Single Player bugs and crashes v37 plus (SVN) - After the 24th of December 2016

[Thunderbrd]

I found place, where you can skip entire one column.
Its like these techs and all further ones could be moved one column back (X positions weren't adjusted in this audit).
Edit: It seems like some techs just have their prereqs listed two columns back just like in these screenshots.

Spoiler :

I wonder if its even technically possible to have tech tree that is:
- without redundancies
- without And requirements being on same column
- techs always requiring something from previous column
- no floating techs (shamanism is only case)
- having easily readable arrows
That would displace most techs from their row and column
I guess someone bored could do that (most likely they would also change building costs of tech unlocking buildings changed column)

Yeah, certain intentions can be easily disrupted and in a lot of ways the best tech tree adjustments are minor ones. Redundancies aren't game impacting and are almost hardly noticeable but cutting them out makes us look like we've got our stuff together. And prereqs being on the same column can simply make sense and adds an almost inbetween the columns level to a tech so really isn't that bad a thing. Sometimes there just isn't something valid to require from the previous column. Floating techs were just too hard to avoid since we also have a rule of not exceeding the 19th Y range so that there's never an up/down scrollbar in our tech tree.

The steam power tech was very interesting that many techs that rely on it were actually 2 columns out. I actually loved the way it set up a very interesting configuration that showed a really unique variation of approach for that era. Steam Power is a tech a LOT of techs take on as their primary, or even only, prereq, even though they may be a column ahead. And the way it is, you can clearly see the tree branching out to reach those. It was just too elegant and symmetrical and yet logically followable, to remove the OR prerequisite of Steam Power.

Don't discount the value of variation in different areas of the tech tree helping to add unique twists and turns to the roller coaster of exploration through the eras.

The biggest "issue" is that the atlatl making and slavery lines do not look very pretty.

If they don't actually conflict at the corner, this solution would be pretty good. But I was trying to avoid large scale line shifts and such for now so past a threshold of tolerance of how many techs had to be moved (even on the Y scale), I usually opted for another approach. This could be a good set of adjustments though and I think an older evaluation of mine came up with the same thing and never got implemented. If you wish to make this adjustment it could be good practice in working with the SVN. Any questions on how or would you 'have this'?

I see no problem with a tech only having AND prerequisites. Also I see no problem in having an AND prerequisite tech in the same column.

I generally did the first when the lines were just impossible to read because they were crossing too much. Or when a prereq tech had another tech between the two and listing the OR in both would result in a line going under another line straight through (since the immediately previous tech was NOT a prereq of the one to come right after it.) So it was often a way of jumping over a tech being in the way of one's prerequisite. This happened very visibly in the industrial from Industrialism to the world war one weaponry techs.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Try not to misunderstand. I recently was reported a game where the AI had cities with some 40-50 healers. Where they had those healers they were some 10s of thousands in the negative on disease and everywhere throughout their nation they had perfectly healthy cities.

Was this a recent game? Or one a few months old? I think I remember it being posted and thought the player was using a relatively older svn version.

If you see this in a game I need to see that game. I'm not saying its impossible. It's not. But if it's happening, I can, and need to, correct that immediately.

It was a posted savegame from a player. I'd have to look to see if I kept it as I recently purged older save games form players that were from last summer, fall and early winter. Had a folder full of them.

 

[KaTiON_PT]

If you're running on the latest SVN, please see my first paragraph here... I'd like to see your savegame. That is, IF you've got the latest assets and have played a significant amount in the last couple weeks. (enough for current coding to have cleared the issues that were fixed)

I did include a savefile, go into worldbuilder and check the AI cities.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Since these are a line of buildings that replace their earlier form it should not, in theory, make them less effective, but this line of buildings has a special ability, having the earlier version reduces the cost of its replacement. This is why I always build the village hall before building the Town Hall and so on.

