Single Player bugs and crashes v36 plus (SVN) - After the 24th of October 2015

[Thunderbrd]

2) I am not sure that the city governor AI and non-player AI have been made aware of the extra effects that have been added to the city specialists (both population ones and settled ones). We have added

happiness and health tags (from another mod)
property conditions


Eg the AI seems to use the slave specialists even though it will cause huge unhappiness in the city.

@DH: Looking at the code, these tags ARE coded for consideration by the AI. So what must be 'off' is how heavily they weigh into the consideration. There could also be a bug or two in those codes. When I was working extensively on property matters, I found a few of the functions that were supposed to return a value weren't returning that value correctly so it's possible that may be happening here as well. I'll have to look deeper into this with a controlled example case. The happiness and health tags are coded as % tags and I'm not sure exactly how they are supposed to work so I'll need to dig further there.

This is somewhat lower priority though than some of the other critical issues so I'm moving it to the end of the debug queue for now.

On a related note, I wouldn't think that investigators should be available for assignment immediately at the beginning of the game. Currently, they are just as accessible as civilians. Ugh. We'll have to do something about that soon, like restrict access based on some buildings opening up the ability to assign some.

 

[Thunderbrd]

a desert field with freshwater, gives with desert camp 2 food.
I take a Great Farmer and set pigs there, then I can make a willow, gives 8 food
so far OK, but then I can build a farm, gives 11 food.
This looks not right for me.

Ok, so I think I get what you're pointing at better now. You're saying that you get more food out of the farm than you do from the pasture and that doesn't seem right. Do you get more gold or production with the pasture than you do with the farm?

One of the issues that leads to this sort of thing, imo, is that we have a number of techs that increase the food output of farms but few that increase the value of pastures. After a while the farms are so bonused by technology that the other types lag behind. Some real charting is probably necessary to illuminate how other types of improvements need to be bonused as techs progress or where we should nerf some existing bonuses.

 

[Noriad2]

That IS a good 'deal' but it's not THAT uber. It does suggest some need to rebalance a little so I'm not ignoring it. I also don't think it changes my previous statement as to what the system needs. But this does point out the entertainers can get a little much too early.

I take it you're talking about the Storyteller unit specifically or are you saying all the entertainers are getting the same 1 gold upkeep?

I have storytellers, bards and entertainers parked in my cities. Deleting those one by one increases my income usually by 1 for each, sometimes by 2 (probably a rounding issue).

Also, 11 education per lvl 4 entertainer type unit with buildup is HUGE, given that most buildings give 1-3 education until a very small number of buildings with 4-6 education during classical and medieval times become available, and the university (25 education) at Education Tech, which is at the end of medieval.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

On a related note, I wouldn't think that investigators should be available for assignment immediately at the beginning of the game. Currently, they are just as accessible as civilians. Ugh. We'll have to do something about that soon, like restrict access based on some buildings opening up the ability to assign some.

I agree, but have no idea what we should use The main thing was to get them working first.

Ok, so I think I get what you're pointing at better now. You're saying that you get more food out of the farm than you do from the pasture and that doesn't seem right. Do you get more gold or production with the pasture than you do with the farm?

One of the issues that leads to this sort of thing, imo, is that we have a number of techs that increase the food output of farms but few that increase the value of pastures. After a while the farms are so bonused by technology that the other types lag behind. Some real charting is probably necessary to illuminate how other types of improvements need to be bonused as techs progress or where we should nerf some existing bonuses.

1000001 was the last modder to do a complete over hall of the bonus and improvement system. Nothing has been done since except a few bug fixes and some tinkering.

Pastures give more than food in general but it is based on the animal in the pasture. Horses and probably Donkeys give more than food.

I did notice that Camels are almost next to useless so perhaps another review focusing on pastures in relation to farms and cottages needs to be done.

 

[Thunderbrd]

1) I can now confirm that the tag FirstFreeUnitClass does not appear to be working. I was first to get TECH_GATHERING but did not get the extra free gatherer.

This could be because the free unit is considered to be a Great Person as far as the code is concerned. You used to get the GP popup if you got it and a message if someone else got it.

This free unit is not always a GP so we need to trap this. It is not always a gatherer either, we used to get a free archer if you were first to discover Archery and I want to give free diplomats and spies at some stage.

It was counting the Neanderthals as already having gathering. I'm not QUITE sure how that happens but odder still was that if you were to save and reload the game before you get gathering, and you're the first to get there, then it DOESN'T count the Neanders as having the tech.

There's two bugs here really. One is that when the function that takes a count of the number of players/teams that have a tech does its thing, it includes NPCs in that count. This is patently a bad way to roll and can cause numerous other problems, including giving them access to benefiting from first to tech awards - which they shouldn't, and keeping other players from getting the benefits themselves. I think there have been reports of barbarian or neanderthals getting a religion and this is where that problem would lie.

