Single Player bugs and crashes - After the 24th of February 2014

[Thunderbrd]

Fossil Dig Site is still not working (latest SVN) can only build a Command Bunker on it, and i hate those as much as i hate Forts now. . . .

Ok... I'll really need to evaluate what's wrong there then.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I've been getting some weird issues with sulphur for the past couple dozen SVN commits.

Essentially the sulphur count my civ has keeps diminishing, despite still having the raw resource mined in my territory. At one point I've even had it go into negative numbers.

Attached a savegame where sulphur total is at 0, despite having three mines and no exports. Forcing a recalc on the savegame ends up with -2 sulphur two turns later. Forcing a recalc THEN brings it back to the expected 3.

hmph... my unzipper doesn't support the file type.

 

[Thunderbrd]

@SO:
1) Looking at your game it looks like you WERE able to build the fossil digsite? Or am I looking at one built before recent changes somehow?

2) I still have to check on the watermill issue.

3) The bomber seems to only have the bomb unit action available. This means the city thing makes sense because it's supposed to have a city bomb action that is much like city bombard. Once the city is torn down enough the bomb unit will probably work against the city so the effect is working as intended - except that you don't have access to the city bomb action.

THAT is more confusing. So I recall that there are a number of bug options that command whether various air missions are available and I go to open the bug options screen and... it hits an endless hang!

You might think I should be able to fix that... and I'd probably be able to EXCEPT that the processing seems to be hanging in the exe! To this, I'm lost. Maybe it's something a python debugger could look into. Maybe some py errors are being thrown and I'm not seeing them (I'm not sure about python debug logging matters much.)


So... can YOU open the bug options panel in your game? I can in MY test game but not yours for some reason... either that or it's just going to take more than 30 minutes or so to open.

I suspect the reason your bomber can't properly bombard the city is due to the mission option not being turned on in your bug options. IF that's not it then it'll take some very interesting code investigation to figure this out. Not being able to open the bug options screen is NOT helping! This could mean a very LONG time this might take to resolve this issue...


EDIT: A bit of code investigation, while not turning up any clues about the bug options, has shown I may be able to find the problem with the AirBomb mission. Still... looking into it will probably take a bit to sort out here.

 

[manivo]

hmph... my unzipper doesn't support the file type.

Try this one.

 

[strategyonly]

3) The bomber seems to only have the bomb unit action available. This means the city thing makes sense because it's supposed to have a city bomb action that is much like city bombard. Once the city is torn down enough the bomb unit will probably work against the city so the effect is working as intended - except that you don't have access to the city bomb action.

THAT is more confusing. So I recall that there are a number of bug options that command whether various air missions are available and I go to open the bug options screen and... it hits an endless hang!



I suspect the reason your bomber can't properly bombard the city is due to the mission option not being turned on in your bug options. IF that's not it then it'll take some very interesting code investigation to figure this out. Not being able to open the bug options screen is NOT helping! This could mean a very LONG time this might take to resolve this issue...


EDIT: A bit of code investigation, while not turning up any clues about the bug options, has shown I may be able to find the problem with the AirBomb mission. Still... looking into it will probably take a bit to sort out here.

I just looked and all the other bombers have the MORE options (pic1) as you can see in the (pic2) more options are there.

Also, where i think its messed up is the UNIT actions bombing, i can bomb units on map every where except the cities?? But whats weird is that sometimes i can, but not with certain cities??

 

[Thunderbrd]

I just looked and all the other bombers have the MORE options (pic1) as you can see in the (pic2) more options are there.

Also, where i think its messed up is the UNIT actions bombing, i can bomb units on map every where except the cities?? But whats weird is that sometimes i can, but not with certain cities??

Odd you're able to open the bug options panel in your game and I can't. I wonder if it has something to do with having differing ini settings or something. huh...

It's correct for unit bombing to be unavailable if the city's defenses are too healthy. That appears to be part of the intent and it makes sense. What doesn't make sense is that unit bombing is the ONLY air attack mission THAT particular bomber has access to! I'm a little lost trying to figure out why that is at the moment but I'll figure it out sooner or later. I have a theory....

 

[Thunderbrd]

@SO: Ok, I've sorted out your issues.
1) You can build the fossil digsite just fine after the xml fix. (However the mission button sucks so Whisperr is working on a new one.)

