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

[Harrier]

I'am not sure i follow you here this just makes no sense to me. It makes sense if that defender can't see the attacker but if it can see the attacker it can also defend.

I have to agree with Alberts2 on this - It is illogical.

Just because the attacker can not see me - does not stop me from defending/attacking.

In fact it probably an old hunting technique for capturing larger animals.

I hide in the bush's downwind. Tie a small animal to a bush/tree etc. Wait for a larger animal to come along and attack it. As it approaches my trapped bait (it can not see me) but I jump out of the undergrowth and attack it. Same could be said for human bait.

This is how it's always been. The invisible 'defender' has always not been able to stage a tile defense as the game will assume 2 things:
1) the defender will want to remain invisible and unseen.

Wrong assumption sometimes.

You probably need more action buttons.

1. Hide and stay hidden - regardless of what happens to other units. (i.e. a spy)
2. Hide but be ready to ambush and defend other units.. (ie, hunter or special forces trap etc)

2) it would be unfair to both the defender (potentially) and the attacker since neither side has made any determination as to the odds of the battle whether battle would be wise.

But that is the point - the attacker does not know the hidden defender is there. If it is considered unfair to the attacker - what is the point of having this feature in the mod.

As for the hidden unit defending - do an odds calculation on success to decide if it should defend or stay hidden (greater than 75% - defend, if less stay hidden).

Otherwise you could go hunting for the unseen by simply fanning out and poking your attack units around until they hit the unseen target.)

Is'nt that what you do anyway when exploring/hunting?

 

[Thunderbrd]

I have to agree with Alberts2 on this - It is illogical.

Just because the attacker can not see me - does not stop me from defending/attacking.

In fact it probably an old hunting technique for capturing larger animals.

I hide in the bush's downwind. Tie a small animal to a bush/tree etc. Wait for a larger animal to come along and attack it. As it approaches my trapped bait (it can not see me) but I jump out of the undergrowth and attack it. Same could be said for human bait.



Wrong assumption sometimes.

You probably need more action buttons.

1. Hide and stay hidden - regardless of what happens to other units. (i.e. a spy)
2. Hide but be ready to ambush and defend other units.. (ie, hunter or special forces trap etc)




But that is the point - the attacker does not know the hidden defender is there. If it is considered unfair to the attacker - what is the point of having this feature in the mod.

As for the hidden unit defending - do an odds calculation on success to decide if it should defend or stay hidden (greater than 75% - defend, if less stay hidden).



Is'nt that what you do anyway when exploring/hunting?

Ok, so I kinda agree but there are a few issues:
1) Many unit types really don't ever want to be found and shouldn't be so easily detected by poking about. Think well disguised criminals, for example, approaching a city. Giving themselves away would be completely against their motive even if they had an incredible chance of success in battle.

2) While that could potentially be mitigated by a new tag on a new status, I'm not sure it's possible without massive restructuring to the combat initiation engine that requires the attacking stack knows exactly what its attacking. An alternative approach may be to setup an automatic 'ambush' action but even then the units moving in would first have to finalize processing their arrival on the plot, which would mean that units to be defended would still have been captured first.

3) This is really a step forward to allow ambushing on the same plot in itself, wouldn't you agree? This allows us to mimic the hunting strategy you point out.

It COULD potentially be done by creating a new status promotion set with a tag for it and having the unit only reveal itself once the move is committed to. I'm not sure still about its possibility though because there are numerous points where validation of a move is made before the move is actually taken and violating those validation points may be crash material. Would take a serious amount of research to see if it could be pulled off.

Then you have complexity regarding the AI 'remembering' that there's a 'unit there on that plot' to consider and then it gets mind blowing how much modding and potential slowdown such a feature could introduce as the AI would have to be made that much more intelligent - more evaluation means more time expense. And we know how greatly the complaints regarding turn times are already. I was already very reluctant to make the status coding as 'intelligent' as it is for this reason.

 

[Thunderbrd]

@Joe: I had a sneaking suspicion about your bug report when I read it earlier today and the minidump confirms it completely. It's a problem with non-fightorflight games and a tag that's turned off for them - I had an issue with it when compiling it and since it seemed to go fine I didn't think more about it until your crash report. It was a repair on a tag that wasn't working at all and something about the original method it was setup with initially (that used to work) isn't working anymore. So... I'm in the process of finding another way to skin the cat on that one. Shouldn't take me long to fix so I should have the repair up by the end of the evening here. Sorry for the problem - I should've thought to test against a non-ForF game when I did that initial repair.

But at least it explains why my test games ran fine and your game does not.

