error_205

error 205 From: Kevin Lewis <kevinl@mekon.co.uk> Subject: Problem reading compiled scripts (205) error To: DIRECT-L@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU Hello All. As a long time user of 7+ years it feels a bit weird that this is my first posting to this list and it's a long one! I think I may have gone some way to finding a possible cause of the 'Problem reading compiled scripts (205)' error. I was getting this error frequently and the previously discussed 'solutions' of saving and compacting etc. were getting nowhere. John Dowdell's statement that this error is known to be related to movies updated from older versions did not apply. My movies were created entirely from scratch in D7. Bruce Epstein suggested that Null characters might be the cause, but in his case he wasn't getting this error. I don't know anything about them, but I followed the advice and spent some time scouring my lingo for these invisible nasties, and after removing them the problem has gone away. Thanks Bruce. I was surprised by how many I found, some in my scripts but several in the D7 Library as well. Usually they were the vary last character in a script window, clinging on to the back of an 'end' statement. In all but 2 cases out of about 40 the 'end' was the very last line of the script, that is there were no blank lines (carriage returns) after it. In the 2 exceptions they were on a separate line immediately after the 'end' line, but again there were no Returns after it. There were a couple of other exceptions but these probably got there by copy & paste. So where do they come from? Director puts them there. At least my Mac copy does. My simplest example of a movie with the error contained only the following lingo: on exitFrame go movie "xxxx" end I think you can see haw I was baffled as to how there could be an error in this lingo! Copying the text into BBEdit and 'zap gremlins' made the last line become: end\0x00 It seems that the ready made exitFrame code structure that Director kindly puts in for you has this Null character at the end. I made several new similar scripts just to check. The automatic 'on mouseUp' you get when creating a new sprite script does the same. I haven't checked others yet. I have checked D6.5 and it doesn't produce them. Now this is where my theory falls apart! Removing these Nulls has seems to have cured the problem for me at the moment, but a test movie I created to deliberately leave the Nulls in hasn't thrown up the error. Reproducing it seems difficult. Therefore some questions arise: Could these Null characters be a cause of this error as my case appears to show? Why does Director put them in in the first place? If, as JD suggested, the 205 error is known to be caused by copying and pasting old lingo from D6 into D7 even if the syntax is correct, could this be what has happened here? Are these Nulls somehow leftovers from D6? Thanks for your time Kevin Lewis mTCi Ltd.