Win BoA and Editor

[mrb]

Below are 2 types of problems I am encountering:

 

1. I used to get this error message often:

"Error:File corruption caused too-high skill. Skill being reset to 0. Can correct it manually with editor."

 

The 'too-high' skills it refers to are mainly the resistances, all derived from the main stats. There was also a problem with the Item Lore <derived>, but lowering the Arcane Lore skill eliminated that.

 

I have reduced the likely stats <intelligence, mage, priest, magery, resistance etc> and have been able to eliminate most of these messages.

 

The question is, why does this occur? If the levels of skills cannot be handled by the game, then why allow someone to change them? And why does the savefile become corrupted as a result of 'too-high' skills?

 

BTW, I have seen the similar post in this forum, but the question has not been addressed by the developers yet.

 

2. Even more serious, for me, are frequent 'hangs' <requiring a complete forced reboot>, and the causes of these are not evident yet. They occur when just walking around, when opening/unlocking doors (whether locked, unlocked or previously unlocked) etc. They are not consistent, in other words, and I cannot be sure of experiencing a 'hang' at any given point. It does seem that the game engine is somewhat 'overloaded' at certain points, given to longish pauses <where everything is frozen for that period>. I don't have any answers to this, but I'd like to have some possible solutions.

 

Thus far, I have limited my 'tweaking' of scripts to those in the scenarios, and they are usually limited also to increasing a single value, for instance:

//from za-khazi run scenario

begindefineitem 450; // town 10

import = 36;

it_full_name = "Silk-Woven Chain Mail";

it_protection = 24;

it_bonus = 2;

it_encumbrance = 0;

it_value = 1000;

it_magic = 1;

it_icon_adjust = 1;

 

where the 'tweak' is just an increase in the it_protection value.

 

Without accurate guidelines/limits for each of these values, how are we supposed to successfully experiment and eventually contribute by writing scenarios? Is the game engine unable to 'cap' these values to a limit that it can deal with?

 

I find this makes a less than robust environment, as it doesn't take too many occurences of those errors to make you lose confidence and therefore also interest.

 

I have many years experience writing code, scripts and scenarios/modules for various game engines, and I would not even bother to write this up unless I felt that there are issues here worthy of attention by the game developers. I hope There will be some meaningful feedback.

 

Regards,

 

mrb

[Lilith]

I doubt that your modifications to corescendata are the cause of the problems you describe, unless your text editor is doing something subtly bad. It sounds like BoA just doesn't like your computer.

[Solymr]

I can't say I've had BoA hang on me, but I have had the "too-high" skill problem you've had. I was told that it was a result of that characters skills being too high for their level or something along those lines. I'm guessing its jsut a BoA Win problem since I haven't heard of any mac users having such a thing occur, don't quote on me that though.

 

It does raise the question of how something like this got past the beta testing though, I would have assumed one of the testers would try out a mex stat/skill party, but I guess it didn't happen.

[Kelandon]

I (a Mac user who has not touched the corescendata files) also experience error 1, although it only occurs in one instance: a character I ran through the HLPM on "god" setting and then used the Character Editor to max out his stats.

 

It is kind of annoying, but I deserve it for having done something as ridiculous as that. Still, the engine seems less than robust without STATED maximum values for things. My first guesses for those "god" items were way off, and I had some pretty bizarre numbers coming up. Has anyone else noticed that if you do more than 1000 damage, BoA only displays the last three digits of the amount of damage that you did?

 

Meh, these were things that I found bothersome, but as they didn't interfere with any sort of normal gameplay (I was using this character for debugging), I didn't feel the need to mention it. Now that it's come up, though, yeah, I've seen these things too.

[Solymr]

Yeah, I've had the same thing with a level 250 character now, so I'm sure its not so much level based. Just as long as your resistances are below 200 you should be fine. You'll pretty much only see it if you use the character editor so for non-cheaters its not a problem, but I can see how people wanting a god like party to test scenarios with would be rather annoyed.

 

And yeah, I only get the last three digits of dmg myself. After getting your very nice god items, Kelandon, I killed a monster in what only seemed to be 1 damage

[mrb]

Regarding max skills/levels:

 

I have used the editor to create a max skills level player, but I quickly gave that up because of the inability of the game to deal with it. Resistances need to be quite low before the game decides they are too much to deal with - I don't have an exact figure yet, but around 150 already causes problems <the file corruption error>. The other derived skill <Item Lore> must be about 120 or less.

 

I would still like to hear from the developer(s), why allow high levels if the game cannot handle them? It's not as if we are hacking the save files, we're just using the built-in tools.

 

Regarding corescendata2.txt:

 

After completely uninstalling and reinstalling all thse files, and then leaving the corescendata files alone, I haven't had the 'hang' again, so there must be a relationship. Since my debugger doesn't work well with BoA, and of course we don't have the source code, I can't tell much more about the problem.

 

mrb

[Solymr]

It might be level related in the fact that I can get resistances up to 200 with no trouble and the same for item lore.

 

If I can be bothered I'll try with different levels to see if that makes a difference, as I've stated before the above limit of 200 comes with a character at level 250, human, no traits.