This is still caster 2.3
I assume caster 2.4 is not savegame compatible with 2.3 saves so I am trying to finish this game out in 2.3.
About 30minutes after this savefile I crashed. Or more accurately froze and nothing happened forever. Right after Merlin cast astral gate on the enemies turn.
On my turn I banished the green wizard from the game. Then I ended my turn. Then I got attacked 7 or 8 times by the green mage on the enemy turn. Then the red mage cast a spell and the game froze up.
This save file is probably useless because anyone replaying that 30minute time span differently will result in avoiding the crash. I plan to replay it myself, I'm fairly confident the crash won't occur again (fingers crossed) I've had this crash (Actually a freeze) happen 2or3 times during this game, I think it might be because of charismatic+aura of majesty because without the combination I've never once had a freeze or crash in caster of magic.
Either merlin is trying to attack me and can't so he freezes the game, or merlin is going over the unit limit or something because of how peaceful I've been this game? I'm usually more warlike and so the ai doesn't build up so much.
Anyways I figured if I wanted this crash bug to go away I should submit my savefile, even if this specific savefile is useless for reproducing the crash, I'll try to save more often at the end of my turns. Speaking of which is there anyway to rewrite the autosave code to save at the end of the players turn? That would be the ultimate tool to find out why sometimes the enemy's turn freezes forever? If I make it to the autosave file being created I'm already past this bug.
Maybe you can see if Merlin's hidden relation hates me? or If he's queued up an attack on me? or if He's over the unit limit? I'm not really sure how a person goes about fixing a crash that only randomly happens rarely
(June 14th, 2016, 04:23)lechium Wrote: Saw one bug. I resurrected Malleus and he has only a blank name now.
I had that happen to be too. It seems the name wasn't saved when the hero died.
Which can happen if
-The owner is not the human player. I don't think this is possible but was your hero confused when he died?
-The units didn't properly die, just got marked dead. without calling the procedure to kill it.
-If they died to unrecoverable damage, in this case they should not be possible to resurrect.
If it's any of these, that indicates there is a larger bug behind it. Do you remember how the hero died, and to what type of damage?
Unfortunately i can't remember the details. Might have been a Chaos spell from Lo Pan or it might have been Shadow Demons.
Did you have the "Backup saves" option on? If yes and haven't yet played another game, you should have a save file of every single turn created immediately after the turn ended. If you find the ones before and after the hero died I could at least know if the name was not saved as I suspect, or if it was saved but erased later.
Here are my saves with Malleus before he was killed by Jafar. Directly after. And after he was ressurected. Hope it helps.
(June 19th, 2016, 00:42)namad Wrote: Maybe you can see if Merlin's hidden relation hates me? or If he's queued up an attack on me? or if He's over the unit limit? I'm not really sure how a person goes about fixing a crash that only randomly happens rarely
By using a save file directly prior to the turn it crashes which reproduces the crash.
The game does autosave each turn although it's the beginning. It even makes numbered saves fr each turn. Are you sure you don't have the one for the crash?
"30 minutes before" is useless indeed.
(June 19th, 2016, 02:40)lechium Wrote: Here are my saves with Malleus before he was killed by Jafar. Directly after. And after he was ressurected. Hope it helps.
Thanks, it helped. Surprisingly the bug is not in resurrection and not in the death of heroes.
It's in saving. When a hero dies and revive it, they have their name. If I save and load before reviving, it's gone.
Hero names is the last record of data saved to the file, but loading has a weird difference from saving.
It checks the size of the file. If it's not exactly a certain amount, it does not load hero names. I have no idea why they made it so, I don't think it's very likely for a save to fail by having every data successfully saved but the hero name part missing.
Since more units mean larger saves, it does not load the hero names at all because the file is a different size. This might be a mechanism for compatibility with older saves? was there ever a version where heroes had no names I wonder.
I'll fix this for the next update.
(June 19th, 2016, 00:42)namad Wrote: Maybe you can see if Merlin's hidden relation hates me? or If he's queued up an attack on me? or if He's over the unit limit? I'm not really sure how a person goes about fixing a crash that only randomly happens rarely
By using a save file directly prior to the turn it crashes which reproduces the crash.
The game does autosave each turn although it's the beginning. It even makes numbered saves fr each turn. Are you sure you don't have the one for the crash?
"30 minutes before" is useless indeed.
It's at the end of the turn before the crash, closer to the crash than the previous turn's autosave It just took me 20-25turns to win 8or9 battles or so during that time (one on my turn and 8or so being attacked by enemies).
