RED FRONT 1.5 Bug report

AGRICOLA

Warlord
Joined
Nov 19, 2002
Messages
211
Location
Canadian bush & Florida
There is a potentially fatal bug in Red Front 1.5 , Colwyn’s revision of Captain Nemo’s classic Red Front 1.4.

The bug is in EVENTS4 (Winter 1942-43) and will crash the game under certain circumstances (it did it to me). Specifically, when the Germans kill a Red Guard unit, EVENTS4 creates a Partisan unit at one of the following locations:

38,98
37,96
39,99

If a German unit occupies square 38,98, the Partisans are created at 37,96 and the game will crash on the next turn because the co-ordinates 37,96 are invalid. There is no such square. Valid squares on the game map have x and y co-ordinates that are either both odd or both even, like the top and bottom ones in the list.

The symptom of an illegal Partisans unit is that the unit is invisible until it is its turn to move. Then a misaligned grid appears on top of the normal game map as you move the unit. If you disband the Partisans before finishing its moves, there will be no problem on the following turn. However, if you finish its moves, the unit again becomes invisible. Then, after you finish the Soviet turn, the Finns and Germans have their turns, and your next turn begins with the automatic display of cities that have built units or improvements, the game simply shuts down. I suspect that the invalid unit co-ordinates screw up something when the game updates itself at the end of a turn.

A permanent fix is to open the EVENTS4 file, use the FIND function to locate 37,96 and change it to 36,96 or 37,97. This will not alter the course of the game as the nearest German unit inevitably clobbers the Partisans.


I should mention that this is not a scenario for the faint of heart or the inexperienced. RF 1.5 makes RF 1.4 look like a Sunday school picnic. It’s a great scen if you want to feel that you are in a desperate fight for survival and cannot afford any mistakes.
 
Perhaps you should send a PM to the creator of the scenario about this.
 
I tried. I did the major playtesting on RF 1.5 but have had almost no access the net for 2 months. Colwyn's old e-mail address did not work yesterday when I tried to send him an e-mail with an attachment. He hasn't yet responded to my PM request for his current e-mail address.

If he is going to fix the bug, he might want to fix a few more minor things that I've spotted, like a River Mine that is created on a land square.
 
That's interesting...this has previously been a non-fatal condition when it occurs in other scenario: the unit is created at those co-ordinates, but exists in a sort of 'third dimension' and cannot interact with the rest of the game. Maybe MGE is just less tolerant. And yes, this should be corrected.
 
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