No crashes for me in 1.4.2... some minor bugs to report

Problems with the Mac version of Darwinia

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Re: No crashes for me in 1.4.2... some minor bugs to report

Postby ShepFan » Wed May 17, 2006 5:06 pm

xander wrote:With regards to several of the issues that I have not addressed, could you try and get screenshots, using the method that I outlined above, please?

xander


Here's a link to a 300K QuickTime movie showing the full-screen artifacts when looking down from high above. Let me know if this doesn't adequately show the issue.

-S
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Postby xander » Wed May 17, 2006 5:23 pm

Hrm... I see what you mean. I don't think I have ever seen anything like quite like that. What do your graphics settings look like? Especially the z-depth (or whatever that setting is...).


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Postby ShepFan » Thu May 18, 2006 5:20 am

Xander,

I'll look that up and report in a bit.

In the meantime, here are four window-based screen dumps:

FourTasksNotThree.jpg - In this one, you can read that Dr. S warns me I can only have three tasks running at once, but you can see I have four in the Task Mgr.

VeryLateNotice.jpg - For whatever reason, I broke with tradition and started on this island in the Pattern Buffer. I also did the PB before the Receiver, which is also different for me. Anyway, this shot shows Dr. S's exclamation that the red guys were coming out of the trunk ports. The thing is, they'd been coming out for a long time by that point. This level was very difficult done this way. I didn't clear this island until the pattern infection was completely gone, the red guys stopped coming out, and I came back to mop up.

MissingArmour.jpg - This shot is a bit later on the same level. There were a few times where the left button stopped placing new items, and I had to quit the program and re-enter. One of those times, Armour I'd placed at the near end of this "corridor" was gone when I came back. Is it possible for just red guys to destroy armor? I can't even imagine how they might have gotten close. I had them pinned pretty well.

StuckSpiders1.jpg
StuckSpiders2.jpg
StuckSpiders3.jpg
Self-explanatory. These guys never left their position, and were easily killed with grenades.

-S
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Postby ShepFan » Thu May 18, 2006 6:07 am

xander wrote:Hrm... I see what you mean. I don't think I have ever seen anything like quite like that. What do your graphics settings look like? Especially the z-depth (or whatever that setting is...).
xander


Screen settings are full-screen 1920x1200, Z buffer depth is 24 bit, all the detail settings are High and the Pixel Effect is enabled. When I try to set color depth = 24 , Darwinia attempts to switch but defaults back to windowed mode, 800x600, Z buffer = 24 bit. I have to use color depth = 16 or 32 to use full-screen on my 23" LCD. As I mentioned before, I'm using a GeForce 6600, 256M VRAM.

Here's a valuable tidbit! The strange full-screen artifacting I made a movie of? It only does that in color depth = 16 mode. 32-bit mode looks great!

(trivial edit- removed a spurious "and")

-S
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Postby xander » Thu May 18, 2006 2:30 pm

ShepFan wrote:FourTasksNotThree.jpg - In this one, you can read that Dr. S warns me I can only have three tasks running at once, but you can see I have four in the Task Mgr.

Heh... nice catch. The problem is in line 12 of english.txt. It should probably read something like, "The task manager is full. You can shut down..."

ShepFan wrote:VeryLateNotice.jpg - For whatever reason, I broke with tradition and started on this island in the Pattern Buffer. I also did the PB before the Receiver, which is also different for me. Anyway, this shot shows Dr. S's exclamation that the red guys were coming out of the trunk ports. The thing is, they'd been coming out for a long time by that point. This level was very difficult done this way. I didn't clear this island until the pattern infection was completely gone, the red guys stopped coming out, and I came back to mop up.

That is interesting... One possible solution would be to increase the radius of the script trigger that sets off that speech. Make sure it covers all three trunkports, and it should go off no matter what order you use.

ShepFan wrote:MissingArmour.jpg - This shot is a bit later on the same level. There were a few times where the left button stopped placing new items, and I had to quit the program and re-enter. One of those times, Armour I'd placed at the near end of this "corridor" was gone when I came back. Is it possible for just red guys to destroy armor? I can't even imagine how they might have gotten close. I had them pinned pretty well.

The save system in Darwinia is a bit funky. Sometimes, when you quit, the armour locations will not be saved. When you quit Darwinia, did you leave the level first? I don't know if this will help, but I have noticed that the auto-save system does, generally, seem to work if you leave the level (i.e. return to the world map). It does not, generally, seem to work if you quit Darwinia from within a level. That could be where your armour is going, i.e. you are quiting the game before their locations are saved.

