How do I add items without crashing?

I'm playing around with the editor and I wanted to try adding a simple item proto to the game. Unfortunately, doing so makes my game crash on start (tries to load items, fails). I'm using the world builder v2.04, and I backed up my protos.tab and whatnot, but it's still kinda frustrating. Is there some special procedure I need to use when I want to add a new proto?

 

The easiest way that I have found is to:

1. Look for a similar item to base the new one on
2. Find this item in the drop-down menu in the Prototypes tab
3. Type in a new, unused ID # in the ID box
4. Click on Add New Proto
5. Edit what you will (be sure to make Proto Number, Object Name, and Object Description fields the same as the new ID#)
6. Click on Save All when done
7. Copy new protos.tab over old one in Temple.../data/rules

 

That's what I did - just to experiment, I took the Mithral Shirt (I think that was ruff's?) and I copied it and made a Small Mithral Shirt. Unfortunately the game engine didn't seem to like it very much . . . testing a few things.
Do I need to update some other file like onames or something when I add a new item?

 

Ok, for future reference: The engine doesn't like fractional values in the weight category.

 

Doh... you also need to copy the new description.mes and maybe long_description.mes over the old ones in the /data/mes folder. But other than that, no, AFAIK.

Ahh, really? Guess that makes sense in a CRPG.

 

Basically, I wanted to make sure that small sized versions of the armor were proto'd, so if (say) you have a halfling fighter or a gnome barbarian or something, you can get your hands on small mithral shirts or small mithral full plate or whatnot. As it happens, small armor is half the weight of normal armor, and mithral is also half. A chain shirt is 25 lbs., so a mithral shirt should be 12.5 and a small mithral shirt should be 6.25. The engine apparently doesn't like this. Following the rules in the PHB (always round down), I just made 'em 12 lbs. and 6 lbs., respectively.

 

The game doesn't really recognize the small/medium/large distinction when it comes to armor. A small character can wear medium sized armor with no penalty, and a medium sized character can wear small sized armor. Adding small sized armor to the game just allows any character to have half weight armor.