EDIT: Fixed. My apologies again.

 

[Harrier]

Ok, so I kinda agree but there are a few issues:

Then you have complexity regarding the AI 'remembering' that there's a 'unit there on that plot' to consider and then it gets mind blowing how much modding and potential slowdown such a feature could introduce as the AI would have to be made that much more intelligent - more evaluation means more time expense. And we know how greatly the complaints regarding turn times are already. I was already very reluctant to make the status coding as 'intelligent' as it is for this reason.

That is why you are doing the hard work programming the mod.

And I being an observer can suggest things, that may some times seem to be realistic - but not practical for the game. Processing times etc. being just one of the considerations.


All of you - just keep up the good work you are doing.

 

[Thunderbrd]

That is why you are doing the hard work programming the mod.

And I being an observer can suggest things, that may some times seem to be realistic - but not practical for the game. Processing times etc. being just one of the considerations.


All of you - just keep up the good work you are doing.

I admit, when pressed I do think more about an issue than I would've otherwise. It might not be a bad idea to see if I could pull off an auto-ambush defense setting. And perhaps the way to get around it would be that once you have made your initial surprise defense, it would automatically negate your invisibility for the rest of the round - this would keep the AI from having to have added 'overthinking'. And it makes sense that once your position is given away you are thereafter vulnerable. Would be a 'use with care' setting. If it wasn't problematic to add then the main AI drain would be in trying to figure out at what point would the AI USE this strategy to their own benefit so that it's not only a player's trick. But if I use the Status mechanism, at least I've setup the basis for making that determination, although it could be a little difficult still to figure out how to mathematically represent the 'best time' to pull it off. Maybe a new mission AI... hmm...

 

[JosEPh_II]

@Joe: I had a sneaking suspicion about your bug report when I read it earlier today and the minidump confirms it completely. It's a problem with non-fightorflight games and a tag that's turned off for them - I had an issue with it when compiling it and since it seemed to go fine I didn't think more about it until your crash report. It was a repair on a tag that wasn't working at all and something about the original method it was setup with initially (that used to work) isn't working anymore. So... I'm in the process of finding another way to skin the cat on that one. Shouldn't take me long to fix so I should have the repair up by the end of the evening here. Sorry for the problem - I should've thought to test against a non-ForF game when I did that initial repair.

But at least it explains why my test games ran fine and your game does not.

EDIT: Fixed. My apologies again.

Thank you. Appreciate the effort.

JosEPh

 

[sunrisereader]

Repeating ctd on end of turn or the next one(tried it 3 times with all 3 tries crashing in 2 turns or 1). i started the game shorty after the Hide and Seek was added, and updated the game to revision: 8963.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Will look into it as soon as possible.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Repeating ctd on end of turn or the next one(tried it 3 times with all 3 tries crashing in 2 turns or 1). i started the game shorty after the Hide and Seek was added, and updated the game to revision: 8963.

I was able to run through two rounds on the debugger without problem. But the mini does indicate that when a function was called for the code went to a different spot. This could be a result of numerous things. It's possible the update is not completely clean and there's a file difference there shouldn't be there on your end. It's also possible that your memory system was strained and had a hiccup. Then again it's also possible that the bug just didn't manifest in the next few turns but since it wasn't solidly replicable it may be difficult to uproot as a whole.

I'd maybe try a fresh checkout of the SVN and see if it plays fine from there.

 

[olduser]

Ok, so I kinda agree but there are a few issues:
1) Many unit types really don't ever want to be found and shouldn't be so easily detected by poking about. Think well disguised criminals, for example, approaching a city. Giving themselves away would be completely against their motive even if they had an incredible chance of success in battle.

2) While that could potentially be mitigated by a new tag on a new status, I'm not sure it's possible without massive restructuring to the combat initiation engine that requires the attacking stack knows exactly what its attacking. An alternative approach may be to setup an automatic 'ambush' action but even then the units moving in would first have to finalize processing their arrival on the plot, which would mean that units to be defended would still have been captured first.

3) This is really a step forward to allow ambushing on the same plot in itself, wouldn't you agree? This allows us to mimic the hunting strategy you point out.

It COULD potentially be done by creating a new status promotion set with a tag for it and having the unit only reveal itself once the move is committed to. I'm not sure still about its possibility though because there are numerous points where validation of a move is made before the move is actually taken and violating those validation points may be crash material. Would take a serious amount of research to see if it could be pulled off.

