2009-11-12, 06:51 AM
Theatrics aside 
You don't know what SOM does internally. Files are files, programs work out of memory. SOM saves your file when you hit the save button, so it's safe to assume it does not do anything like memory mapped file operations.
Most likely SOM uses a very simple database library for it's file procedures.
If you just clear out a record from the evt file, you will be leaving junk in the data portion of the file, which eventually SOM (or the imaginary database library) will barf on. Probably when you start trying to erase and create new events in the editor. Then your file will be corrupt. I have experience in this aspect of SOM. If you copy an event record, things might (because there is no reference provisioning in the file format) feel safe, until you delete one of the records you copied, which will in turn delete that events information in the data portion of the file, which will corrupt all the events you created by copying, and will cause SOM to crash / leave you with a corrupted file. SOM does not copy events itself this way. If you copy an event the entire data portion is replicated in the file, so you need to know how to work with the event data. I'm not sure what you're up to, but you need to at least understand what is and isn't a valid evt file (peoples' projects are important to them after all)
I'm trying to help you out here.
PS: From what I was able to gather, you seem to've misunderstand what I meant before about extracting and concatenating events. My goal in that case was simple. I have many endless global events in my project. I needed to extract the global events into their own evt file, then concatenate that file with the evt files of the other maps. To do that you don't have to know what the events are doing, but you gotta understand how to correctly pull events out and put them back in. You can do a merge by extracting the events you're replacing then putting in the new set you want (I have not decided philosophically whether to add some overwrite options or not)
You don't know what SOM does internally. Files are files, programs work out of memory. SOM saves your file when you hit the save button, so it's safe to assume it does not do anything like memory mapped file operations.
Most likely SOM uses a very simple database library for it's file procedures.
If you just clear out a record from the evt file, you will be leaving junk in the data portion of the file, which eventually SOM (or the imaginary database library) will barf on. Probably when you start trying to erase and create new events in the editor. Then your file will be corrupt. I have experience in this aspect of SOM. If you copy an event record, things might (because there is no reference provisioning in the file format) feel safe, until you delete one of the records you copied, which will in turn delete that events information in the data portion of the file, which will corrupt all the events you created by copying, and will cause SOM to crash / leave you with a corrupted file. SOM does not copy events itself this way. If you copy an event the entire data portion is replicated in the file, so you need to know how to work with the event data. I'm not sure what you're up to, but you need to at least understand what is and isn't a valid evt file (peoples' projects are important to them after all)
I'm trying to help you out here.
PS: From what I was able to gather, you seem to've misunderstand what I meant before about extracting and concatenating events. My goal in that case was simple. I have many endless global events in my project. I needed to extract the global events into their own evt file, then concatenate that file with the evt files of the other maps. To do that you don't have to know what the events are doing, but you gotta understand how to correctly pull events out and put them back in. You can do a merge by extracting the events you're replacing then putting in the new set you want (I have not decided philosophically whether to add some overwrite options or not)