257 replies to this topic

[JustMe]

Tried every trick in the book to get into the curiosity shoppe. (I have a heavily modded Direct Play version) So I'm going to just download the 2 CD version hopping that my saves will work (touch wood).

I also tried modding the save game with Near Infinity to just put the story sensitive items in the curiosity shoppe in my inventory but I couldn't work out if that was even possible. I've tried tormentHack and a number of other torment editors but none allows me to add items to the inventory that aren't already there.

If anyone know any way to mod the inventory with the items needed it would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Nevermind, hex editing and some trial-and-error worked it out.

Edited by JustMe, 14 December 2009 - 02:52 PM.

[Qwinn]

As soon as I got mazed, Morte was on my team

This implies he was with you -in the maze-. That seems unlikely. Do you mean he joined you when you left the maze?

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Okay, cool. Now to diagnose the maze problem, you need to tell me in what area you got mazed and were then returned to after you got out.

The Mortuary crashing bug is as old as the hills, also happens in the vanilla game, and I still haven't found out what's causing it. The work around is to get Pox in front of the Mortuary to "make you a deader" to get in.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

That's really bizarre, since he's not even in the area... when Morte gets kidnapped, he's actually moved to an inaccessible, unseeable area of the Lower Ward map, and when you exit Lothar's area after freeing him he's teleported back to you.

I actually thought the join scripts only worked if the PC was in the area when it executed. Guess not. Bleah. That actually explains a couple things. Looks like I'm going to have to create a number of variables to track who is in your party when you get separated, and only join those. Of course, it's done in a cutscene and you can't do conditions in those. Grrr. This is gonna be a pain, but yeah, needs to be done.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Okay, wait, I'm really confused now. I can't see how this happened. You're saying Morte got attached to your party in the Hive Mortuary area? I can sorta see it if you went to the Lower Ward and he got attached -there-, but not seeing how it can happen in the Hive Mortuary area. Ugh.

I may wind up having to disable the Party Separation fixes (that automatically reassemble your party after the few times you are separated from them via the plot, like being mazed) that have been in since v1.0, cause I'm not seeing any way to fix this. Most of the party separation stuff is apparently handled by the engine.

Qwinn

[scient]

Well, took 5 mins and got code locations where PC's are converted to NPC's (EA.IDS -> 2 (PC) vs 128 (NPC)) when entering AR1800 and then NPC's -> PC's when exiting back to AR1700. If you give me saved game or details of buggy behavior I'll look into it more. Not quite sure issue.

Edited by scient, 03 January 2010 - 06:10 AM.

[Qwinn]

Wow, cool, scient. Well, I could potentially do something if I could get variables set when an NPC gets booted from the group. That way, I could have my rejoin logic only kick in if the character were absolutely, positively in the party at the point of separation. Up until now (and this was all based on SKARDAVNELNATE's fix, which worked well enough, I thought), the fix just attempts to rejoin everybody on the assumption that they are in the area you're returning to where the separation happened. The only exception necessary was to make sure that pre-Pharod Hive Mortuary Annah didn't get added into the party if you left the maze via the Hive Mortuary area. And again, I thought it was mostly working fine.

I did experience a bit of weirdness myself one time though. The Clerk's Ward is one place where it was possible to return from the maze, so I did have the rejoin code there. I parked Vhailor in the Clerk's Ward one time, and when I would zone into that area from the Lower Ward, it would sometimes automatically try to rejoin him. I couldn't find any way my code was responsible though... it can only kick in if the player arrived at the Clerk's Ward from AR1900, the maze. So I didn't know what to do about it.

Part of the problem for me is that I'm not sure what happens in the vanilla game anymore... when you return from the maze or whatever, are the PC's just standing around? Or does the vanilla game try to do something to make them rejoin, via the engine, just not as robust as what SKARDAVNELNATE had it try to do?

Well, I'm gonna comment out the whole thing and test it myself, see if I can get a handle on how it operated, and then see if I can figure out what could cause this fluky behavior that's been rarely reported.

I'm also going to look and see, if you did give me the set variables (they'd be called Rejoin_Morte, Rejoin_Annah, Rejoin_Dakkon, Rejoin_Grace, Rejoin_Vhailor, Rejoin_Ignus and Rejoin_Nordom), I could actually do anything useful with them. I'm not positive yet that I could, so don't go nuts trying to get them in yet. Would it create space issues in the engine to set all those variables at party separations?

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Oh, and note that the other places where I'd need this logic would be when getting mazed (can happen in AR0100, AR0101, AR0200, AR0300, AR0301, AR0400, AR0500 and AR0600... can probably find it by looking for references to when the movie MAZE1 plays), and when entering the dreambuilder (entering AR3017 from AR0502).