Knowing what to do I could've done it faster. In fact if I just flee from every battle and don't banish the green wizard it would only take one or two minutes to process the enemy turn up to the point of the crash. However I'm betting if I play the turn that differently there's no chance the crash will happen (I'll do that later today).
I've actually never seen this crash when the enemy turn was quick, but it happens occasionally during long enemy turns. A lot of the battles were casting invis or mass invis and then waiting until turn 25. Which took a long time.
I guess it tells you how good or bad a player I am that 30minutes was only about half of a single turn I fought several battles before the save, which was why I didn't use the autosave, it was even further away from the crash.
If it matters my dosbox is using gog's default setting of "max cpu cycles" hadriex seems to have a hunch (in his videos) that setting cpu cycles too high causes enemy turn's to freeze/crash but I am not sure I believe him, and it's so rare it's impossible for me personally to give a good guess.
EDIT: I hit ddddddddddddddddddddd next turn flee flee flee flee flee flee flee it took 1minute to get back to the point where merlin froze the game. Only this time the game didn't freeze and everything is fine. So, I guess there's no way to track down what went wrong, maybe it was a dosbox issue not even related to the game? I'll resume the game normally and hope when I don't flee that the freeze thing doesn't happen again.
(June 19th, 2016, 09:52)namad Wrote: EDIT: I hit ddddddddddddddddddddd next turn flee flee flee flee flee flee flee it took 1minute to get back to the point where merlin froze the game. Only this time the game didn't freeze and everything is fine. So, I guess there's no way to track down what went wrong, maybe it was a dosbox issue not even related to the game? I'll resume the game normally and hope when I don't flee that the freeze thing doesn't happen again.
There are random crashes in the game that are not caused by anything specific and disappear if exiting and reloading. Since they cannot be reproduced, I have no way to find and fix these aside from randomly noticing while working on that part of game code.
So far I fixed like a dozen of them which is not very good news, who knows how many more are there...
(June 18th, 2016, 06:26)vicwaberub Wrote: From an historical point of view: The human right of property was denied in the third german empire for jews and others, the income of the empire increased. New idea: "Destroyer"
In the first half of the 20th century in USA still existed institutionalized racism, but this has not contributed anything to the US economy.
Its a little bit offtopic, but I think this is not correct. Think on cotton and other farming in the south of the US. This work was done by the black people. But let us talk about CoM, MoM and good game design in fantasy strategy games (Planar Conquest the newest application: seven planes are no good design...)
I think 7 planes is actually fine design. I think that ideally though for balance they should limit the player to enable at most 2 out of 7? or maybe 3 out of 7 or something.
Different versions of Myyror are an amazing idea. Having them all in play at once is just pointless and copying a rather weak feature of warlock master of the arcane.
Why add a dozen challenges harder than winning the game to the game? killing the ai is the goal of the game yet all these planes do is add portions of the game the ai sucks at that the player can do for fun or ignore and still win.
(June 22nd, 2016, 19:15)namad Wrote: I think 7 planes is actually fine design.
In the end, planes sort of don't matter -- would it really change MoM that much if Myrror and Arcanus were just different widely separated locations on the same world map? It's just an excuse to have somewhat different tactical environments and geographic barriers. Of course, planar conquest might have implemented things badly.
(June 22nd, 2016, 19:15)namad Wrote: I think 7 planes is actually fine design.
In the end, planes sort of don't matter -- would it really change MoM that much if Myrror and Arcanus were just different widely separated locations on the same world map? It's just an excuse to have somewhat different tactical environments and geographic barriers. Of course, planar conquest might have implemented things badly.
Planes are good in games with a hero journey like Diablo: From level (plane) to level with bigger treasures and greater monsters.
IMO are planes in a strategic game not the best idea:
1. Your troops must reach the Planes A, B, C, D, E and F in a short time or your pacing and your gameplay (f.e. endgame with too long supply routes) fails.
2. The immersion is not so good with planes: Why should I go to the lava plane? The immersion is higher with regions like in LoTR: Fangorn, Mordor, darkwood and lothlorien (where the timestop spell is working). You have borders to this regions, so this regions can be a threat or a place of ressources. It is natural with regions.
3. A plane should have very different kind of movement: Water (free movement with full speed), Land (with a lot of movment limitations in direction and speed), underground (small passages and big caves limits the directions very strong). Land and Water are the normal world, underground (like Moria in LoTR) can be a good idea for a plane. It feels natural, it has a good immerison. AoW and HoMM3 has this system, unfortunately the maps of HoMM and AoW3 are on the surface area the same system of ways and limitations
4. Playability. Whats going on plane C? And E? F? Often confusing.
It just took me 20-25turns to win 8or9 battles or so during that time (one on my turn and 8or so being attacked by enemies).