I fixed this portion of the bug. The next SVN commit will include this fix.

The other bug that disturbs me more in the long run is that the neanders didn't seem to have a tech that was assigned to them once the game was saved and reloaded, which suggests that NPCs aren't keeping techs after a reload. Entirely possible. I'll have to research that much further but I'm not going to stress on this until some other NPC known bugs are addressed as I change the way those get established somewhat. That project is coming up soon (its one of the 2 'big ones' I have on the plate here.)

 

[Harrier]

The other bug that disturbs me more in the long run is that the neanders didn't seem to have a tech that was assigned to them once the game was saved and reloaded, which suggests that NPCs aren't keeping techs after a reload. Entirely possible. I'll have to research that much further but I'm not going to stress on this until some other NPC known bugs are addressed as I change the way those get established somewhat. That project is coming up soon (its one of the 2 'big ones' I have on the plate here.)

If you want some grunt wiork on this -when you start to work in it - let me know.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I have storytellers, bards and entertainers parked in my cities. Deleting those one by one increases my income usually by 1 for each, sometimes by 2 (probably a rounding issue).

Also, 11 education per lvl 4 entertainer type unit with buildup is HUGE, given that most buildings give 1-3 education until a very small number of buildings with 4-6 education during classical and medieval times become available, and the university (25 education) at Education Tech, which is at the end of medieval.

The question of how much education an entertainer can give is a matter of answering by technology level. The promotions should become gradually available and the units themselves as a base amount gradually grow. If it's AT Education tech when you get access to universities with 25 education as a building that you can cap out your entertainers at 11 education each, then that's probably not that far off target. The problem at that point is that the NEED for education is not nearly keeping up with what can be provided with fair ease. I can also see some argument to make educational units like these a bit more expensive to maintain by that point and some reevaluation that puts them more in line with the expense of concurrent LE or Disease Control units is probably in order.

But yeah, at education? 11 as the cap for an educating unit doesn't seem OP with the modern primary building for that purpose at that stage giving 25. The building isn't cheap but that's because of the research it provides and the standards applied to research granting buildings, not the education. Education was never given any gold cost tradeoffs for the buildings that provide it.

I'm not saying you're not pointing out an issue that needs some consideration of course, but minimums of making gains of only one have been applied to the educational progressions through promotions and upgrades and build-ups. So it's going to be hard to reduce that and probably easier to look at the whole balance picture, not just how to nerf what's been kept to a near minimum already.

I agree, but have no idea what we should use The main thing was to get them working first.

If you look at the LE unit prereq buildings, you'll see a clear progression of buildings that could open up specialist slots as they go, then we can consider some wonders. Modders willing to scour the building lists to identify the spots to add tags like these are incredibly helpful and it doesn't take the expertise of a programmer to do it, just patience. I'm missing Mouse, Harrier (who's around but doesn't have much time for this stuff at the moment) and Toffer right about now. Maybe Pepper can help with this? Anyone up for this?

1000001 was the last modder to do a complete over hall of the bonus and improvement system. Nothing has been done since except a few bug fixes and some tinkering.

Pastures give more than food in general but it is based on the animal in the pasture. Horses and probably Donkeys give more than food.

I did notice that Camels are almost next to useless so perhaps another review focusing on pastures in relation to farms and cottages needs to be done.

Repeat of request above. This sort of analysis is just a spreadsheeting and time consuming thing but extremely valuable once done right.

 

[Thunderbrd]

If you want some grunt wiork on this -when you start to work in it - let me know.

You were responding while I was writing my last post so the help we need is mentioned there. lol

If I'm not mistaken, you had assigned some starting techs to neanders in the xml somewhere hadn't you? Or was that Toffer? Might be helpful for this matter to start by understanding what techs were assigned and reminding where and how it was.

I'm probably not going to need grunt work on the restructuring of how the NPCs are setup so much because it's mostly a change in coding strategies to hopefully address a few lingering issues. It MIGHT not be necessary to go that far as I may be able to address those issues in other ways. There's a lot working now that I don't relish the idea of breaking all over again.

But I'm forced to wonder if the animation problems are somehow related to not setting them up quite right to begin with because that's about the time we started having to disable pretty much all the animations to get the mod to function right.

 

[Thunderbrd]

CTD, after click next turn . . mini and save in zip .

Graphic crash from the Ornithopter. I've stopped the animation for now to keep the crash from being possible (and disabled a number of other bomb mission animations along with it to hopefully catch the rest.)