2) Your Bomber has moved so shouldn't be able to do the Air Strike at all that round. That's the problem - that all the other missions are omitted correctly but the Air Strike mission is not. You can't use an Air Strike (the anti-unit) mission on a city that has fully healthy defenses. This is correct. One must first bomb down the defenses to the point that the units within the city can then be struck with an Air Strike. Bombers can also hit the city defenses too so it just takes a bit more of them working over a city to get to the point where they can wear down the defenders.

I'm fixing the incorrect enablement of the Air Strike mission on units that have attacked or run out of mvmt pts.

Interestingly enough, it looks like it would be pretty easy to make a 'blitz' ability for air units. This could be kinda cool... perhaps eventually I'll have to do that.

3) The watermill issue was very interesting! Apparently you have the Hide Obsolete Builds option on. The problem was then twofold but also pointed out exactly why someone else was having trouble building a mine on his coal earlier.

First, no unit had a build action defined for the watermill's upgrade, the Hydro Plant. However, the build was valid for your nation and for that plot. So due to the Hide Obsolete Builds option, the watermill was not showing because the Hydro Plant had 'technically' obsoleted it. But since the worker couldn't build the Hydro Plant either, neither of them were showing as possible to build!

So adding the Hydro Plant to the worker build lists for all workers that would be around for it by technology stage was a suitable solution for the problem.

However, this has a very negative effect on the intention behind another improvement, the Shaft Mine. The shaft mine was never given to any workers to be able to build because it's supposed to represent a mine that's been worked for a very long time and has thus gotten that 'deep' to be considered a 'shaft mine'. However, this thus created a problem - the shaft mine build needs to be defined but since it could be unlocked and valid on a plot for a player, it would 'technically obsolete' the Mine from being able to be built if the Hide Obsolete Builds option was on, thus leading to a situation where you can't build mines anymore because the shaft mine was TK obsoleting the mine and could never be outright built itself.

So to keep THIS dynamic required a new tag for Builds to set a build like the Shaft Mine as being unable to TK obsolete the build action on the build for the improvement that would upgrade into this one. I've done that and implemented it so we shouldn't have further trouble with mines being unbuildable. (Wouldn't have been a problem for the Mountain Mine... just all others.)


whew... those were tough.

Only one more left here and that's this odd sulfur problem. I should be updating with the aforementioned fixes tonight though.

 

[strategyonly]

OK now you did something that i cant take over the city because i cant kill the air planes and ships??

EDIT: OK i think i found out the whole problem, its the ranged assault stuff.

Meaning i used it, BUT it doesnt take the "green" away from the units as a "used" unit. So i was thinking there are still turns left to fight, but there isnt, at least thats what i am thinking.

 

[Thunderbrd]

OK now you did something that i cant take over the city because i cant kill the air planes and ships??

EDIT: OK i think i found out the whole problem, its the ranged assault stuff.

Meaning i used it, BUT it doesnt take the "green" away from the units as a "used" unit. So i was thinking there are still turns left to fight, but there isnt, at least thats what i am thinking.

I can take a look at this later but observations:
1)Tanks have blitz so should be able to attack as long as they have movement. Regardless of what they've done that round, including ranged assault. (but this MAY be one of the issues here - that the RA has properly charged a mv pt but might've made it impossible for other attacks to be made even if the unit has blitz.)

2)Are the city defenses reduced as far as they can be? Since there's no active defenders, you wouldn't get the message you can't attack until the city defenses have been reduced because it apparently comes up instead of the attack help when it goes to trigger the attack help hover.

So before I take the save later tonight, which does obviously show the potential need for some evaluation for at least an improvement to function somewhere, see if it's possible to bomb the defenses any further then try to attack.

 

[strategyonly]

Yeah there is something really messed up with attacking a city with no units in it (see pic 1) besides ships and planes, you just cant do it

In the pic i still have 4 moves left, but i cant attack all it does it take away the movement from trying to attack the city, and YES i have it as low as i can on the defense bombardment stuff.


EDIT: OK in the attached game, take any Helicopter and see what happens when you try to attack??pic 2)

Something is goofy here, after i wrote this i took a different helly and attacked and i took over the city, all i can say is "What the hay?"

 

[Thunderbrd]

Yeah there is something really messed up with attacking a city with no units in it (see pic 1) besides ships and planes, you just cant do it

In the pic i still have 4 moves left, but i cant attack all it does it take away the movement from trying to attack the city, and YES i have it as low as i can on the defense bombardment stuff.


EDIT: OK in the attached game, take any Helicopter and see what happens when you try to attack??pic 2)

Something is goofy here, after i wrote this i took a different helly and attacked and i took over the city, all i can say is "What the hay?"

