Maintenance tools

The Wesnoth source code distribution includes a couple of tools intended to help authors maintain campaigns, faction & unit packs, and other WML resources. These are:

macroscope

a cross-reference lister, useful for finding unresolved macro and resource-file references.

upconvert

a utility for porting your old WML to the current version of WML.

You will need a Python interpreter on your system to use these tools. Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS/X should already have Python installed; for Windows it's a free download from http://www.python.org. You will also need to know how to run command-line tools on your system.

Both these tools are under very active development, so it is recommended that you do a Subversion checkout of the Wesnoth source code in order to get the latest version before proceeding.

Both tools will require you to supply a directory list. This is a set of directories containing the WML files you want to work on.

macroscope

The main use for macroscope is to find WML macro references without definitions and references to resource files (sounds and images) that don't exist. These are difficult to spot from in-game because they usually result in silence or a missing image rather than actual broken game logic. They may happen because of typos in your WML, or because the name of a macro or the location of a resource file changed betweeen versions of the game.

macroscope has many options for changing the reports it generates; the more advanced ones are intended for Wesnoth developers. Invocations for the most commonly useful reports it generates are included in data/tools/Makefile of the source distribution. Here are some of those reports:

make unresolved

Report on unresolved macro calls and resource references. (This is what you are most likely to want to do). Note that in the current version this report works for mainline but still contains some false positives (warnings about bad references that aren't actually bad) when you are checking UMC. The path-resolution logic is being worked on.

make all

Report all macro and resource file references, not just unresolved ones.

make collisions

Report on duplicate resource files.

For more advanced users, or those who want to understand what the canned Makefile invocations are doing, here is a summary of macroscope's options. Some of the more advanced options will require you to understand Python regular expressions.

-h, --help

Emit a help message and quit

-c, --crossreference

Report resolved macro references (implies -w 1)

-C, --collisions

Report duplicate resource files

-d, --deflist

Make definition list. (This one is for campaign server maintainers.)

-e regexp, --exclude regexp

Ignore files matching the specified regular expression.

-f dir, --from dir

Report only on macros defined under dir

-l, --listfiles

List files that will be processed

-r ddd, --refcount=ddd

Report only on macros with references in exactly ddd files.

-u, --unresolved

Report unresolved macro references

-w, --warnlevel

Set to 1 to warn of duplicate macro definitions

--forced-used reg

Ignore reference count 0 on names matching regexp

--extracthelp

Extract help from macro definition comments.

upconvert

upconvert is a tool for migrating your WML to the current version. It handles two problems:

• Resource files and macro names may change between versions of the game. upconvert knows about these changes and will tweak your WML to fit where it can.

• Between 1.2.x and 1.3.1 the terrain-coding system used in map files underwent a major change. It changed again in a minor way between 1.3.1 and 1.3.2. upconvert will translate your maps for you, unless you use custom terrains in which case you will have to do it by hand.

upconvert takes a directory-path argument specifying the WML directories to work on. It will modify any cfg and map files under those directories that need to be changed. Here is a summary of its options:

-h, --help

Emit a help message and quit.

-d, --dryrun

List changes but don't perform them.

-o, --oldversion

Specify version to begin with (not usually needed).

-v, --verbose

Set verbosity; more details below.

-c, --clean

Clean up -bak files.

-D, --diff

Display diffs between unconverted and unconverted files (only on Linux, *BSD or Mac).

-r, --revert

Revert the conversion from the -bak files.

The verbosity option works like this:

-v

lists changes.

-v -v

warns of maps already converted.

-v -v -v

names each file before it's processed.

-v -v -v -v

shows verbose parse details (developers only).

The recommended procedure is this:

1. Run it with --dryrun first to see what it will do.
2. If the messages look good, run without --dryrun; the old content will be left in backup files with a -bak extension.
3. Eyeball the changes with the --diff option.
4. Use macroscope, with a directory path including the Wesnoth mainline WML, to check that you have no unresolved references.
5. Test the conversion.
6. Use either --clean to remove the -bak files or --revert to undo the conversion.