I've been thinking on this and I THINK that the problem may lie with the fix I made to stack attacks. When working on that I recall having to tweak with a spot that had some notes attached to it that said it was a hack to keep the game from crashing due to a graphic flaw that had something to do with the order in which units were considered dead and an automatic graphic call from the exe after battles. This would adhere to the kind of thing I'm seeing with all these combat animation crashes. I might have had to unravel their fix inadvertently to fix stack attack. Might come down to us having to make the decision whether to have stack attack or have combat animations. I might be able to use an option switch that automatically turns off combat animations if stack attack is in play and allow it to operate the old hacked way and have combat animations on if stack attack is NOT in play. I strongly suspect this is where the underlying problem lies.

Although this insinuates some unpleasant choices for the player could become necessary, it also is nice to think that perhaps the combat animation bug is completely disassociated with the NPC split project. That could mean that I don't have to re-engineer things there as deeply as I've feared.

 

[Dreifels]

However in the Caveman2Cosmos case, and with many other mods, the game should not be looking outside the mod's folders for anything. There is a field in the mod ini file that should be set to ensure that. It is not set in the current SVN version of C2C.

btw: Problem is not in AND2
If I know where the strins are, I can edit the files and secure for personal use.


@Thunderbrd

the field on desert + fresh water gives 2 food + 3 gold with camp,
with desert + fresh water + pigs + farm it gives 12 food + 1 gold,
but when I switch back after buildung the farm, I get for
desert + fresh water + camp just 5 food + 5 gold, and if I switch back to
desert + fresh water + pigs + willow (fences) I get 8 food + 0 gold
means a) if I change first to farm and then remove farm to have the status as befire, I have different result, and if I build the fences/willow after, I have 1 food more than I would have if I build the fences directly, and 4 food + 1 gold less than with farm.
This cannot be right, because b) it is not logic that there is able to build a farm only after build a fence (build the bonus related improvement) first, and c) farrm is not a bonus related improivement, so it should be give less anyways than the bonus related improvement gives.

 

[Dreifels]

kill me as dounbled posting

 

[stachnie]

Can you do me a favor and get the game right up to where you would be selecting the promotion and then repost it here? Running a foreign game on a debug dll for any length of time is not a good way to use debugging time.

No problem, but I am not sure if this will be useful. The troublesome unit already had 700 base Strength, so Quality Up gave it 1050. I think the best moment would be just before promotion from +2 Str. (base Str.: 5) to +4 Str. (base Str.: 700). I still have an earllier save, so I may replay it and check if the bug occurs again.

And a question: how does the "duplicate unit" WB function work? This problematic unit may be the one I have duplicated, adjusted XP and name (I have done this to revert some mistake - and I was not willing to load autosave from a few turns before) - if it may cause problems, I may do some experiments with Stalkers, WB and duplicating units, maybe this way I would be able to reproduce the bug.

S.

 

[Thunderbrd]

a) if I change first to farm and then remove farm to have the status as befire, I have different result, and if I build the fences/willow after, I have 1 food more than I would have if I build the fences directly, and 4 food + 1 gold less than with farm.

That sounds like the bonus from irrigation remains after the farm has been removed. hmm...

This cannot be right, because b) it is not logic that there is able to build a farm only after build a fence (build the bonus related improvement) first, and c) farrm is not a bonus related improivement, so it should be give less anyways than the bonus related improvement gives.

Perhaps somehow related - water access rules are a bit difficult to follow in the code and have become a little overly complex for various reasons.

Trying to 'fix' this will be very difficult at best but it warrants taking a look at some point.

No problem, but I am not sure if this will be useful. The troublesome unit already had 700 base Strength, so Quality Up gave it 1050. I think the best moment would be just before promotion from +2 Str. (base Str.: 5) to +4 Str. (base Str.: 700). I still have an earllier save, so I may replay it and check if the bug occurs again.

You're right - I won't be able to catch HOW it happened initially. However, I could possibly be able to figure out how to restructure how the data compiles and make it so that it basically recalculates itself from the bottom up with each change. That could fix any future corruptions like this once any changes to str are made.

And a question: how does the "duplicate unit" WB function work? This problematic unit may be the one I have duplicated, adjusted XP and name (I have done this to revert some mistake - and I was not willing to load autosave from a few turns before) - if it may cause problems, I may do some experiments with Stalkers, WB and duplicating units, maybe this way I would be able to reproduce the bug.

S.

That very well could be the problem. Duplicate Unit in the WB (I didn't know this existed for one thing) would have to be a python solution, most likely designed by a programmer working to provide the option for all mods, not just c2c, and, as a result, would have been designed with absolutely no consideration for how SM works and could well be running afoul of some issues there. You would be better off just placing a new unit and giving it the exp and promotions, rebuilding the unit from the ground up.

 

[stachnie]

That very well could be the problem. Duplicate Unit in the WB (I didn't know this existed for one thing) would have to be a python solution, most likely designed by a programmer working to provide the option for all mods, not just c2c, and, as a result, would have been designed with absolutely no consideration for how SM works and could well be running afoul of some issues there. You would be better off just placing a new unit and giving it the exp and promotions, rebuilding the unit from the ground up.

