A strange bug in pitboss - need advise

[Gavagay]

We have just started a Pitboss and ran into a strange bug.
One of the players - the one who logged in first and was identified as "player 1" - wasn't asked to provide a password when he claimed his civ. In all other respects everything was fine but when we uploaded the game to civstats later during the same day, this player wasn't identified in the player's list. Instead there was an empty line in player's list which showed zero score.
Now, I'm perfectly fine with playing on without an ability to track one of the player's actions using civstats (this player himself is also unconcerned). But I'm worried that it may be a sign of some deeper problems with our game. I certainly don't want to find out that the game is unplayable for some reason after 100+ turns.
So, if anyone has ideas what could be the underlying reason of these symptoms and what we can do about it, I would be happy to hear your thoughts.
We are using K-Mod which has some modifications related to pitboss games but I don't think that it is relevant for our case. Nevertheless, I'm going to ask the designer of this mod about it.
http://www.civstats.com/viewgame.php?gameid=2516 - this is our game. I've just noticed that for some reason civstats failed to identify our leaders and civs. Once again, it isn't a concern per se but may be a symptom of something bad.

Update. Hm, I noticed that information on civstats is erroneous in other respects. It says that we have no turn timer (we have one set to 20 hours) and that we are playing continents map (it is actually B&S).

 

[2metraninja]

Civstats fail to recognize leaders when they are BTS ones and also if they are unrestricted I think, so "Unknown" leaders is not to be worried much, but the one without name is strange. Is it possible that this this invisible player have in his name Unicode characters outside of the normal Latin alphabet for windows?

 

[Gavagay]

2metraninja, thanks for reply. Indeed, I looked up at some other games and noticed that when people play with unrestricted leaders civstats identifies them erroneously. And it is also sometimes wrong about mapscript and other data. Never paid attention to this. It is usually able to identify civ (even BTS one) and ascribe some leader to it but I can live without this info. I remember who is who anyway.
Player name doesn't have non-standard characters - at least as far as I can notice. Also it wouldn't explain zero score - this player has settled a city and has 31 score in game like all the others.
What worries me most of all is that he wasn't proposed to provide a password when he claimed a civ. Without this issue we could just write the whole thing off as a civstats bug which can't really affect our game.

 

[2metraninja]

To me it seems something is wrong with the game, rather than Civstats itself. As I never played K-mod, you better contact Karadoc and see if he can help with something.

 

[karadoc]

I've not seen this problem, and I can't think of anything that I've changed that might affect this. But I'll let you know if I think of something.

...

But I don't know what Civstats is. Where does it get its data from? I would guess that it just uses the text from the pitboss window -- does that window also show zero score and no name?

I'm not sure which part of the code is responsible for asking for the player's password. It might be in the pitboss program itself, in which case the bug might not be fixable; but maybe the password stuff is in the dll. I'm not sure. I don't remember seeing it anywhere.

[edit]
One guess is that this kind of thing might happen if the player was set to be AI at the start of the game. (??) I guess you'll find out if the game automatically takes the player's turn when they aren't logged in!

 

[Gavagay]

A player in question has just told me that he had logged into the game and claimed a leader even before a map was generated. Didn't know that it was even possible. Anyway, this seems to be a root of the problem. The question is whether it will have any detremental consequences other than screwed data on civstats and lack of password protection. Really really don't want to restart this game - have done lots of planning already.

 

[2metraninja]

I see something else which looks odd to me - the name of the game is

civstats2701

This doesnt sounds right to me. Is it the name you set for your pitboss or it is something which you missed to set and the game is taking some default name from its variables?

My advice is to restart the game. If you have the initial save, just restart it from there and see if/when the problem player logs in the game changes anything.

 

[Gavagay]

My advice is to restart the game. If you have the initial save, just restart it from there and see if/when the problem player logs in the game changes anything.

It would definitely be a solution if we had an initial save made when all civs were unclaimed. However, as I stated earlier, one of the players managed to claim his civ even before a map was generated. Therefore, I'm afraid we don't have a save which isn't corrupted. Anyway, we've already tried to restart from earlier (though not initial) save. It didn't help.
So, the question now is what kind of damage has been done to the game and if it prevents us from playing the game normally. Because if the game is still playable, we are certainly unwilling to generate a new map.

Regarding game name - will need to ask our host who is currently unavailable. I strongly suspect that he just didn't name it and civstat generated some placeholder name.

 

[Gavagay]

A screenshot of our pitboss screen:



Y'Berion is a player who is missing on civstats. As you can see, pitboss is unaffected by this bug, it is present only in civstats for some reason. I think we will just take a risk and play this game on, unless someone can state a specific reason which would make the game unplayable.

 

[2metraninja]

Try removing the apostrophe from the name.

 

[Gavagay]

OK, now I feel silly. It looks like that apostrophe was the issue after all.
Thanks, everyone, sorry for trouble.

 

[2metraninja]

You are welcome, good to see you get your problem solved.