ShepFan wrote:StuckSpiders1.jpg
StuckSpiders2.jpg
StuckSpiders3.jpg
Self-explanatory. These guys never left their position, and were easily killed with grenades.

Interesting... I have never seen that before. Is there any way that you can consistantly cause them to get stuck? Are there any particular conditions that seem to cause it?

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Postby trickfred » Thu May 18, 2006 2:46 pm

xander wrote:
ShepFan wrote:VeryLateNotice.jpg - For whatever reason, I broke with tradition and started on this island in the Pattern Buffer. I also did the PB before the Receiver, which is also different for me. Anyway, this shot shows Dr. S's exclamation that the red guys were coming out of the trunk ports. The thing is, they'd been coming out for a long time by that point. This level was very difficult done this way. I didn't clear this island until the pattern infection was completely gone, the red guys stopped coming out, and I came back to mop up.

That is interesting... One possible solution would be to increase the radius of the script trigger that sets off that speech. Make sure it covers all three trunkports, and it should go off no matter what order you use.


What they could do (And I'm using this in a mod I'm working on) is set SafeAreas, one each around each Trunk that the red DGs come out of. Have them set to, oh, 10 red DGs as an arbitrary number.

Then add this to game.txt:

Code: Select all


   Event BuildingOnline :test,401 BuildingOffline :test,402 BuildingOffline :test,403
      Action RunScript  saystuff1.txt
      End
   Event BuildingOffline :test,401 BuildingOnline :test,402 BuildingOffline :test,403
      Action RunScript  saystuff1.txt
      End
   Event BuildingOffline :test,401 BuildingOffline :test,402 BuildingOnline :test,403
      Action RunScript  saystuff1.txt
      End


This triggers the message once, and only once, when the first SafeArea to reach the alotted # of red DGs goes online, but prevents it from showing up three times.

It would mean breaking current profiles, yes, but if it makes the message appear more reliably, then I see it as a small price to pay. Sometimes I never even see that message.

Of course, it's not exactly a game-breaking bug, and it probably won't be changed.
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Postby ShepFan » Thu May 18, 2006 7:15 pm

xander wrote:
ShepFan wrote:MissingArmour.jpg - This shot is a bit later on the same level. There were a few times where the left button stopped placing new items, and I had to quit the program and re-enter. One of those times, Armour I'd placed at the near end of this "corridor" was gone when I came back. Is it possible for just red guys to destroy armor? I can't even imagine how they might have gotten close. I had them pinned pretty well.

The save system in Darwinia is a bit funky. Sometimes, when you quit, the armour locations will not be saved. When you quit Darwinia, did you leave the level first? I don't know if this will help, but I have noticed that the auto-save system does, generally, seem to work if you leave the level (i.e. return to the world map). It does not, generally, seem to work if you quit Darwinia from within a level. That could be where your armour is going, i.e. you are quiting the game before their locations are saved.
xander


I always leave the level first. It's the only way I know to get to the "Leave Darwinia" option in the sphere. I guess in windowed mode one could choose Quit under the Darwinia menu, but that seems like asking for trouble, and never occurred to me until now.

To be completely fair, even though this game used a fresh, clean profile that I created just to try and find bugs... Before this last game I did use the redshirt2 ruby script to set my levels to 4 through 6 on a different profile. I even discovered an unused squaddie weapon called "Control" which did fire but didn't affect anything. Anyway the point is, after doing that I noticed that Triffids twice reappeared in places I'd already killed them. That also happened when re-entering levels, two different ones. I would think that profiles couldn't affect each other, but I mention it just in case.

As far as causing stuck spiders, I know of no way to duplicate the problem. I think it depends on where they are randomly dropped at the start of a level. I mentioned earlier I once saw 2 or 3 spiders stuck in exactly the same spot, so they looked like one spider with 12-18 legs. The stuck spiders all seem pretty placid--they barely stir, except to flick a leg now and again. I wonder if they're not stuck so much as they don't "see" the action around them?

Here's another strange thing that happened very fast, and I didn't get a chance to capture. A normal, non-stuck spider was walking horizontally along a nearly vertical wall, and his body, especially his legs, were stretched in the vertical. From leg tip to leg tip he was almost the height of the wall. Once he got past that region he returned to normal size. It lasted less than 5 seconds total.

