Missing Xenka flag?

[theyeti]

Hello, I've been playing U7 SI through, and I've gotten to the point where I need to reunite the chaos serpent. I've talked to both the Order Heirophant and the Chaos Heirophant, gotten the scroll, the serpent relics, etc. Various walkthroughs have stated that talking to Xenka at this point about "sacrifice" should result in the party drawing straws to see who has to sacrifice himself and so on and so forth. But when I talk to Xenka, she says nothing about "sacrifice" or needing to restore the imbalance. And for that matter, when I talk the the Chaos Heirophant, he doesn't say anything about needing something strong to bind the banes. So since I can't get Dupre to sacrifice himself, I'm stuck.

Has this happened to anyone before? Is there some flag that I was supposed to set that I didn't? Any help would be appreciated.

[wjp]

We should make this a Frequently Asked Question

I'll copy-paste my research from an earlier thread here into a single post, for easy reference:

----------------

It looks like the following flags are relevant:

0x1f9 has to be set
0x25e has to be set
0x22b has to be set
0x242 has to be cleared

0x25e: set when returning amulet to Gwani. Never cleared

0x22b: set when talking to the Chaos Hierophant. Never cleared

0x242: this one is cleared at the start of the game, and is set when healing the Chaos Serpent, it seems. (that function is a bit too complex to be 100% sure, but it sounds reasonable)

0x1f9: This is set in usecode function 0x6ac when the Serpent Staff is picked up. 0x1f9 is never cleared.

--------------------

summarizing:

The "sacrifice" conversation option will turn up if and only if:

you have returned the amulet to the Gwani AND
you have spoken with the Chaos Hierophant AND
you have picked up the Serpent Staff from its proper location (i.e., not by cheating) AND
you have not yet healed the Chaos Serpent.

[theyeti]

Hmm, I've done all those things. Still no conversation. (I assume that I need to get the "sacrifice" conversation *before* I can heal the chaos serpent.)

[wjp]

If you want you can send me a savegame and I'll check what's wrong.

[theyeti]

Okay, I've sent a savegame to the email address in your profile. If you find anything, just reply here. Thanks!

[Dominus]

you have picked up the Serpent Staff from its proper location (i.e., not by cheating)

This one is easy to do wrong. When you pick up the staff from too far away it may have gone wrong. "from to far away" is easy to do when you play wiht higher resolutions than the original.

[wjp]

The Serpent Staff flag is indeed the one that was not yet set. To fix this:

Go into the cheat menu with F2
Enter the flag modifier with F
flag 505 (enter)
Set the flag with S.
exit: X X

Speaking to Xenka again will give the Sacrifice option now.


Dominus: picking it up from far away doesn't cause the problem. (I tried at 800x600 from as far away as possible and it worked just fine.)

However, first moving the staff a little bit on the floor (just move it one tile east or something), and _then_ picking it up will break things.

[Dominus]

ah, good to know. noted for soon to come update on the FAQ.

[Neutronium Dragon]

Yes, the resolution doesn't matter - the sacrifice bug happened back in the original DOS days, too, though the cause wasn't known at the time.

Question: Does trying to pick it up and failing also break that bit of usecode? (That is, there's no free slot/room in inventory, producing the buzz and red X?)

How about if it's picked up in different ways? Dragged over the character, dragged into inventory, picked up to another character than the Avatar, etc?

Neutronium Dragon

[wjp]

Hm, if it happened in the original too there's no "good" way to fix it. It should be possible to hack our way around it, though, by treating this egg differently.

Picking it up in different ways doesn't matter. Not sure about what happens if picking it up fails. (I would assume that doesn't break it, though.)

[wjp]

Just tried: if you fail to pick it up (either because it's too heavy or because you drag it to an invalid place), it works fine. (At least in Exult.)

[Neutronium Dragon]

I think that the suggestion that came up at the time the cause was first discovered here was that Exult might simply check to see whether the staff was in inventory, rather than checking that flag.

Neutronium Dragon

[wjp]

That would involve rewriting the relevant usecode.

[artaxerxes]

...which I would gladly include in the patch for SI-french!

Artaxerxes

[wjp]

I just committed a workaround to this bug, which indeed also happened in the original. The 'fix' only tries to make sure the flag is set when you pick up the staff, though, so if you already picked up the staff "the wrong way", you'll manually have to set flag 505 like I described above.

[Miguel]

I's just like to report that I fell victim to this acursed bug too. I didn't cheat, nor did I use higher resolutions. But I didn't pick it and put it straight into my inventory. I used the spell Fetch!

So, in a nutshell, using Fetch to get it breaks the plot! If you think about it, the spell places the item on the ground, which the Exult FAQ warns us not to do... (

PS: this is one of the worst bugs I've ever found in a game, for if I had to reload a saved game SO far back, I would've quit!