As I see it there are two alternatives:-

1. Don't let the earlier ones go obsolete.
2. At the tech they do go obsolete have a new building that is given free in all cities. It would be equivalent to the Town Hall, but not have the population requirement, and replaced it. This is a bit more difficult to do as you want it in existing cities as well as new cities.

edit It should be noted I wanted this line of buildings as the gates not population for controlling what other buildings you could access. This is because I come from a rich but sparsely populated country and we build stuff in what we call towns that less rich but much more populous nations would call hamlets.



My main strengths are Data Model conversions and UI. Unfortunately the game industry has not caught up with mainstream computing and tends to use one data model for storage, game play and user interaction.

I looked at these buildings. Has someone already reacted to this and removed obsoletions or am I missing why these are obsoleting??? They don't seem to have a tech obsolete point. I suppose they need furniture... maybe that's what's causing the problem?

EDIT:

           <Bonus>BONUS_FURNITURE</Bonus>
           <PrereqBonuses>
               <Bonus>BONUS_BRICKS</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_CEMENT</Bonus>
           </PrereqBonuses>

I'm suspicious of this. Perhaps at Industrial, access to furniture is lost? This WOULD shut down the function of these buildings if that's the case. For NOW, I'm thinking I should comment out these prereqs. I'd kinda like it if there were a few bonus tags, one that specified it's only necessary to construct the building with and another for maintaining the building.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Was this a recent game? Or one a few months old? I think I remember it being posted and thought the player was using a relatively older svn version.

It was current. All I did was instruct the AI to take a count of units already in training/responding and if it's more than a couple, hold off until they've arrived. The city goes on trying to train for itself all it wants. This is still going to let the AI overtrain a little so that it does react quickly and strongly to a need, but it should get to the point where it's over a hundred disease control healers guarding a city as we were seeing. It's almost impossible to tell the AI to stop training when its trained 'enough' because how can we count what would be 'enough' when there are so many variables at play in the system?

I did include a savefile, go into worldbuilder and check the AI cities.

OK, thanks.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I did include a savefile, go into worldbuilder and check the AI cities.

Well, the following observations were made under worldbuilder:
1)They are not staffing criminals. They probably were because of previous assets but changes since have stopped them from doing that successfully.
2)They do, in many cases, have cities that have criminals in them. Barbarian spawned criminals. These are likely there because of the previous problem and possibly bind ups in building a proper responses as you are experiencing of a total societal meltdown from reaching the point where you've lost access to furniture.
3)Their ability to react to this is hindered by two major AI bugs I DID find. The first of these is that invisibility spotting units are nowhere to be seen now that I kept criminals from spawning for those roles. This made me realize I have a more fundamental issue with see invisibility AI units - I was filtering for the best INVISIBLE skilled unit rather than VISIBLE skilled unit... ugh. A new DLL is on the way that will correct that - you should soon see canines and law enforcement performing more roles than just hunter escort and crime reduction.
4)Another hindrance to their ability to properly respond was a bug in the Investigator AI - was very similar... was asking for the best See Invisible unit rather than the best investigating unit. Urph. Again, fixed on the next commit. There's probably some cause for taking a deeper look at the Investigator AI stuff but for now hopefully this gets them to try to build one for each city as they are supposed to, which will have another side effect of limiting the need for excess crime control.
5)Some cities, with lots of crime control, were perfectly healthy.
6)Seems they really like building heroes as escorts. I can see why... speed and strength in one package is one of the hallmarks of this AI request. But it looks like they aren't using escorts as they should so next version I should spend some time taking a look into that.

and

7)Yeah, you lost access to furniture at Industrialism. For now I'm going to comment out that prerequisite and then open the game again and see if you immediately start getting back those critical admin buildings.

 

[KaTiON_PT]

SVN 9849

Got into a curious situation, usually when you have units waiting for orders the game toggles to them, this is the same with buildings. In the end when all units/buildings are occupied you are given the warning to end your turn.

Well, what happened was that I pressed next turn, but it no longer toggled to inactive units or buildings, even after checking them out by moving them. So I saved the game, lucky I auto save every turn.

