Iolo disappears

[AlmightyO]

Hi!

Everytime I exit the game and then load my savegame, Iolo is missing. He's nowhere to be found, I tried to run around quite a lot before giving up. Also Shamino walks funny while his friend is absent, stopping and having troubles going around walls. The only remedy I've found for this issue is to sleep at the inn. When I wake up, Iolo comes back.

Any help will be appreciated.

PS: I am using the latest snapshot, OS: Windows 7

[Dominus]

BG or SI and we need a savegame

[AlmightyO]

http://www.speedyshare.com/QHMrZ/exult06bg.sav

BG

[Dominus]

Yes, I can reproduce with this savegame.
Did you do *anything* out of the usual? Did you cheat somewhere or did leave him somewhere and made him join through the Cheat screen? Or did he need resurrecting? You are at the healer, so it might be that.
Iolo is no longer on the map, totally gone at that moment and that shouldn't be...

[Dominus]

With a lot of help by Marzo, we figured some things out:

1. you are using the keyring mod, it's important that we are told about this

2. your problem was caused by
- going into map edit mode (ctrl+alt+m)
- clicking once on Iolo (red outline)
- hiting the delete key
- saving

So you best restore to a save before you messed your game

[marzo]

Here is an alternate fix:
(1) Load the bad savegame; this sets up the gamedat directory for quick-load.
(2) Go into the gamedat directory and replace the npc.dat file with this. No need to close Exult for this.
(3) Quick-load (Ctrl+R) the save game.
(4) Walk around a bit to get Iolo back.

The issue happens because something caused Iolo to be marked as being unused; this causes him to be deleted again every time the game is saved then loaded. The modified npc.dat flags him as being in use and reverts his schedule to 'follow avatar', and so breaks this cycle.

A likely explanation is given by Dominus; another possibility is that you are not using one of the snapshots (which lock down the delete key to be active only on mapedit mode) and you hit it accidentally when the mouse was over Iolo.

[Dominus]

or if you are using an old keyfile instead of a current one. In the old ones the delete key was working even when not in map-edit mode.

[AlmightyO]

Thanks! Replacing npc.dat worked fine. Didn't even know about map edit mode, so probably did it accidently.