Noted a 200+ MB hip file with pages of slashes in something about a mplayer menu
parm {
name “vm_image_mplay_label”
label “MPlay Session Label”
type string
default { “” }
menureplace {
"`pythoneprs ///////////////////////////////////

at which point it basically crashes the simple text editor.
ops:

Crash and Hack nightmares… wow fun.
10s of millions of slashes in an expression? WTF happened there?
Still works though.

ange { 0 1 }
export none
parmtag { “spare_category” “Output Options” }
}
parm {
name “vm_image_mplay_label”
label “MPlay Session Label”
type string
default { “” }
menureplace {
"`pythonexprs(

5C 5C 5C to infinity.

then it continues with…
)`“ ”One per Houdini Process“
”$HIPNAME“ ”One per Houdini File Name (.hip)“
”$OS“ ”One per Output Driver Name (ROP)“
”“ ”One MPlay session only“
}
range { 0 1 }
export none
parmtag { ”spare_category“ ”Output Options" }

I deleted the heavily laden with slashes expression and after re-saving when opening complained about a missing quote or something it seems to be fine.

Although I do see a WARNING Bad parameter reference dispScale in parameter vm_displacebound/floatdef that's been happening for sometime and likely not related.

Displacement isn't on there, never touched it (another bug? is likely. Maybe I'll repost that one separately then.)

The HIP file is now 2.5 MB not 250 MB

Wait a minute that file was totally missing Chops and more?
I had a previous backup seemed okay, when re-saving I overwrote it accidentally Ohps now it's at 68MB. I'm screwed now. ops:

Does anyone have any ideas how to edit a HIP file with a text editor etc that's 256MB of slashes?

Modifying hip files with a text editor is always a bad idea. If you need to do any hand editing you should be sure to use hexpand.

Also, which build of Houdini are you running? This was an issue a long time ago.

The version is more or less current Houdini 12.5

I've been using Hex Editor Neo

It's doing something to all the files no matter how far I got back now.

An empty file seems okay.

Simply opening a file and re-saving results in this slash runaway train.

:idea: Well I managed to cut and paste the nodes from the areas /ch /obj /shop and recovered the file that way.

However an /out nod,e a mantra_ipr I believe, seemed to be the cause of the problem.
At one point it ran away and resulted in a 1GB HIP file?!!? (It almost died again this time too)
This also explains (and confirms suspicions) why my machine has experienced the blue screen of death twice lately. :twisted:

There is something really wrong in there I hope to never see that again.
All I can think is that I was attempting to optimize the settings and running various renders.

I think a Save As ASCII HIP file would be a good idea at least for debugging and recovery purposes. The current format does not seem editable by any means but I also think this restricion has something to do with locking the learner hipnc files.

A .hip file is a cpio archive file type. An archive of hscript command files and binary or ASCII geometry files. Saving ASCII hip files is not an option here.

You could do in a text port:
opcf /
opscipt -r * > /tmp/myscenefile.cmd
if you want to dump out everything as an ascii file and then rummage about through that.


As Graham mentioned to debug a hip file, just use the shell command:

hexpand

to expand the .hip file in to it's internal directory structure.

So hexpand to expand the cpio archive, edit the contents, then use hcollapse to sew it all back up in to a proper cpio archive with the .hip or .hipnc extension if you will.

So you were actually editing a CPIO archive file directly. Never a good idea.

Sure you can “read” some of the ascii parts but never ever edit it directly and expect reasonable behaviour.