364 replies to this topic

[Qwinn]

Thanks

The 0.0.0.etc. sequence seems to be the compiler's way of determining which of various traits a CRE can have is being checked for. All of these can be set in the CRE, some (like TEAM and SPECIFIC) are often set in scripting.

The format -seems- to be 0.FACTION.TEAM.GENERAL.RACE.0.SPECIFIC.

RACE might also be SPECIES - these are identical in 99% of the CRE's in the game. The handful where they aren't the same, I saw no instances in scripts where they are being looked for.

This is actually a pretty cool way to do it, because it lets you look for multiple traits at once. For example, all the thugs in the Alley of Dangerous Angles have TEAM "ALLEY_GANG", but the good side has GENERAL "GOOD" and the bad guys have "GENERAL" "BAD". Blackrose has scripting that checks for, and does different things, based on [0.0.ALLEY_GANG.BAD] and [0.0.ALLEY_GANG.GOOD], meaning it allows him to tell the good gang from the bad gang among all the gang members.

The first parameter in the list appears to be meant to distinguish PC's from NPC's, but that isn't set in the CRE as far as I can tell, I think the check is hardcoded in the engine.

The sixth parameter is unused in any script in the game, no idea if it's used anywhere else but I doubt it.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 13 July 2009 - 02:35 PM.

[Qwinn]

If you'd like to see an example of this in action, look at 0600TOD1 and 0600TOD2. These are Sarhava's toadies. They turned up in your search on 'Help("' because they do have these blocks:

IF
  Help("Sarhava")
THEN
  RESPONSE #100
	Enemy()
	Attack(LastAttackerOf(LastHelp))
END

Those fail, since Help("Sarhava") always returns false. But, I don't actually have to do any fixes, because the toadies and Sarhava ALSO include:

IF
  OnCreation()
THEN
  RESPONSE #100
	SetTeam(Myself,146)
END

and

IF
  Help([0.0.146])
THEN
  RESPONSE #100
	Enemy()
	Attack(LastAttackerOf(LastHelp))
END

This sets their team properly and checks against cries of help from that team, which works fine. Those bits properly set up a mutual defense pact between Sarhava and her toadies. The Help("Sarhava") check at that point is just redundant, so it doesn't matter that it's not working.

Other places, though, I will have to add checks. I've already gone through and changed "!Help("Jasilya")" to "!Help([0.0.0.0.0.0.DAMSEL_IN_DISTRESS]" in some of those 0701 scripts (after setting Jasilya's TEAM to DAMSEL_IN_DISTRESS, of course). And there's apparently some scripting where the three incarnations in the Fortress do stuff based on each other's cries for help, though in at least two cases I think it's just floating text. In all 3 cases it's based on your attacking them, which I doubt many people do anyway, but I'll fix it just to be thorough.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Noticed that one of the rail critters (#5) in AR0701.INI (Curst NW section) wasn't being activated.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Alright, took a minute to fix the Help() triggers on the Paranoid Incarnation and Harlot 5's johns. I also noted that the john's talking animations weren't synchronized with their floating text, which actually had the effect of making it seem as if the floating text was appearing over the wrong john's sprite. Fixed that too.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Been meaning to take care of this. It's really a fix to a UB component, but what the hell, this thread is pretty much a developer diary at this point.

Restored Curst Prisoners - if the jailbreak has begun and you beat the prisoners to the area exit, when you come back, any prisoners that didn't make it can be seen running back to the jail and then to the exit again. They'll be gone when you come back in v4.0.

Qwinn

[Zwolf]

I have the fixpack, the tweaks, UB and UI installed.

Things I noticed:

First bug:

In the Foundry Nadilin has two sprites superposed.


Second bug:

In Curst (first trip) Kiri has no name when I have the cursor on her.


Third bug:

When I fight Trias in Curst, after his death I enter the portal but instead of moving to Sigil my team is teleported to a black corner of the map and nothing happen. I'm stuck there. I have Vhailor in the team and I did all the good deeds.
Don't know if this specific bug can be a trouble with the UI resolution I use (1280x768), I doubt it but who know...

Any clue about how to avoid the last one? I restarted the fight 4 times far or near the balcony and using various choices in the dialogue and I'm still stuck.

Edited by Zwolf, 14 July 2009 - 11:16 PM.

[Qwinn]

On the last one, I suspect the bug in question is happening because you talked to an item right before a dialogue was started by someone other than TNO - in this case, a cutscene with Fhjull. There's a bug in the game (already fixed for v4.0) where talking to an item right before a cutscene dialogue can cause issues like you describe.

My guess is you're consistently converting Celestial Fire before hitting the portal. Try either not doing that until after you take the portal, or "fixing" yourself after doing so by talking to another of your NPC's.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

In the Foundry Nadilin has two sprites superposed.

In Curst (first trip) Kiri has no name when I have the cursor on her.

