list field bug

[Clock Nova]

Is there any way to make the pikeman at the list field return after the Banquet bug has made him vanish? I'd really like to do some training and get our magic shield back.

[Elden]

I accidentally got him back by changing screen size from 400x300 to the largest size possible he reapeared for no reason after that !

[Clock Nova]

No luck. Were you standing next to him at the time?

I can't even find him at the House of the Dead. What is his NPC number? Maybe I can use the in-game editor to get him back.

[drcode]

He's not a real NPC, but is created by a 'monster' egg that's near the desk. The bug is that the usecode executed for the banquet finds all eggs near the Avatar and deletes them.

The only way to fix it would be with ExultStudio. Might be a bit tricky, as you'd have to first look at the egg in a 'good' game to get all its attributes.

[Dominus]

And Exult does not use the House of Dead when NPCs die or get deleted...

[Clock Nova]

"The bug is that the usecode executed for the banquet finds all eggs near the Avatar and deletes them"

Now why would it do that. Nasty bug. Nassssssty, nassssssty bug. We hatesss it.

I guess I'm starting over. Again. Sigh.

[wjp]

It wants to delete the egg near the banquet hall doors. (But instead deletes the pikeman egg when you're closer to that than to the doors)

[Telemachos]

Hmm.. it's rather unbelievable that eggs are not accessed through IDs or symbolic names. Relying on a certain egg to always be the closests - well, that's just... stupid

- Tele

[fliptw]

Maybe thats an insight on how the pathfinding worked in U7...

the deleting eggs is what confuses me. sounds wasteful and... well... not very avian friendly

[Darke]

Why would deleting the closest egg be 'stupid'? At a guess the only other alternative to selecting an egg would be something like a GUID. Which would require more storage space on both disk and in memory (and it's not as if U7 wasn't pushing the limits of the minimum requirements anyway!), for something that happens rarely. After all, most of the time you're just triggering eggs by moving near them, which doesn't require a GUID, so why would you waste such relatively large amount of space for the time, for a 2byte (limiting you to 65k eggs) or 4byte GUID for *each* egg?

[Dominus]

Also most of the times this problem surfaces when people are playing in cheat mode (higher resolution) and execute stuff (like doubleclicking a door) from too far away...
But to be precise, you could trigger this bug in the original as well.

[Telemachos]

Well, how many eggs are in U7 in total? Just an estimate?

- Tele

[wjp]

About several thousand.

[Telemachos]

Well, what is that? 5000? 10000? More? I'm asking to be able to better comment on what Darke suggested that it would be a problem with storing an ID per egg in memory and on disk. My point here is that even assuming we spend 4 bytes per egg for an ID (although 2 would probably be enough) the extra memory needed would be minimal

Trading 20kb memory for a host of hard-to-debug gameplay bugs seems like a premature optimization to me

Dominus' comment that you could actually trigger this particular bug in the original game as well just goes to show that the design is flawed (IMHO)

- Tele

[Neutronium Dragon]

It might not seem like much *now*, but on the original version designed to run on 2 meg machines and already requiring an extremely difficult-to-achieve amount of conventional memory free, it would have probably been a breaker.

Neutronium Dragon

[Colourless]

Actually the fix would have been simpler than adding an egg ID to all the eggs. The problem isn't that they used 'find_nearby', it's that they used 'find_nearby' the Avatar's Positions. Instead, they should have just used the coords of the egg for the location to find_nearby.

Incidently, patching this usecode would be possible, should someone want to spend the time doing it.

-Colourless Dragon

[wjp]

There are close to 3000 items of shape 275 i n SI. (That shape includes usecode eggs and several other kind of eggs, but I think it doesn't include traps)

[memo]

As I suggested before, it would be nice to limit the range of several actions (search for eggs, ranged spells etc.) to the original resolution, no matter the current resolution. Like a 320x200 invisible frame around the Avatar. This could solve many problems, and playing in hi-res wouldn't be cheating anymore (granted you can still se things you should not see, but you cannot use them anyway).

[Colourless]

The List Field problem though isn't caused by an egg being triggered. The usecode is executed when you double click on the Banquet Hall doors.

[drcode]

I think you can make the same bug happen in the original if you're at the far left of the screen when you double-click the doors.

[George]

I figured out how to fix the bottle egg by the Gobline obelisk without too much trouble. Would this be a similar fix or would it be more involved and necessitate fixing this "usecode" thing I keep reading about? If it's similar to the bottle egg, then can someone give me some basic advice on what to look for if I wanted to try and fix this myself?

Thanks!
Skirge

[Clock Nova]

Wat was the problem with the bottle egg?

[Skirge01]

I drank the bottle rather than picking it up. =) Then, in trying to fix that screwup in Exult Studio, I started messing up the eggs in the area and had to fix them.

[Clock Nova]

Jezz. You'd think that if anyone was going to drink the evidence it would be Dupre!