O.K., so now I will be aware of that. Maybe I will perform some tests with duplicating Stalkers, giving them enough XP etc. Simply I was too lazy to do it from scratch - units produced in my main military city have lots of free promotions (all Mesopotamic ones, Poison Tips etc.) so I thought a "copy&paste" would be better. Of course, I could rebuild the unit from scratch (the most honest solution) but I was too impatient to wait a dozen of turns to produce the unit and transport it by land and sea...

S.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I realize it would be less convenient of course. Sorry for that. I'm curious to see if you can replicate it.

 

[stachnie]

I realize it would be less convenient of course. Sorry for that. I'm curious to see if you can replicate it.

No problem. And yes, I managed to nail this bug. I duplicated a Stalker a few times (perhaps I could to do so with any other unit), gave the new ones some more XP (to advance to the next level or more) and hit End of Turn. At the beginning of the next turn I promoted the new units (all of them were Str 6 and could advance to Str 7), chosen the second +Str promotion and their current Strength multiplied by 100 became their base Strength, so after the promotion they had Strength equal to 602 (600+2 from level 2 promotion). I gave one of them some more XP so it could advance 2 or 3 times more, but after the next +Str promotion it had Str 604 (600+4). I guess if I duplicated such unit and gave it some more XP, I could get a Str 60200 + something or 60400 + something unit.

S.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Wow. I'll have to look at seeing if that's fixable at some point. Not sure it will be but we'll see. The main thing would be the original trick I'd envisioned which would be to recalc from the base up with each str adjustment. That could create a slowdown that may not be worth it as far as solutions go though.

 

[JosEPh_II]

After last 2 SVN Updates can continue the 45 min EoT game, somewhat.

Turn times range from a low of 3 min 08 sec to a high of 14 min 23 secs. This is after the updates from SVN that contained "Fixes".

Also had strange pop up for some of my Enforcers losing their Sentry I promotion. (see screenshot) this EoT hung. Have tried to save before each EoT.

On longer EoT waits the game usage for ram hits as high as 2.97GB (that one hung). the 14 min EoT wait the ram hit 2.88GB. During each of these Long EoT's my CPU usage would go as high as 49% for my i7 2600K Quad Core 8 thread 3.2ghz cpu.

Get about 5 turns per hour on a Deity Epic GS at ~3000BC. Am now 6 or 7 Techs from Classical Lifestyle.

Problem is reduced enough to "sort of" play. But is nowhere near fixed. You can tell when a turn is about to complete when the running man turns into the regular game cursor, but it then quickly comes back as Running Man. This tells me that a last minute check has sent it into 1 more loop thru for something else.

Had a turn where I received a tech from trade, but then next turn I had to Research it for 1 turn. Never had that before either from a trade. Whatever is broken is affecting many aspects of the game.

JosEPh.

 

[Thunderbrd]

After last 2 SVN Updates can continue the 45 min EoT game, somewhat.

Turn times range from a low of 3 min 08 sec to a high of 14 min 23 secs. This is after the updates from SVN that contained "Fixes".

Also had strange pop up for some of my Enforcers losing their Sentry I promotion. (see screenshot) this EoT hung. Have tried to save before each EoT.

On longer EoT waits the game usage for ram hits as high as 2.97GB (that one hung). the 14 min EoT wait the ram hit 2.88GB. During each of these Long EoT's my CPU usage would go as high as 49% for my i7 2600K Quad Core 8 thread 3.2ghz cpu.

Get about 5 turns per hour on a Deity Epic GS at ~3000BC. Am now 6 or 7 Techs from Classical Lifestyle.

Problem is reduced enough to "sort of" play. But is nowhere near fixed. You can tell when a turn is about to complete when the running man turns into the regular game cursor, but it then quickly comes back as Running Man. This tells me that a last minute check has sent it into 1 more loop thru for something else.

Had a turn where I received a tech from trade, but then next turn I had to Research it for 1 turn. Never had that before either from a trade. Whatever is broken is affecting many aspects of the game.

JosEPh.

You must've had a few of the issues I found. But there are more. Most of the ones I found have been lurking for a long time and something simply brought them to the fore. I certainly am not claiming to have hunted down the biggest issues I'm aware of yet.

Drop your save here - I can't imagine it won't illuminate more issues to be addressed.

The trade issue is really strange. I have no idea what could have caused that. I don't know of any changes to tech trading that have happened ever. Would be interesting to capture a save where the trade can be made and the code can be watched when the trade takes place.

 

[Noriad2]

Worker job: build lumber mill doesn't obsolete build lumber camp. Lumber camp removes the lumber mill and then gets turned into lumber mill again after 17 turns. See attachment.