(June 2nd, 2022, 19:20)mxb2001 Wrote: Well I may have found a bug in this non-patch <g>. Or not.
So I started a small ave 2 player game as sili vs darlok and was exterminating the darloks. I started this game using the other patch I call MOO140M2. M1 being the one that fixed the battle scanner display, M2 fixing the endless saves every turn filling HD's and M3 being the one in this thread that combines the 1&2. So after I found M3 I used it to start 2 new games but I also decided to try using it to finish the game started with M2 and well it crashed in a very weird way.
I attach a screenshot of the crash screen. Also the last SAVE7.GAM from before it crashed. I alas didn't have the presence of mind (being a Silly Coid I've rocks for brains) to screen cap the game screen when it started acting weird just before the crash.
So I describe it.
There is (was) a Darly colony 5 parsecs from me (I had range 4 only) but on this turn it simply vanished and there were darly transports leaving it in the direction of the, uh map edge (which it lay quite near to).
Weirder yet all my fleets were permitted to fly to it with 4 fuel range even though they needed 5. No extra tanks I swear.
Then when I clicked on the darly ship in orbit the program crashed.
Thanks for the savefile, I have some time now so I'll see if I can reproduce it.
[edit] Well, I was able to reproduce it and tried loading it from the original vanilla v1.3 version where it also crashed. It'd be hard to isolate whether the save-game data corruption was caused by any of kyrub's or our changes or if it was also originally there with the vanilla version unless you also had a save prior to that distant planet disappearing.
(April 27th, 2023, 14:01)hornpipe2 Wrote: Hey all -
This patch is built on 1.40m from @kyrub. However, I found a 1.40n version from 2015 which fixes a couple more bugs. See here: https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...p?tid=7331
Sounds good, thanks for doing this.
Ya, I didn't use the 1.40n version as I hadn't been following it too closely and didn't want any confusion as to whether any new issues were caused by my changes or from the 'n' version so I stayed with the more thoroughly played 'm' version.
As you would expect, kyrub's patch cannot even be analyzed to the end; new bugs have been added
It's quite strange that people prefer to do this rather than look for errors in 1oom which is essentially an open book
I can tell a lot of work went into it, and it seems like they found a lot of bugs. But, I think it suffers from the typical open-source problem of being tough to read and use. A normal person doesn't really want to go delving into source code just to find out what's going on in their game mod...
Have a bit of time, I tend to hibernate in winter. Can anyone describe the factory construction bug? I'm not very familiar with it. If it could be broken down into what the manual describes how the function should work versus what seems to be occurring in game I could get a sense of where to look.
I know most people have moved on from playing the original DOS version, but it'd still be good to fix any issues in it that can be done.
For anyone that was looking to change the Galactic High Council behavior, there are a couple places you can modify.
Hex Address CC6A: B8 19 00 - mov bx, 19
Basically the frequency that the Council convenes, so you could increase the number to 32 if you wanted every 50 years, or any number of your choosing (remember the number is Hex).
Hex Address CC7B: 83 7E FA 02 - cmp [bp+num_alive], 2
This check skips the Council if there's essentially only 2 players left in the game since then there would be no point in having it. That means that you can change the 2 number to any number you want to stop having the Council show up. If you set it to a higher number then there are players in the game (50 for instance), then the Council will never show up. If you set it to 4, then the council will show up if there are 5 players still in the game, but once there's only 4, it will stop showing up.
Since this is a personal preference, I won't be making a patch for it, players can patch their own games as they like.
Thanks for all your work and discoveries on the secrets of this terrific old game, SDragon!
(8 hours ago)SDragon Wrote: Can anyone describe the factory construction bug? I'm not very familiar with it. If it could be broken down into what the manual describes how the function should work versus what seems to be occurring in game I could get a sense of where to look.
If I understand which but you mean, here's what I know of the way it actually works:
- The cost of building any factory at any time is equal to [current Industrial Tech level, which starts at 10] * [current Robotic Controls level, which starts at 2] / 2. (Not sure if it's floor or ceiling.) Exception: For the Meklar, the cost of building any factory at any time is equalt to [current Industrial Tech level], under all circumstances.
- Unless you are Meklar, when you acquire a new Robotic Controls tech or first conquer a rival's colony with factories in place, you have to pay a "refit" cost for your existing factories before you can build the "new" factories. This cost is extremely small (e.g. the cost of refitting exactly one factory) and failing to pay it doesn't appear (as far as I can tell) to affect your ability to work factories up to the number allowed by your population and best RC. I'm also not sure when this cost is applied, but it might be when your factory count reaches (or has surpassed, as sometimes happens when conquering colonies or after bio attacks) the number the planet's max population would have been able to support with your old (pre-refit) RC tech. Note Meklar never have to pay refit costs.
- There is a display bug associated with these "refit" costs: When you spend on Industry on a planet that still "needs" to refit its factories, the display to the right of the slider displays "REFIT" at the appropriate times, but does not recognize that after refitting you will also be building more factories. Thus, if you've maxed a UR world at RC2 as Klackons with Industrial Waste Elimination, IIT2, and tech level 99 in planetology, and then you get RC3, double the planet's output from the treasury, and slam the whole slider into INDustry, the display shows "REFIT" for that planet. But the next turn, you'll find that you not only fully refitted all the existing factories but maxed the planet again with RC3 and created an enormous amount of reserves to restock the treasury.
How it's supposed to work is a much more difficult question. I can try to look it up in the manual again, but I don't think it specifies certain crucial details. My off-the-cuff thoughts:
If (as in Remnants of the Precursors) between maxing old-RC factories and building even your very first new one, you need to pay to refit every one of your existing factories, it would massively decrease the value of RC technology* (and consequently, non-intuitively, most IIT) - though if you can still build the "cheap" RC2 factories up until the planet does max out with those, at least pulling RC3 from an early artifact world wouldn't be a poison pill. My view is that the best result within (what I think is) the existing savefile format would be something like this: Factories can be built at a cost of [IIT level] until factory count reaches twice the planet's max pop. Beyond that, (for non-Meklar) the cost per factory becomes [IIT level] * ([RC level needed to build this factory] - 0.5). (Thus 2.5 * IIT level until you're at thrice max pop, then 3.5 * IIT, etc.) This means you end up paying the full "refit" cost, but it's spread out among all the factories you build that require it, resulting in a much faster return on your investment than if you have to pay all the refit costs up front before building any new factories.
See how it fares.
