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Friday, 7 December 2018

All Fixes & No Play - Start Saved Game Issues

Well, I need to add another apology. From our own play testing, there was another problem with talking with STORE OWNERS to open the store when their conversation is exhausted. I thought the bug was squashed a few fixes back, but it was back on our last session, which did not last very long at all. More on that in a moment. So, the latest version 2.17 fixes the store issue, and also addresses some other issues that we experienced in our last play.

LATEST VERSION HERE: https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/module/scroll

Here is what happened: Graham (on WAN) wanted to bring in another PC to replace Aeriol, because he felt that another fighter would balance the party rather than with two wizards as it currently stood. After a quick mid game fix to repair skill/feat selections Graham had made for the fighter (which is also in the latest v2.17 campaign folder fix), we continued to play. However, we only got as far as leaving the Bloated Buckle Inn and talking to a store owner when we encountered the store problem, mentioned above. No problem we thought, as we could reload the game and continue without taking the conversation path until it was fixed. However, when we went to reload, Graham (on WAN) had no end of difficulties trying to rejoin the game with the latest save.

The previous save appeared to work still, but (just to be on the safe side) we decided to make sure we could save/reload again having just restarted the session. Then, even that basic step of save and reload gave the same issues as he had experienced previously. We then spent the remaining time we had trying to establish why this had happened without any successful reload for him. In the end, it looked like even Jennifer (on LAN) could not join the session either, experiencing the same error messages.

In the end we ran out of time and I had a new issue to resolve. After checking the code, I thought there were some potential issues that needed addressing (which I did) and by the time I came to test it (the following day), the problem appeared resolved. Then, just out of interest, I went back to the previous version and tried to reload the LAN character again … and it worked!

So, although I made a number of alterations that I believed may have contributed to the issue, in the end, it may have simply been some form of corrupt server data that was cleared after a computer reboot. (I know I should have tried that first, but it’s great with hindsight.) However, those additional alterations I have made did clear up some inefficient code, and (hopefully) ensured a better establishment of variables upon a reload - so that it may help towards ensuring the loaded game did not confuse some variables, including such things as who was the host. NB: The older code still looked good to me, but I am happier with the alterations I have made to help alleviate similar problems (that may have contributed) anyway.

So, no gaming news to report other than these experiences. Hopefully, we will have a decent session tonight. I will report back as usual.

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