Now the curious thing is that when loading that weird save I'm getting a hard crash related to Civ4 runtime.

Please see both attached files, "Non buggy" is the good turn where no problems occurred and "Buggy" is the next turn, the one with all the weirdness and the one that crashes when loading. In any case going into the next turn on the "Non buggy" save turns on the weirdness (so at least its repeatable!)

EDIT: Probably related to the whole "World War" i'm doing against the AI?

 

[Thunderbrd]

SVN 9849

Got into a curious situation, usually when you have units waiting for orders the game toggles to them, this is the same with buildings. In the end when all units/buildings are occupied you are given the warning to end your turn.

Well, what happened was that I pressed next turn, but it no longer toggled to inactive units or buildings, even after checking them out by moving them. So I saved the game, lucky I auto save every turn.

Now the curious thing is that when loading that weird save I'm getting a hard crash related to Civ4 runtime.

Please see both attached files, "Non buggy" is the good turn where no problems occurred and "Buggy" is the next turn, the one with all the weirdness and the one that crashes when loading. In any case going into the next turn on the "Non buggy" save turns on the weirdness (so at least its repeatable!)

EDIT: Probably related to the whole "World War" i'm doing against the AI?

I'll have to look into this tomorrow night.

 

[raxo2222]

The arrows come from OR prerequisites so floating techs have no OR prerequisites only AND prerequisites.

I see no problem with a tech only having AND prerequisites. Also I see no problem in having an AND prerequisite tech in the same column.

Well that was more of theoretical question about possible existence of tech like this
I rate it 4/5 now - before this change it was 3/5 with whole arrow mess

Spoiler :

- without redundancies
- without And requirements being on same column
- techs always requiring something from previous column
- no floating techs
- having easily readable arrows
That would displace most techs from their row and column I guess

I think it would destroy most of beelining though.

 

[Thunderbrd]

no floating techs (shamanism is only case)

No it isn't. There are quite a few now. They don't stand out as much when they become an OR prequal for another tech.

You'd really have to take each thing you listed and go through the tree and REALLY wrack your brain to try and fix that issue everywhere it exists AND not screw up other matters. We also have a desire to keep the progression of one tech to the next be technologically logical wherever possible too.

 

[raxo2222]

No it isn't. There are quite a few now. They don't stand out as much when they become an OR prequal for another tech.

You'd really have to take each thing you listed and go through the tree and REALLY wrack your brain to try and fix that issue everywhere it exists AND not screw up other matters. We also have a desire to keep the progression of one tech to the next be technologically logical wherever possible too.

So I guess while technically its possible it is very demanding

 

[Thunderbrd]

I'll have to look into this tomorrow night.

You might have some index problems with your game at the moment. That might have something to do with AIAndy's observation that I could be introducing a bug into existing games when changing the indexes on missions. I'm having a horrible time trying to identify why no matter what I do you lose the town halls, even after trading for the furniture that is the last prerequisite you don't possess for them. I'm going to have to look much deeper into the original save you gave me to see what is taking place when it checks to see if you can build that particular building and so on. Commenting out the furniture prereq didn't do the trick.

@The team: We may need to simply kick out furniture prerequisites throughout the buildings entirely until we sort out the issue of the source buildings being obsoleted. Next version hopefully. @JosEPh_II If you can find some time, can you do that for us? I'm gonna be back to work tomorrow and I obviously need to look into some deep code problems for a bit here.

Maybe... this might have more to do with some games simply being made incompatible upon the re-enumerating of all missions. That might also explain this last save also going totally bonkers. I know Raledon was working on the suggested solution to that and maybe we can yet recover some of these games in progress for folks.

 

[KaTiON_PT]

You might have some index problems with your game at the moment. That might have something to do with AIAndy's observation that I could be introducing a bug into existing games when changing the indexes on missions. I'm having a horrible time trying to identify why no matter what I do you lose the town halls, even after trading for the furniture that is the last prerequisite you don't possess for them. I'm going to have to look much deeper into the original save you gave me to see what is taking place when it checks to see if you can build that particular building and so on. Commenting out the furniture prereq didn't do the trick.

