Noob Question: Description

[Diaz Ex Machina]

Is it possible to avoid the double description in the alchemical items?

Thank you in advance for your help and time.

 

[ploturo]

Short version:

It's a bug in the code that automatically generates the description text, since it doesn't handle the case where something has multiple unique ids properly.

(Or you could consider it a bug in the code that automatically generates the DescInfo.? tags, but there are probably reasons for creating all auto-generated tags for both the old and replacement thingid.)


Long version:

It happens because of how the "replace thing" functionality is implemented, since it automatically generates tags for both the original version of the thing and the replacement version of the thing.

The replaced item has two thingid.? tags, a thingid.oldThing tag and a thingid.newThing tag.

The reason the description is shown twice is because the replaced item also has two DescInfo.? tags generated for it.

Normally, the description display code uses extra DescInfo.? tags to append relevant information from another thing (like appending the description of the primary version of a spell, when another version of the spell just says that it works like the other spell in its own description.)

The display code isn't written to ignore additional DescInfo.? tags for itself when an object has multiple thingid.? tags though, and thinks it is supposed to append another object's description.

You could fix it for the descriptions of Picks that have been added to the hero by adding a script to the replacement that deletes the DescInfo.? tag with the old thingid. But you can't delete tags from a Thing entry, and so the chooser where you add items would still always show the double description since it uses the database of Things. I'm not sure it is worth it to add an extra script to every replacement thing.

It's a relatively minor glitch and either no-one has given the effort to file a bug report, or LW considers the problem to be a low enough priority that they haven't gotten around to fixing it.