DotP 2014: Frequent Modding Mistakes

When you coded one or more cards but they don't work, it's very likely that your mistake is one of the following. This list will hopefully help the new modders auto-debugging their productions.

The card(s) cannot be seen in the Deck Editor and/or the game crashes before starting a duel

• Did you save the XML files with UTF-8 encoding? If you used ANSI encoding, you corrupted the special characters (japanese, russian, etc.) and the game can't read them properly. There's no undo for that: you need to rewrite the file from scratch and save it with the proper encoding.
• Did you produce XML files with correct structure? The structure of an XML file must follow specific rules. If you use Firefox browser, you can drop your XML file onto it: errors in the XML structure will be reported, or you'll see the whole XML file if no errors have been found. This is not the place to learn XML, anyway the most important rules can be condensed into this:

<BLOCK_THAT_CONTAINS_SOMETHING>
  <ANOTHER_BLOCK_THAT_CONTAINS_SOMETHING tag_name="tag_value">
     <![CDATA[Here you can write special characters]]>
  </ANOTHER_BLOCK_THAT_CONTAINS_SOMETHING>
</BLOCK_THAT_CONTAINS_SOMETHING>
<BLOCK_THAT_DOESNT_CONTAIN_ANYTHING />

• Did you keep Multiverse ID, FILENAME value inside the XML files, and actual XML file names uniform? Maybe you added your prefix to a Multiverse ID but forgot to do it in all 3 places.

The card(s) can be seen in the Deck Editor, but the game crashes at some point during a duel

• Are your cards compatible with other mods you installed? Make a test with only your mod in the game folder: if it works, then there's a conflict with another mod. Try to find which one by putting back one mod at a time in the game folder, and when you find the culprit, talk with the other mod's author and see if you can find a solution together.
• If one of your cards produces tokens, did you include the TOKEN_REGISTRATION block? Each kind of token produced by a card needs its own TOKEN_REGISTRATION. Look at other cards if you need examples, for example Bestial Menace.
• If one of your cards produces tokens, did you specify the correct token name? Maybe you updated a card from a previous DotP game and forgot to change the token name with the new one.
• If one of your cards produces tokens, did you put an underscore in the ARTID? An underscore, "_", in the ARTID will cause teh game to crash out, changing the ARTID and the associated image to not include underscores seems to remove this crash.