I can't reproduce either of these In particular, the Nadilin one seems unlikely. Can you email me your AR0502.INI and AR0502.ARE? Email address is pescalona@verizon.net.

EDIT: Looking around, I suspect that you somehow managed to install the Fixpack twice (I add Nadilin as an actor in the Fixpack, so installing it twice would make him appear twice). You're not the only one who's done it, but I'm honestly surprised that you got that far in the game without encountering worse issues. It's entirely possible that your Trias issue is a result of this as well, if the bit about not talking to an item before taking the portal doesn't fix you up.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 15 July 2009 - 12:52 AM.

[Zwolf]

Thanks for the answer, I gonna try this about Trias. I doubt I installed the fixpack twice as any try I had doing so crashed the installation. Tried to fix an obscure mistake in the order of the installation between all the files. A merged install with the fixpack, UB and the tweaks would be helpful.

Perhaps part of the bugs I encountered come from a problem with the dialog.tlk files. Wanted to switch from french version to english version and it's highly probable I messed up somwhere in the process.

Edit: just tried the Trias thing, I'm still stuck. I think it is possible it's because I replaced the two dialog files (dialog.tlk and dialogF.tlk if I remember correctly) by an inappropriate version at the installation. The double fixpack installation cause is still a possibility, perhaps infortunately the second installation partly succeeded. Gonna try to reinstall the game and use the savegame I have, hazardous but better than restarting all over at this point.

2nd edit: it worked so the trias bug was very probably a bug with the dialog file. But guess what? Nadinil still has two sprites superposed
It doesn't affect the gameplay but it's weird to watch a matrix effect on the old guy. You should check again, it's only noticable when he does a specific animation. Gonna try to take a screenshot.

P.S: mail send.

Edited by Zwolf, 15 July 2009 - 08:30 AM.

[Qwinn]

Switching the dialogue files does explain the "Kiri" being missing.

And yes, looking at the files you sent me, it does appear that the Fixpack, at least, was installed twice This can't normally be done, a second installation attempt would ask you "Reinstall" or "Uninstall".... but there are ways to do it, such as the WeiDU log being removed at some point after the first install, or running Setup-PST-Fix.exe twice concurrently.

I agree that your best bet at this point is to reinstall and see if you can get the save games working. Let me know if the Trias thing is still an issue after. If it is, could you send me a savegame before this happens?

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 15 July 2009 - 08:26 AM.

[Zwolf]

Old matrix guy:



One of the sprites has standard animation and the second one is stuck.

By the way I edit my posts tons of time so we probably crossed our posts. Please reread my last one in case you missed an edit
The savegame is still the same so I send it to you.

Edited by Zwolf, 15 July 2009 - 08:40 AM.

[Qwinn]

That's cause both instances of the guy are saved in your save games. To get rid of the second guy, you'd have to restart from a save game prior to your first entering the Foundry... you'd then only get one.

Good to hear the Trias thing is fixed. I doubt it could be the dialogue file at fault, it was probably the double install that I still think must've happened somehow.

Qwinn

[Zwolf]

Ok thanks so no need to send you the savegame I suppose.

Indeed I removed the log files, usually log files are kinda useless so I tend to remove them with the installation files. Obviously these one have a purpose, good to know.

Strange the second installation still crashed but partly succeeded.

Can we expect a all-in-one pack? It would clearly simplificate the installation.

Edited by Zwolf, 15 July 2009 - 08:48 AM.

[Qwinn]

No plans for it at this time. If anything I think more people would prefer I make installation -more- complicated by making more of the changes optional/configurable.

Question: Why were you mucking about with the log and stuff in the first place? The only hint you've given so far is "Tried to fix an obscure mistake in the order of the installation between all the files." Could you give some details on what you meant by this?

Qwinn

[taplonaplo]

It would be good if there was a savegame which could always reproduce the Trias bug, it happened to at least 3 ppl, so there must be something to it, altho it seems some reloading fixes it, but it's still not right.

[Zwolf]

Question: Why were you mucking about with the log and stuff in the first place? The only hint you've given so far is "Tried to fix an obscure mistake in the order of the installation between all the files." Could you give some details on what you meant by this?

Installed all the patchs, then read somewhere it was necessary to install language pack before the fixpack. So I installed the language pack, then reinstalled the fixpack thinking it would overwrite the previous one. But I discovered the fixpack don't only add and overwrite things but patch files too. At this point I was kinda bored to reinstall entirely the 4cd game for the third times and just said to myself "to hell I'll stick with it". Haven't any real problem until I met Trias for the second time.
Oh and between each I deleted .log and install files. Usually installation details go to the register so I don't bother with logs but I saw it is not in this specific case. I'm not used to DOS installations. Didn't planned to remove the patch without uninstalling the game so no point to keep them. Kinda a matter of multiple coincidences.