Again, don't do anything yet, just telling you so you can tell me whether there's enough room in the engine to do what I'm suggesting.

Qwinn

[scient]

Setting up globals inside engine takes a bit of space although I could always optimize it into loop if parameters were same. This seems like overtly complicated method tho.

The two code locations engine uses to toggle PC/NPC for non-TNO members is same used when adding party member via dialog or booting them via reform party. They're probably action script functions, I'd have to do some testing to be sure. If you get more details on bug or how to recreate it I can do some tracing prior to these script functions being called internally for party manipulation for tomb/maze where TNO is alone.

[scient]

On another note, if someone has saved game or steps to cause Mortuary crash I'd be interested to look at seeing if I can solve it. Debugging and locating cause of crash is very simple (fixing the code on the other hand...).

[Qwinn]

Well, the only other option that I can see is for you to disable all of the party separation code in the engine and I'd handle it completely within scripting (I already do it manually when entering the dreambuilder in the XP Deionarra mod). That's a reasonable possibility. But as long as the engine is doing the separation in its current form, I'm not sure I see any others.

Urf, wait, come to think of it, I'm not sure that'd work... I'd have to basically interrupt the engine as it teleports you to the maze. Totally depends on if the area script runs before the "oops, you've been mazed" engine code runs, and we're probably only going to determine that via testing.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 03 January 2010 - 07:40 AM.

[Qwinn]

Okay, I worked on this (the Morte invisible rejoin thing) a lot today. I am able to consistently duplicate the problem, sort of.

First, to whomever reported the problem, you can fix it by saving and reloading in the Lower Ward with Morte. In my game, that reactivates Morte. Now, that caused a banter to trigger with Annah, which may be what reactivated him. If he's not reactivating and a banter isn't triggering, try resting until a banter should trigger (I'm assuming you have my banter accelerator installed) and then saving and reloading in the Lower Ward.

Now, I've figured out what's doing it. If you activate the party separation code for some reason, it runs a script that attempts to make every possible PC join the party. The theory apparently was, if the NPC doesn't exist in the area where the script activates, the PC won't rejoin, and that is true. BUT, if you then make it to an area that does have an unjoined PC before quitting or reloading (that seems to clear the problem), the script will then kick in when you enter the area with the PC. So, example, you make it out of the maze, Annah and Dak'kon rejoin you... but a script saying to rejoin Morte also ran, it just didn't do anything yet because Morte wasn't in the area. But then when you get to the Lower Ward, assuming you don't save/reload in the interim, that script block that was still running in memory activates and causes Morte to rejoin you prematurely. That make sense?

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to solve it. I still think the party separation/rejoining code solves more problems than it creates, and the problems it causes are more avoidable (just save and reload after your party rejoins you after a forced separation), so I'm leaning toward leaving the party separation fix in. And I'll see if I can brainstorm a way to do this that won't cause the problem.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 09 January 2010 - 11:23 AM.

[Qwinn]

I'm not sure what "problems" the rejoin scripts are supposed to be solving, though (was there something other than player convenience)?

Apparently, yes. There were complaints by people that for some reason they couldn't get the PC back in their party after being forcibly separated. Although, now I'm wondering if this wasn't just due bad timing of the old "can't initiate dialogue with this particular PC" bug that is resolvable just by saving and reloading, or exiting the area and returning. If that's all it is, maybe I should can the whole thing as too problematic. Well, let's see if I can come up with something workable. I -can- already improve it so it won't create any catastrophic problems like force-joining PC's that you haven't done everything you should to get in your party yet (such as, walking into the Brothel and having Grace instantly join you before you ever talked to her or did her quest).

If it wasn't a cutscene, you could probably just append the area scripts and use CreatureInArea() checks to makes sure the characters being forced to rejoin are actually in the current area (hopefully that wouldn't pick up Morte or others); but I don't remember anymore the script you use in the current fixpack.

Yeah, I already made it not-a-cutscene, and I'm just having the area scripts check for various conditions on each individual PC. I -did- want to use CreatureInArea, but I don't see how I can use it - it only takes one parameter, the area, so how does it know which creature to check on? I didn't find that trigger used in any scripting, only in dialogues. I already tried Exists() hoping that would mean "Exists in the current area", but no, it apparently works if the PC exists anywhere. But yeah, if I had a trigger that can run in an area script that checks "This PC exists in this area", then I could make this pretty close to perfect.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

I'll have to test on that Deactivate thing not getting stored, it does seem to be stored to me in at least some situations. For example, Morte getting kidnapped he stays in the Lower Ward and just gets deactivated, I don't think reloading in the Lower Ward brings him back.

Qwinn