subclass thing ;-)
The problem might be deep in the classes so theres probably not going to be an easy fix for that. I just hope it does not happen very often.

I had a feeling it was something to do with reusing variables.

Just out of curiosity, is Delphi strongly or loosely typed (ie do you have to declair a specific type for each variavle like in C++ and Java)?

btw this error wouldn't be as bad if I could save the game just before opening the publisher screen and if I have a problem just reload my saved game and try again, but when loading a saved game it skips to the next week on me, kind of defeating the purpose of this type of workaround.

That actually gets annoying when I have to save the game and quit while I still have tasks left undone for the week and I can't do them because of this week skip.

Im not Arnd altho according to the error message its a type mismatch and i highly assume its more strict in terms of type conversions whilst afair in java you nearly never need to declare a type at all if you dont do anything super specific.

For the week skip thing i had this myself latley it started to happen at first when i had 4 lines and doing external publishing contracts. Altho i must say i can do other stuff when i get the error i just cant do anything inside the publishing department which isnt that bad as i dont publish my own games most of the time due to it beeing such a hassle.

I've always had the week advance on loading a saved game, in all versions of GB I've ever played, all the way back to GB1. I've always assumed it was an intentional feature Nino put there for some reason or other.

I assume you're referring to javascript?

Java is what's known as a strongly typed language, meaning that all variables need to have a data type assigned to them when declared, otherwise the Java compiler will give you an error message telling you to give the variable a data type.



Edit: One thing I just thought of, as a quick fix solution is try checking for this type mismatch error before the variable that causes this error is used for anything that could crash the publishing section and do something like reassign it a dummy value of the right data type if a type mismatch error is about to occur. One way to do this is if Delphi has an error handling system similar to the try - catch blocks used in Java/C++. Or alternatively use a function that checks the data type stored in a variable and either returns it as a string, that can then be compared to another set to the name of the right data type, and again fix this variable before the error occurs -- or the function could just return a true/false value to much the same effect although this method would be less versatile.

This post has been edited by Seriously Unserious on Mar 29 2012, 12:20 AM

Well to me it happend so often that i stopped playing GB3 altogether and even reloading the game did not fix it. Actually it happends no matter if i had my char selected in the publisher screen or not without any way to reproduce it at all. At a certain point i was not able to acess the publishing screen at all anymore because of it!

Since then i play Gamebiz 2 again and trigger happy in beeing so as GB3 for me is unplayable.
And funny thing is with the complexity of engines and all that i enjoy gb2 way more than i ever did gb3 and gb2 is obviously free.

I hope the change in programming language for gb4 is leaving that bad legacy behind.