By the way looks like I found another bug. When I ask Dakkon to tell a story to Yves I'm stuck. I suppose it could be a consequence of ghostdog's UI, I set biggest font and read somewhere in the forum similar bugs happened in the past in other long dialogues. Unless it would be a consequence of the double fixpack savegame but it would be surprising. Don't know if this part is altered in your fixpack but I remember it looked the same when I played with patch 1.1. Unfortunately I don't remember if I asked Dakkon to tell a story to Yves when I played 1.1 version so I don't know if it already was a matter.

For taponaplo, sorry but it looks like my trias problem was a diffrent one so I doubt it would help. I can still provide it if requested tough. Nevertheless I'm far away of Curst now, you would need a trainer or something like that to go there I suppose.

Edited by Zwolf, 15 July 2009 - 02:35 PM.

[Qwinn]

Unfortunately I don't remember if I asked Dakkon to tell a story to Yves when I played 1.1 version so I don't know if it already was a matter.

Yeah... I know the problem you're talking about. If a single dialogue string is too long for the dialogue window, you can get stuck in the dialogue (no "Click for More" appears). The size of the font DOES matter in this regard. First time I discovered the problem was with the Dodecahedron puzzle, for characters with less than 16 INT... the spanish translation was too long, and caused this problem. It also happened in english if you used the Floating Text Font tweak, I believe.

I've found that english text is generally shorter than other languages... for example, the same sentence is usually longer in spanish than it is in english. I suspect the same is true in french. I'm not really sure what can be done about it. It can theoretically happen even without using a larger font, though the larger font will make it more likely. If the people who made your translation are still in business, letting them know about the issue might help, as they can potentially just find a shorter way to translate the given sentence.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

taplonaplo:

At this point it's hard to say that the 3 people who encountered the problem didn't do that same thing Zwolf did, somehow - a multiple installation of the fixpack.

Some people who reported a problem with that portal noted that Fhjull would spit out Celestial Fire's dialogue (or some other item's dialogue) and then they'd get stuck. We know what caused that problem, and how to avoid it, and it is fixed for v4.0.

For those reports where Fhjull didn't spit out any dialogue, at this point I'm inclined to think it might've been the same double-install Fixpack issue. At least, I'm going to need a save game where it can be duplicated on a good install (meaning, Zwolf's doesn't count) for me to have any chance of resolving the issue - again, assuming there -is- an issue other than a botched install.

I'm going to try and add a sanity check that will detect the presence of the installed Fixpack even if you've wiped out the weidu.log. Will be tricky though.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 15 July 2009 - 02:59 PM.

[Qwinn]

Figured I'd note here what got accomplished in the last few weeks, mainly pertaining to the alignment hits issue we were discussing:

Scient -has- finished some important fixes in the engine, such as the fact that for some inexplicable reason creatures created by INI files (rather than within the ARE file) would not increment KILL_ and _DEAD counters when they died. This prevented a few intended things from working, such as githzerai getting annoyed if you ever killed one. The githzerai that walk around in the Hive are INI creatures, so you could kill them with impunity.

He also said he was going to see if he could make the engine differentiate between your party killing a creature, and somebody else doing so. (Actually, he said the engine already does, but after the point where it would be useful in terms of the alignment hits, and maybe he can reverse it and use it). If so, that would really rock, as we could then restore the vanilla-game alignment hits for killing Carceri citizens without worrying about you taking the hit for it when they get killed by demons and such, which does happen in the vanilla game and which clearly shouldn't be. For now I'm assuming he -won't- get that working, but if he does, it won't be any great trouble to restore the alignment hits there back to what they were.

At any rate, for the time being, I've got the alignment hits issue dealt with. Obvious alignment hits will now take place if you go around killing innocents. The bulk of these are in the Clerk's Ward, Festhall and the SW section of the Hive, but there are others scattered around. Note that when I say "innocent", the vanilla game even considers killing husband-killing Roberta as a chaotic evil act, so arguments to the effect of "But maybe Ingress did something bad one day ages ago and that's why you didn't get a hit" don't really work. Maybe she did, but -you- don't know that, so it shouldn't make any difference on how chaotic or evil an act it is on your part. And even when your target is a manifestly evil and corrupt creature, attacking them when they're not attacking you seems to be held in many cases as chaotic evil in the original game. I feel sure that it was just oversights in all the cases where I'm adding the hits in, and at any rate the poll results on the question were pretty overwhelmingly positive, so in they go!

Note that one effect of this fix will be that the unprovoked killing you do in the course of becoming an Anarchist -will- now have an effect on your alignment, which common sense would dictate they should have. The fact that they did not do so was a result of these oversights. You can still do these things and keep a lawful good alignment, but you won't be doing them with the same squeaky clean shiny soul you'd have if you never harmed a fly.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 22 July 2009 - 10:20 PM.

[Displacer]

Qwinn, I've been trying to get a hold of Scient, I'm reversing the engine as well and thought that we could swap information. If you talk to him have him pm me.