Then you have complexity regarding the AI 'remembering' that there's a 'unit there on that plot' to consider and then it gets mind blowing how much modding and potential slowdown such a feature could introduce as the AI would have to be made that much more intelligent - more evaluation means more time expense. And we know how greatly the complaints regarding turn times are already. I was already very reluctant to make the status coding as 'intelligent' as it is for this reason.

Makes sense for criminals or spies but.
What strategyonly posted had nothing to do with criminals or spies it was a normal unit. That unit has to defend in that situation it can't just ignore the attack and let the enemy capture the captives.

 

[sunrisereader]

I'd maybe try a fresh checkout of the SVN and see if it plays fine from there.

It been a while since i did a new checkout, is it enough to delete all inside the cavementocosmos folder and to do a new checkout or do you recommend more actions?

 

[tmv]

Unless your BTS installation is corrupted, a fresh checkout should be sufficient. AFAIK the mod doesn't use caching any more, so deleting the cache shouldn't be necessary. If you want to try that, here is a thread that is more than 2 years old that describes the process, I don't know if this information is still valid (the first section of the first post):

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=493813

Regarding a fresh checkout, your User-Settings will probably not be the same as in the SVN. You should either save your UserSettings folder and copy it into the checkout, overwriting the files, or you should check the User-Settings and adapt them to your need when you start the mod again for the first time.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Makes sense for criminals or spies but.
What strategyonly posted had nothing to do with criminals or spies it was a normal unit. That unit has to defend in that situation it can't just ignore the attack and let the enemy capture the captives.

I had a similar experience in the game I had the CTD in yesterday. This game has No Combat Mod(CM) or FoF or any other Option like Hide and Seek on, a Non CM/Fof/HS game.

A Big cat was guarding 8 workers. A Jungle tarantula came in destroyed all 8 workers and did not attack the Big Cat instead who was in either Fortify or Sentry mode. The BC was Not in Stealth. The Next turn the Tarantula was still on the same tile as the Cat, transparent icon like rogues in cities. I could then attack the tarantula with the Cat. Was Not happy to lose 8 workers that were guarded to this stealth stuff by a wild animals when I had No Option on at Gamestart that should have allowed it.

More clean up needed to keep such actions from happening in the base Mod?

JosEPh

 

[Thunderbrd]

I had a similar experience in the game I had the CTD in yesterday. This game has No Combat Mod(CM) or FoF or any other Option like Hide and Seek on, a Non CM/Fof/HS game.

A Big cat was guarding 8 workers. A Jungle tarantula came in destroyed all 8 workers and did not attack the Big Cat instead who was in either Fortify or Sentry mode. The BC was Not in Stealth. The Next turn the Tarantula was still on the same tile as the Cat, transparent icon like rogues in cities. I could then attack the tarantula with the Cat. Was Not happy to lose 8 workers that were guarded to this stealth stuff by a wild animals when I had No Option on at Gamestart that should have allowed it.

More clean up needed to keep such actions from happening in the base Mod?

JosEPh

Your experience goes to show that this is a factor that's been this way for all units with any invisibility back to the beginning of CivIV. This is not something to 'clean up'. It's what was established long ago and as a result there are numerous code elements basing themselves on the assumption things will operate like this.

Again, what I've done is made it possible for the invisible unit to remain on the tile and have some recourse. And I'm not entirely sure it's going to be possible to make it capable of behaving any better.

But I do plan to work on the above discussed idea that a status could be used to set a unit to auto-self reveal when an enemy moves into the tile where they can't see the unit and thus stage a 'surprise defense'. I'm not promising this though because even that may be impossible to do without crashes requiring extremely deep re-coding.

Seriously though, if this basis is doubted, try vanilla on a modern game and see how stealth ships interact. This is where its most obvious that this has always been an 'issue'.

All of the Big Cat feline units are given camouflage invisibility, even on the base mod. Always have. They are invisible to units that cannot 'see Camouflage' like dogs. If the opponent player has no camo visibility on the tile, the unit is invisible to all its units. It doesn't have to be in a 'stealth mode'. It just has this ability by its original settings. Is this really the first time anyone has noticed that there is a double edged sword when it comes to invisibility? That criminals cannot defend the captives they capture etc...?

 

[Thunderbrd]

It been a while since i did a new checkout, is it enough to delete all inside the cavementocosmos folder and to do a new checkout or do you recommend more actions?

I suspect that would have some potential issues of its own. Better to just do a fresh checkout as it is explained on the first post of the SVN thread you were linked to above. Sorry.

 

[olduser]

Your experience goes to show that this is a factor that's been this way for all units with any invisibility back to the beginning of CivIV. This is not something to 'clean up'. It's what was established long ago and as a result there are numerous code elements basing themselves on the assumption things will operate like this.