Keep in mind I corrected the furniture issue right away when it happened with a quick trade deal and then fixed it by building a furniture factory.

 

[Septimius]

Salt gatherer doesn't upgrade to quarry. And it doesn't say what the prerequisites for upgrading it are.

Check my post #2534 for a savegame if you want to have a look at it.

 

[JosEPh_II]

@JosEPh_II If you can find some time, can you do that for us? I'm gonna be back to work tomorrow and I obviously need to look into some deep code problems for a bit here.

I can try.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Salt gatherer doesn't upgrade to quarry. And it doesn't say what the prerequisites for upgrading it are.

Check my post #2534 for a savegame if you want to have a look at it.

I'll look at your save. But I have 4 current games going and I don't remember salt gatherer having an upgrade problem. I'll still look of course.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I looked at these buildings. Has someone already reacted to this and removed obsoletions or am I missing why these are obsoleting??? They don't seem to have a tech obsolete point. I suppose they need furniture... maybe that's what's causing the problem?

EDIT:

           <Bonus>BONUS_FURNITURE</Bonus>
           <PrereqBonuses>
               <Bonus>BONUS_BRICKS</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_CEMENT</Bonus>
           </PrereqBonuses>

I'm suspicious of this. Perhaps at Industrial, access to furniture is lost? This WOULD shut down the function of these buildings if that's the case. For NOW, I'm thinking I should comment out these prereqs. I'd kinda like it if there were a few bonus tags, one that specified it's only necessary to construct the building with and another for maintaining the building.

1st some basic info needed:
1. Do we have a PrereqOrBonuses Tag?

2. And do Both PrereqBonuses have to be fulfilled for the building to be built?

 

[Thunderbrd]

1st some basic info needed:
1. Do we have a PrereqOrBonuses Tag?

2. And do Both PrereqBonuses have to be fulfilled for the building to be built?

           <PrereqBonuses>
               <Bonus>BONUS_WOOD</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_BAMBOO</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_TIMBER</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_BRICKS</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_CEMENT</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_MARBLE</Bonus>
           </PrereqBonuses>

This is an OR tag that only requires you have one out of the list. You must also have what's in this tag:<Bonus>BONUS_FURNITURE</Bonus>. And then ConstructConditions tag usage can apply.

Keep in mind I corrected the furniture issue right away when it happened with a quick trade deal and then fixed it by building a furniture factory.

Yeah, I tried that. This is why I'm going to have to go in and really dig to figure out what the hell is keeping you from being able to construct this thing.

 

[JosEPh_II]

           <PrereqBonuses>
               <Bonus>BONUS_WOOD</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_BAMBOO</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_TIMBER</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_BRICKS</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_CEMENT</Bonus>
               <Bonus>BONUS_MARBLE</Bonus>
           </PrereqBonuses>

This is an OR tag that only requires you have one out of the list. You must also have what's in this tag:<Bonus>BONUS_FURNITURE</Bonus>. And then ConstructConditions tag usage can apply.

Yeah, I tried that. This is why I'm going to have to go in and really dig to figure out what the hell is keeping you from being able to construct this thing.

Furniture Workshop has an ObsoleteTech And a ReplaceBuilding, why does it need both when the other lines for PrereqBonuses like Bricks or Cement do not? They have only the ReplaceBuilding, No ObsoleteTech

Maybe a simple fix just to Remove the <ObsoleteTech>TECH_INDUSTRIALISM</ObsoleteTech>? It's what I'm leaning to.

 

[raxo2222]

Assembly Line (Industrial, X = 65) allows variety of factories and Industrialization (Modern, X = 72) obsoletes variety of workshops.
Did someone beelined too hard or forgot to build furniture (and other) factories before getting workshops obsoleted by Industrialization?
Sounds like mod dislikes blind beelining

Spoiler :