&Ben.Boeckel; &Ben.Boeckel.mail; 2009-08-08 When editing &sigmod;s, errors and other possible sources of complications can occur. Validation can help to catch these errors and mistakes before they cause problems in the game engine. The validator will set the background color of the message depending on whether it is a warning or an error. There will also be a count of the number of warnings and errors on the validation dialog. Here is a sample of validation output: Validation dialog Sample validation dialog The errors will stop the &sigmod; from being run by the game engine while warnings will not. However, warnings should be considered before being ignored; they are there to warn when values or objects are not typical. The most common sources of errors are deleting objects that are referenced leaving the reference open. However, if a new item is created with the same id number after a reference is broken, the new object will be picked up as the reference and no errors will be given. With this occurring, it is best to validate the entire &sigmod; after deleting an object. This will help to catch any dangling references created by deleting the object. It also means that in order to catch the errors more easily, keeping errors low from the beginning is key. By building &sigmod;s from the bottom up, these errors can be kept to a minimum. See the Chapter on building &sigmod;s for tips and tricks.