The Current Bugs Thread!

Discussion in 'Bugs' started by rydash, Aug 1, 2012.

  1. Sloe

    Sloe Member

    I would like to apologize if i came across as abrasive though. Wasn't my intent; Just bothered that i felt the game was abandoned as is and language being imprecise as it is, leads to long posts that may come across wrong, with a little venting thrown in.

    I do enjoy dredmor, obviously, or i wouldn't have posted at all, and i just would like to see it work, so i could have some faith in gaslamp's future games. They obviously have some good concepts and a sense of humour, and i enjoy their work, but frankly many are of the mind i am and can't afford to throw money away.

    If there is in fact a plan to put some manpower into dredmor's fixes, then i apologize, but all signs led to thinking it was abandoned as is.
     
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  2. rydash

    rydash Member

    I'd just like to restate that the intent of this document is to be a community-run collection of unintended game events. It is not a manifesto to the developers, nor is it a cost-benefit analysis which says why addressing Dredmor would help out the company moreso than putting current efforts on CE.

    That said, the issues listed here are recognized as work "tickets" within GLG's internal systems. It's just that current work is better spent on the product intended to be released this year. Ten or fifteen people can only do so much.

    In a perfect world, this list wouldn't exist. There have been occasional comments stating that Dredmor may be revisited after CE bursts onto the scene. All I can do for my part here is apologize for my lax categorization efforts in the recent few months, and hopefully encourage you that these wrongs can still be righted in due time.
     
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  3. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Hey Sloe,

    Some of your criticism is definitely fair. For example, there are crashes that a certain number of people still experience in game, that we have tried to reproduce for months or years without success, and some Steamcloud syncing issues.

    That said, to say we have abandoned the game after releasing it would be false, our latest patch is about 2-3 months ago, fixing more of those types of issues. Not all, unfortunately.

    The entire team is focusing on Clockwork Empires (which is being built to be easier to debug), but whenever there is time we gather up some bugs and release a patch, we just usually don't announce it. There are still plans to fix the remaining crashes some people experience. As for actually minor non game-breaking bugs, we'll get to them if we can, that's unfortunately the reality of game development.
     
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  4. Sloe

    Sloe Member

    Thank you for responding and i appreciate the stance you're taking. I was told right out by some that there was no more development and reading this thread made me believe it was abandoned... I apologize for jumping the gun then, and i look forward to more updates in future, thanks.

    The main problems i would appreciate a fix to is the laggy text messages (the text messages are basically useless within a few minutes of playing, they are often several minutes behind, and in some cases it's necessary or at least very helpful in finding out for example what item u had corrupted) and the random crash on level up and floor change, if there is any plans to fix that up in time, i retract my statements and appreciate the response.
     
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  5. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    TL;DR: That which is not dead can eternal lie.

    I will readily admit that nobody is more frustrated with some of this stuff than I am. The main blocker to dealing with any lingering Dredmor issues is me having time, and this just won't happen until Clockwork Empires is out. With Mr. Whitman gone, we are now down to two full time programmers (myself and Micah) on CE, plus pinch-hitting from Ryan (who only does Ryan things) and Daniel (who mainly does tax paperwork.) We don't have the resources right now to take on another programmer and train him to fix things, and I don't have the time to fix it until then (and frankly, I'm the one who should be investigating these things anyway.)

    Once we ship CE and deal with its teething issues, I hope to spend some time doing a little mopping-up work. I did spend some time over our Christmas break working on things, with the goal of cleaning up some minor issues; we also have half of another patch queued up which significantly improves lag, load times, and memory usage, based on porting Dredmor to SDL2. I just don't have time to get this patch into beta testing right now, because it will require a significant amount of testing and debugging to make sure that releasing a new patch does not cause significantly more issues than it fixes. So stuff happens, but it's basically me sneaking a couple of minutes every so often to fix a few things.

    The biggest issue is definitely the save game corruption, which I've spent a significant amount of time trying to track down, without success. I'm not even sure if it's us, or if it's Steam Cloud. One thing we've found autopsying people's save games is that sometimes Steam Cloud seems to replace *half* of somebody's save game with an earlier one. My inclination at this point is to shut it off entirely; we also won't be using it for Clockwork Empires. This, and the vanishing stat bug, are my two biggest white whales in terms of debugging; I've spent a good deal of time looking at them, but there's very little I can do without specific reproducibility steps. We don't have a QA department, seeing as how we're seven people, so we're basically relying on useful bug reports from the community (and the unceasing tireless service of rydash here) to try to sort these things out.