Well... loaded the game and ran it under the debugger but couldn't duplicate any problems. All units were able to attack just fine. We'll have to keep trying to find a way to catch them but it may be that loading is 'correcting' the issue which would make this a very tough bug to fix. I might find it in a test game of my own at some point...

Ranged Assault may be a bit too strong though... sheesh.

 

[strategyonly]

Well... loaded the game and ran it under the debugger but couldn't duplicate any problems. All units were able to attack just fine. We'll have to keep trying to find a way to catch them but it may be that loading is 'correcting' the issue which would make this a very tough bug to fix. I might find it in a test game of my own at some point...

Ranged Assault may be a bit too strong though... sheesh.

Yeah now it is, i can wipe out 20 units in a stack no problem now, but that is only with more promo's of ranged assault also, not just the basic one.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I'll have to tinker around with it some. I greatly enhanced the damage and I could turn that enhancement off with ease. Now that the accuracy is working fine. (and that may now be too high again too since that had been adjusted when I didn't realize it was broken at an underlying level.)

I've gotta add the Railgun so I can mess with it all when I do that.

 

[Harrier]

Yeah now it is, i can wipe out 20 units in a stack no problem now, but that is only with more promo's of ranged assault also, not just the basic one.

I agree those promo's are to strong. I just captured a city of 15 units in two turns. Did not lose any of my units. Also the defenders had not built any land traps, so for once I got no strength reductions. I'll keep an eye on this with my next attack.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I don't think it's the fault of the promos so much as the fault of overlying adjustments I made to the whole system when the underlying bug was undiscovered. We'll see how it goes if I reverse those changes and I'll see if I can get to that this weekend.

So that plus an attempt to see if I can figure out this 'case of the disappearing sulfur', along with potentially debugging some OOS errors is all I've got on the table that I'd like to get to before release. And not a one of those I feel is absolutely necessary so whenever DH wants to get this thing packaged up is up to him. I'll just keep tooling around with these issues and we'll see what I can get in until release is made.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I am unwell and not concentrating well if at all. Not sure when I'll be back, a couple more days at least.

 

[strategyonly]

I am unwell and not concentrating well if at all. Not sure when I'll be back, a couple more days at least.

Take the whole weekend, for sure, and heck take next week if you need it also, no rush right now, nothing that important is there??

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Just the release.

Oh, I may have had a brilliant idea (or maybe it is the fever) on how to partially solve the problem with animal spawning on the different maps random/GEM/SEM etc. I will test it out and see. It may be useful to be able to show spawn information on the animal pedia page.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Try this one.

Well... the game works. And it does prove you've had a problem since as soon as you open the game you get messages that show that AI players will trade sulfur with you. However, just played about 15 turns on the debugger and I haven't seen the sulfur adjust at all except in a strange case of 'having a hard time understanding why it needs to be subtracted by one then added back whenever a change takes place in the number of bonuses of ANY type among the trade network...'

I've asked the senior programmers about this in the main forum. Not sure why it needs to process in and out EVERY SINGLE bonus every time one is added to the plotgroup. Doesn't make much sense imo.

But we'll see what they say about that.

At the moment I'm about to test it it has something to do with the save/load wrappers and the way they process the data from a savegame being loaded. That may have something to do with things but from the way you explained it I don't think it's the issue - you said it would gradually happen while playing the game. Unfortunately, I really haven't been able to find anything taking place that would duplicate this effect.

I suppose it COULD be something to do with resource depletion as someone else pointed out. If it wasn't actually being removed from the map when depleted but was simply taken from the plotgroup as an accessed resource somehow it might explain things. It would be a hard to catch and duplicate issue for sure and if this is the case then I'd simply have to suggest NOT playing with the resource depletion option (but it'll be hard to prove that's the problem I think.)

On the plus side, running this save exposed some errors in the AI that had been worked on this cycle so that was good to catch prerelease.

EDIT: yeah, it's not the save/load process either.

 

[manivo]

I never play with resource depletion anyhow, so that's out the window as well. =\

Seeing as no one else reported an issue with sulphur, it might just be that something just randomly broke in my game amongst the ten or so svn updates and recalcs its seen through its lifetime. Bummer though, I was hoping for a tale of heroics and sleuthery like with the dissapearing modern mine action bug


Regarding svn updates mid-game and recalcs - every single time I updated the svn I had to do a recalc when loading the game for the first time after the update (understandable), but then after playing, saving the game, and starting it back up another day it always asked for another recalc. Is that normal?