Prefab nightmare!!!!

[Hebblewhite]

Hey Guys! (Thought I might as well register on the new forums!)

Torque appears to have totally eaten all of my prefabs ???? Working with T3D v 3.6.2 with PhysX. I open the mission (it was perfect last time I worked on it), and this evening I load it up and *swoosh* every single prefab object is gone!!! The prefabs themselves still show in the scene tree, but when you select them they all appear to be physically clustered together on the map, and if I explode them the original shapes are simply not there... this is totally random and weird. I literally haven't touched anything within the project folder (no assets moved or deleted etc). All of the prefabs had unique names, and no more than 10 or so objects from the scene.

Is this a known issue ? Is there some kind of cap on the number of prefabs or number of objects you can convert into a single prefab ? Has anyone experienced this before ?

[buckmaster]

That sounds bizarre. Are the prefab files themselves still there?

[Steve_Yorkshire]

Possible limit with the stock number of objects able to be displayed? I usually alter the code to allow more. But it doesn't sound like it to be honest. :?

[Hebblewhite]

@Daniel: The prefab files themselves appear to have been eaten... the entire "Prefabs" folder from within the Shapes directory is gone... I can only think that its somehow been deleted as the result of a crash or something I did in the editor without noticing. I haven't touched the directory at all, and I've been checking through virus killer logs to make sure it wasn't removed. I've absolutely no idea why it's no longer there!

Question: When creating a prefab, is it an issue if the objects are not physically touching one another or collectively greater than a set number of polys ? What else can possibly effect prefab objects (other than direct manipulation in the world editor) ?

@Steve: I was thinking along those lines, but I've created much larger and more complex missions in the past and have never had anything like this happen before. I can only see the problem being something to do with the objects I made into prefabs i.e. size, poly count (although none of them were particularly heavy in that regard) etc. Either way, I'm a tad on the gutted side as it looks like I'll have to rebuild a whole section of the map.

[JeffR]

If there was some kind of error when you were editing/saving a prefab file, it could cause it to not write out/save correctly. That strikes me as the most likely scenario.

As for prefab behaviors, a prefab is just a convenient grouped object. Internally, it acts exactly like a simGroup of regular sceneObjects. So rendering of each object inside the prefab is handled on a per-object basis as usual.

[Jason Campbell]

I've had some trouble with prefab corrupting but never all of them disappearing. I know this is obviously not a help now but I took to backing up my prefabs and especially my forest brushes as well as a periodic complete backup of the entire project. Sorry that happened.

[Hebblewhite]

Hi Guys - thanks for the replies. Still no idea what caused the issue, but noticed that some of the prefabs had been left intact, but they had been saved in directories away from the main "prefabs" folder. Anyway, I've rolled back to a previous project version so no real harm done in the end - but I'll absolutely think twice about creating prefabs in the future!

[Nils]

A lil bit late to ask, but did you stack prefabs within prefabs? I remember having problems with that a while ago.

[Hebblewhite]

@Nils: Yes! That's exactly what I had... Basically several large rooms with a selection of pillars and other assets all grouped into prefabs. Definite intersections in terms of prefab boundaries. This sounds like a possible bug then...

[Nils]

I think it has to do with the order of reading the objects. I suspect that if the included prefab is read before the containing prefab you may create a problem of referring to objects that aren't defined yet. I think it would be good to disable including prefabs within prefabs to avoid such practices.

Apologies if this sounds a bit fuzzy :|

[Hebblewhite]

Well, now I know about it I can least avoid such situations in the future! But yes, I agree that the option to make a prefab should be disabled if the selected shapes already intersect or reside within an existing prefab so stop this from occurring.