    There also seems to be something specific on Level 14, but - again - I can't figure out what the common denominator is. It may happen only organically when playing Dredmor on Level 14, which is difficult because I'm no longer a sufficiently good player at my own game to get down there... :(

    With regards to more specific stuff:

    - The ticker speed: this is surprisingly easy to fix; I just haven't done it because you're the first person to actually complain about it. :) Let me get back to you on this one.

    - The mouse wheel: actually got fixed in 1.1.4, and should have gone out to everybody. I just checked to make sure I did fix it, and that I'm not going insane; this bug is closed on my local build. If there are platforms where this did not get updated, this means we have a bug in our build system somewhere.

    - Sleep: Sleep actually does a *separate* resistance check from the damage component of any spell that it's in. C++ code:

    Code:
    if ((*objIter)->IsMonster())
                 {
                   Monster *m = (Monster *)(*objIter);
                   if (!iter->resistable || DoResistance(caster,m))
                   {
                     m->state |= STATE_SLEEPY;
                     if (iter->numTurns > 0)
                     {
                       m->sleepyCounter = iter->numTurns;
                     }
                     else
                     {
                       m->sleepyCounter = Random2(10) + 10;
                     }
                   }
                   else
                   {
                     return;         // prevent resistance from triggering anything else.
                   }
                 }
    
    I'm not sure if that is what you're talking about, with regards to it not working? It may be that it's not displaying the "Resistance" eyecandy and we need to give you a visual cue here.

    - Which other spells crash the game, and under what circumstances? I know there's some dodgy stuff with polymorph, where a second polymorph spell will crash you, but I don't know of any others. (If somebody wants to clean up the Master List, that would be lovely.)

    - I believe we fixed the pocket dimension not working if you don't have the free expansion pack when we snuck the last patch out. If I'm wrong, let me know.

    - If you can send me a save game that consistently crashes on a floor change, that would be useful. Also, if you can disable your steam cloud support (instructions are rattling around the forum somewhere, but Mathieu would remember more quickly than I can) and see if your crashing problems changing floors goes away, this would also be a useful data point and one that would encourage me to just shut off the danged cloud support.

    - I don't think I've ever seen a crash when gaining a level, so that might actually be new. I can fix this if you have a save game file which does it consistently.

    - A point in my own defense: a complete list of everything we've done to Dredmor can be found here: http://www.dredmorwiki.com/wiki/Version_history and is missing the most recent changes from various patches in 2013. Most of this was also done while working on Clockwork Empires. We're not perfect, but I think that we do a good job of maintaining a $4.99 game three years after release. :)
     
  6. Kazeto

    Kazeto Member

    I vote for Steam Cloud in this case, as I don't remember any reports of it happening to people who had it disabled for DoD. Granted, I might be wrong there as my memory is a fickle mistress when it comes to such details, and the way this game interacts with Steam Cloud is weird anyway.

    I mean, seriously, why is it controlled by the value in a config file that has to be found instead of possibly being controlled by Steam itself? Is it a safeguard of some sort, or just a weird mishap? Not that I'm complaining or anything because I'm used to working with config files (yay, Minecraft), but it just makes me scratch my head in confusion and thus I am a bit curious.


    Actually, there were others commenting about it and sometimes it did count as complaining. Though from what I remember there was the general (or not so general) consensus that while annoying it wasn't a high-priority issue and thus it was put to the side for now. Though, if you happened to have some spare time and could make a quick fix to just that thing (increase the message display speed when there are enough pending messages, for example), I'm sure many people would appreciate it because it's an UI problem and those tend to be noticeable even if they aren't very serious.

    Once again, not that I am complaining (I tend to play rogue-likes cautiously enough that it's not a problem for me), but I do think that any actually visible change for the better might serve as a good way to say “hey guys, we are still aware this game exists, really”.


    Obviously, but some people are still going to be irked thanks to communication failures and other misconceptions, as well as the fact that (as I mentioned before) the decision to get into making CE instead of fixing all the bugs forever and beyond that in DoD first is bound to be seen as controversial (because people not involved in actually making games and/or other computer stuff usually don't know how much of a nightmare debugging can be, so there's that though there's also the fact that for a long time there weren't any official statements about DoD on your blog, and a simple “we haven't abandoned the game, it's on hold but [insert explanation here]” might possibly make the situation more comfortable). But ... well, hopefully you aren't getting any death threats or anything.
     
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  7. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Tell you what. I apologize. I was in a crazy mood earlier today and just went off on you Sloe. It was not your fault, and I was out of line. I am sorry. I have slept since then and I think I am in a more stable mood now than I was.

    I could edit all my posts to remove my insanity, but that would make your replies look bad. So unless you object, I will leave them in there.
     