Another (admittedly very nitpicky) thing-- during the cutscene at the Temple. I noticed that the buildings are glowing red, even though the virus hasn't yet been released. I did get a screen dump, if you'd like to see it.

Speaking of the Temple cutscene, the horizontal black lines across the DGs aren't visible in windowed mode. It could be the same artifact as the high-up-looking-down problem, I suppose.

-S
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Postby trickfred » Thu May 18, 2006 7:26 pm

ShepFan wrote:A normal, non-stuck spider was walking horizontally along a nearly vertical wall, and his body, especially his legs, were stretched in the vertical. From leg tip to leg tip he was almost the height of the wall. Once he got past that region he returned to normal size. It lasted less than 5 seconds total.

Another (admittedly very nitpicky) thing-- during the cutscene at the Temple. I noticed that the buildings are glowing red, even though the virus hasn't yet been released. I did get a screen dump, if you'd like to see it.


The Spiders ignore land elevation, and walk up hills just as if the land was flat - explaining the distortion. I suspect this was probably done to increase their mobility for one reason or another - it could have been the only way to give them the ability to climb steep inclines.

And the Team 1 buildings is just another thing they probably missed when creating the game - but if they fixed it now in a patch, it would break all pre-patch profiles, and therefore I suspect they're probably not going to bother addressing it.
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Postby xander » Thu May 18, 2006 9:11 pm

ShepFan wrote:I always leave the level first. It's the only way I know to get to the "Leave Darwinia" option in the sphere. I guess in windowed mode one could choose Quit under the Darwinia menu, but that seems like asking for trouble, and never occurred to me until now.

Command+Q works, too.

ShepFan wrote:To be completely fair, even though this game used a fresh, clean profile that I created just to try and find bugs... Before this last game I did use the redshirt2 ruby script to set my levels to 4 through 6 on a different profile. I even discovered an unused squaddie weapon called "Control" which did fire but didn't affect anything.

Try firing the Controller weapon at some green DGs. It basically turns the Squad into a weaponized Officer.

ShepFan wrote:Anyway the point is, after doing that I noticed that Triffids twice reappeared in places I'd already killed them. That also happened when re-entering levels, two different ones. I would think that profiles couldn't affect each other, but I mention it just in case.

The reappearing triffids is a known bug. And the profiles will have no effect upon eachother.

ShepFan wrote:Here's another strange thing that happened very fast, and I didn't get a chance to capture. A normal, non-stuck spider was walking horizontally along a nearly vertical wall, and his body, especially his legs, were stretched in the vertical. From leg tip to leg tip he was almost the height of the wall. Once he got past that region he returned to normal size. It lasted less than 5 seconds total.

This is also a known bug.

ShepFan wrote:Another (admittedly very nitpicky) thing-- during the cutscene at the Temple. I noticed that the buildings are glowing red, even though the virus hasn't yet been released. I did get a screen dump, if you'd like to see it.

I've noticed it too, but it never struck me as a big deal. It is fixable, but it would basically require that you rewrite both of the Temple mission files, and the Temple map file, to move all of the buildings from the map to the missions. It could be done, but probably isn't worth the trouble for small effect that it would have.

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Postby ShepFan » Thu May 18, 2006 9:33 pm

xander and trickfred,

Thanks for lending a helpful ear. I think this documents everything I could find that matters. I trust you'll send anything important along to The Powers That Be. If I find anything else I'll chime in again.

-S
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Postby xander » Thu May 18, 2006 9:47 pm

ShepFan wrote:xander and trickfred,

Thanks for lending a helpful ear. I think this documents everything I could find that matters. I trust you'll send anything important along to The Powers That Be. If I find anything else I'll chime in again.

-S

By posting it here, you have gotten about as close to the powers that be as possible. Chris and John (at least) read these forums, and if they consider a bug worth fixing, they will probably fix it. Suffice to say, Chris is aware of the issues.

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Stuck DG screen shot

Postby ShepFan » Sat May 20, 2006 3:30 pm

StuckDG.jpg - I noticed the little guy 10 minutes before this screen shot, seemingly circling to nowhere, as if one foot were stuck in the ground. When I found him so much later, and standing near an Officer with a "Follow Me" flag, I grabbed a picture.

-S

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