Again, what I've done is made it possible for the invisible unit to remain on the tile and have some recourse. And I'm not entirely sure it's going to be possible to make it capable of behaving any better.

But I do plan to work on the above discussed idea that a status could be used to set a unit to auto-self reveal when an enemy moves into the tile where they can't see the unit and thus stage a 'surprise defense'. I'm not promising this though because even that may be impossible to do without crashes requiring extremely deep re-coding.

Seriously though, if this basis is doubted, try vanilla on a modern game and see how stealth ships interact. This is where its most obvious that this has always been an 'issue'.

All of the Big Cat feline units are given camouflage invisibility, even on the base mod. Always have. They are invisible to units that cannot 'see Camouflage' like dogs. If the opponent player has no camo invisibility on the tile, the unit is invisible to all its units. It doesn't have to be in a 'stealth mode'. It just has this ability by its original settings. Is this really the first time anyone has noticed that there is a double edged sword when it comes to invisibility? That criminals cannot defend the captives they capture etc...?

Doesn't matter if it always was this way. Vanilla Bts had much less usages of invisibility on units compared to C2C. That suggest that it wasn't built to be used as it is in C2C.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Doesn't matter if it always was this way. Vanilla Bts had much less usages of invisibility on units compared to C2C. That suggest that it wasn't built to be used as it is in C2C.

It does when someone thinks you've done something to change things unfavorably. I'm heading off accusations of allowing things for options to 'bleed over' into the main core. If it was there before I even began this is a moot point, which I'm showing it was.

Where Vanilla did have invisibility on units, and a good example being the Stealth Destroyer, the same annoyances applied. I'm not saying it's optimal but it makes sense that without establishing some kind of ability to determine player preference on a particular unit in a particular situation, this behavior as its stands is a reasonable default. Face it, if you have a unit hidden, why would you want to enable the enemy to find it? I could always send out cheap worthless units to go poking around wherever units 'may' be so I can find them and kill them with more powerful troops after they are revealed.

The only real reason this is an issue in C2C is because we often have captives and such to 'defend' and we don't take enough notice of our unit's abilities to know if they are actually defended by a unit we assume can do so or not.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Your experience goes to show that this is a factor that's been this way for all units with any invisibility back to the beginning of CivIV. This is not something to 'clean up'. It's what was established long ago and as a result there are numerous code elements basing themselves on the assumption things will operate like this.

Again, what I've done is made it possible for the invisible unit to remain on the tile and have some recourse. And I'm not entirely sure it's going to be possible to make it capable of behaving any better.

But I do plan to work on the above discussed idea that a status could be used to set a unit to auto-self reveal when an enemy moves into the tile where they can't see the unit and thus stage a 'surprise defense'. I'm not promising this though because even that may be impossible to do without crashes requiring extremely deep re-coding.

Seriously though, if this basis is doubted, try vanilla on a modern game and see how stealth ships interact. This is where its most obvious that this has always been an 'issue'.

All of the Big Cat feline units are given camouflage invisibility, even on the base mod. Always have. They are invisible to units that cannot 'see Camouflage' like dogs. If the opponent player has no camo visibility on the tile, the unit is invisible to all its units. It doesn't have to be in a 'stealth mode'. It just has this ability by its original settings. Is this really the first time anyone has noticed that there is a double edged sword when it comes to invisibility? That criminals cannot defend the captives they capture etc...?

Okay.

This is the 1st game I have ever used a Trained Cat or Big Cat (cause I do believe this Big Cat is relatively new). That said I never knew it acted like a stealth Submarine or Cruiser (have not had a chance to play with either of those units for over 3+ years now, just can't get a game that far before some major change blows the game up), so oh well then. Won't use them as guards anymore, lesson learned the hard way.

As for your very last 2 questions, Rogues, thieves, ambushers, when SO 1st introduced them, could defend their captives. Cause the only captives back then were workers iirc. Everything else, main units mil or non mil (and not wild/subdued animals) were killed.

JosEPh

 

[Thunderbrd]

No... they weren't able to defend their captives even then. Not unless they weren't invisible units. Or unless they were seen by the attacker.

But I don't mean to argue now that it shouldn't be an issue.

I've spent the morning here creating a solution. I think y'all should be pleased provided it works as well as I think it will. I found the point where a tagged unit can suddenly reveal itself and stage a surprise defense and have been working on setting that up. A status and a buildup will be available for establishing this unit ability. We'll see how well it works in play but it could be pretty cool.

 

[Pit2015]

Unhappiness bug? Look my scenario thread...