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  8. Vitellozzo

    Vitellozzo Member

    Just put a sidebar to let the player see it entirely (or just the last few messages, like 10 or something) with the +speed of the messages and I'll always love you.
    even if you cannot manage to remember our Valentine.
     
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  9. Vitellozzo

    Vitellozzo Member

    Just a question: currently I have the [BETA] tag near my dod game in steam library. It says I'm playing using the beta version of the game.
    I should have reactivated it for some last beta patch, but now i don't know if i have to continue on BETA game or if this patch has gone out and I just need to remove the beta entirely to play the normal game.
     
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  10. DiggleBro

    DiggleBro Member

    Should we still report things in the meantime if we do not see them listed on the official bug list, rydash, or are you going to be checking the various threads and adding to them at a future date? I don't want to be a squeaky wheel, but the "You Used All the Glue On Purpose" achievement is not listed as being borked, despite how someone can use a mod or debug mode for 500+ repairs in one session and not get it. The closest mention to it is the "features" section about counter-based achievements, but this one never had a visible counter to see if it's resetting or if the game is just not incrementing anything.

    Sorry if I jumped the gun with mentioning it again and you were going to get around to updating in the future! I just would like it not to be lost in the shuffle in the hopeful future after CE's launch where some of the bugs for DoD can be revisited.
     
  11. rydash

    rydash Member

    It's okay! Thank you for reminding me. I have all the things to be added marked as unread, but CE madness has certainly taken over quite a bit of time. :p That said, it's still probably a good idea to give them threads because of my laziness.

    I will at least add that example, and honestly should ask Nicholas if he was able to solve any of these during the flight where he mentioned he might try to tune-up Dredmor...
     
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  12. Nanimonai

    Nanimonai Member

    I feel as if I stumbled upon a minor problem. I just got a new computer recently and now everytime I run DoD, I notice that all the settings (Autoloot, key rebinding and the other options available in the menu) reset themselves to default.

    This seems to be a new problem, since I never ran across it back on my old laptop.
     
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  13. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Sounds like it could be a permission issue somehow?
    You'll find the file that handles both of those in C:\Users\<Username>\Documents\Gaslamp Games\Dungeons of Dredmor\config.xml
    See if that is not read only, or try running the game as Administrator.

    You could also modify the file directly but it'd require some trial and error.
     
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  14. Nanimonai

    Nanimonai Member

    Hooray! Feels good when a problem is solved as easily as this one. Config.xml was read only. Changed it and now it works again. :)
     
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  15. jjk999

    jjk999 Member

    Mods not loading. Using steam version. Just says "Steam Workshop: Getting Subscription Details" but the mods never load. Restarted steam client as directed. Verified game cache as directed. No change.
     
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  16. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Could be an issue with the Steam Workshop traffic itself, since it's not unheard of for the site to have issues during a big Steam sale. Try a different mod or try again later.
     
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  17. 0player

    0player Member

    Hello,
    just registered here, so I apologize if this is a wrong thread. Game crashed (some sort of memory issue it seems, "memory cannot be read" error. I have a dump, I think?), Steam appeared to have synchronized with cloud. Upon reloading I get my autosave from a few minutes ago, which I'm very happy about, because my last save is from 3 floors above or so... until I notice that my inventory is gone. Now THANKFULLY everything valuable was either on me or in a pocket, but my fine collection of crafting stations and not one, not two, but SIX horadric lutefisk cubes is now gone. Now, while I realize that it may be impossible to help me heere, I ask you to look into this bug (I suspect the culprit here is Steam Cloud and save transitioning; must've got corrupted in the process), and to direct me towards some way of editing my inventory to at least get my basic stations back, as continuing playing as an Alchemist character without box and still is going to be a challenge.
     
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  18. 0player

    0player Member

    Ah, something else notable: using Monster Toss on a poor Diggle standing on a displacement glyph resulted in tearing glyph's sending and receiving function apart by 2 tiles, as well as destroying its imagery completely.I spent nearly a minute trying to understand why the heck was I teleported from an empty spot.
     
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  19. Nonary

    Nonary Member

    First of all, I'm terribly sorry if this bug has been brought up before. I just created this forum account so I could tell you.

    I managed to crash the game (version 1.1.4) by smacking an enemy that stood on stairs leading down. Now as I smacked him I think the mace skill "Dwarven Handshake" happened.

    I'll try to replicate it as soon as I can just to be sure.
     
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  20. 0player

    0player Member

    Not sure if this was here, no search in the thread on this forum, but there's a weird Z-level interaction between UI. For instance, character window appears above crafting window, while it receives keypresses as if it was below.
     
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