Undesirable building template deletion / overwrite behavior

Support Bug Reports
1

Summary:

Editing templates tends to destroy the original template. Workaround requires manual duplication and editing of the building_template json files. Should be a pretty quick fix.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Load a template or create a new one.
  2. Modify the building template
  3. Rename the building template
  4. Save the building template
  5. Attempt reloading the original template.

Expected Results:

After the operation, I’d expect to have two templates. The Template from step 1, and the template from step 4.

Actual Results:

The template from step 1 is destroyed.

Version Number and Mods in use:

Build 2980847

System Info

Windows 7, hardware is fairly high end and shouldn’t matter in this case.

1 Like
2

At what point should the building template be duplicated? Should there be a Save Copy button in addition to the Save button? Or better yet, a Duplicate button that simply duplicates an existing template and then your modifications will be to the new template? Or right-clicking a template in the list could create a duplicate?

I think the steps you listed don’t inherently suggest that duplication should be happening. If I recall correctly, new templates used to be created every time you changed the name, and it was super annoying because you couldn’t delete them at the time. Then they made it so you could modify a template’s name without automatically creating a new template, which is a very handy feature to have, and feels like normal default behavior to me since other modifications don’t cause template duplication (plus, names aren’t used by the game as unique identifiers, they’re just for the player’s benefit). If duplication capability is added (which I agree would be nice), I hope it’s a manual thing (clicking a button) and not automatic (whenever you load the template or change its name or something like that).

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3

An explicit duplicator button as you describe is probably the best solution with the current template manager.

I think the steps you listed don’t inherently suggest that duplication should be happening.

Saving and editing files is a ubiquitous feature. If a file is opened in any software, then saved under a different name, duplication is clearly the intent. If the file is saved as the same name, replacement is the intent.

The complication is the recent decoupling of the file name and the template name. I Imagine this change was made to essentially grant a UUID to every building template file so that they may be shared without worrying about collisions between common template names like “town_hall” or “blacksmith” etc. By design, this removes the users ability to make their intent explicit through the template name alone, and another mechanism to restore this ability should be present.

4

@Jeff_Ely is right but his steps may not be completely correct.
In my experience it is impossible to create modiffications of a template in the same playthrough it was saved. So, if you create one template, save it, modify it and then try to save it with a different name it will overwrite the original template.
This is useful to change the name of a newly saved template but makes it impossible to create sucesive versions of a building.
In order to create new templates out of one original template you need to load the game. Pre-existing templates are not overwritten. You may even get different copies of the same template if you use the save template button.

Imho it would be better to have a new copy of the template everytime you change the player’s name. Only overwrite if that name stays the same. In the new builder system it is very easy to delete an unwanted template. The automatic overwriting of templates is no lorger necessary.

Have fun, Kyth.

PS: I just found out another way to create several versions of a template without having to re load the game.

  1. Create a new template and save it. Place a second copy of that template somewere else.
  2. On one of the two copies placed made the desired modifications. Save them with a new name. This will overwrite the existing template.
  3. Go to the other unmodified copy. It will retain the original name. Save it. You should now have both copies, the original and the modified.
  4. Rinse and repeat. As long as you retain one copy placed on the map of each template you should be able to recover those templates.
    I haven’t tested with more than two copies. Will do it tomorrow.

Having fun, Kyth.

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