Bug report thread

[Bryce]

[edit] I am going to post any bugs I find in this thread. I encourage others to do likewise. If it is a bug that requires a workaround, please mention the workaround. (As opposed to things that are just minor annoyances or malfunctions.)

 

I'm sorry I didn't think to start recording the bugs I found sooner. Frankly I didn't expect there to be so many but it's okay.

 

STATUS

MY CURRENT LOCATION: Muck

PARTY: Singleton Slith DT+NM, lv 33

 

Bug 1: Full inventories

 

Many quests do not check for totally full inventory when they give a material reward, and instead of the reward falling to the ground, it disappears entirely. This is very noticable as a singleton, where inventory slots are often totally full coming back from a mission with salable loot.

 

A specific example is the ogre infestation quest in Tranquility.

[Randomizer]

It happened to me with the Rat Lord's rats in New Harston. It's why you need to sell before rewards.

[Bryce]

I certainly try to remember to do so, but it's still a bug.

[Bryce]

Malachite's (maintainer in tranquility) gender is inconsistently reflected in pronouns (sometimes "she" sometimes "his")

[Bryce]

Hesper (or whatever the name of the Anama fungus tender girl is) died to chitrachs. Fungi attacked and killed me. If this is desired behavior, or if i triggered it by using icy rain on the chitrachs, maybe there should be a message of some kind?

 

edit: i thought spidweb regularly read these boards?

[Lilith]

If you haven't already done so, emailing Spiderweb Software about these issues will mean they're more likely to be read by someone who can do something about them.

[Bryce]

Leaving Moref the Shade's lair after finishing the stone servant part (that is, after he manifests to attack you) results in the "driven from its lair" thing activating, leaving the amusing situation of 2 shades, one hostile and one not, followed by the stone servant thing all starting over again if you come back. (The original Moref continues to exist in addition to the one "inhabiting the stone servants.") If I had an awesome munchkin party I would try farming Moref for XP.

 

Note that you can easily go back to town and heal after doing the stone servant stage of the Moref battle, then come back to finish him off, because it is quite easy to lure Moref out of his lair for the battle without triggering the stone servant part from the other Moref. (All the killing Moref consequences are linked to killing the final Moref shade, so even though the battle is nominally reset after leaving the lair, final-Moref is still there so it doesn't matter unless you walk far enough into the lair to set off the stone servant part from the new motionless shade.)

 

Edit: not worth it to farm him

[Bryce]

The wyrmkin infestation quest in tranquility also lacks a check for totally full inventory (the shield silently vanishes.)

[Bryce]

Approaching Solberg's secret retreat, message describing the sentinels standing guard appeared after the battle with them (they rushed down to attack). A similar problem also occurs in the Fang Clan test and numerous other places where the player starts with an attack from long range. Not really a big deal though.

 

(Edit: I understand the message occuring after the battle begins, this is happening after it ends. (I'm guessing that the trigger is "when player is past this point" rather than "when player is past this point OR when golem takes damage.")

[Randomizer]

Most of the late appearing messages are tied to standing in a certain spot or your attacks occur before the dexterity of the opponent. These are in most of the games.

[Bryce]

I'm going to start organizing these by location. This post is for anything I find in Anama lands. That way it won't be so many individual posts.

 

Bugs:

* Farmer Gillette quest: Reward disappears when completing with full inventory. Very nasty because if your inventory has a purging crystal slot, etc, you could end up loosing the knowledge crystal WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING IT. (That is, thinking that you got the complete reward.)

 

* Transt the Anama priest you encounter after leaving Anama lands is refered to as Micklebur in the text. (Which is doubly problematic Micklebur is dead.)

 

Annoyances / Possible Problems:

* The Chitrach husk looks the same as a broken bit of husk. This is annoying since you have to open your inventory to see the name of an item.

 

* The Chitrach claw is too hard to see on the ground. What happened to the orange one? (Of course, the orange one would be slightly hard to see on the green hive ground...)

 

* The Mindwarp Chitrach is very dumb strategy-wise, if it has three creatures next to it it will never do a damaging attack. (In my case, 2 summoned rats plus a rabid rat that joined me). So it pretty much got gnawed to death by rats and pecked at with arrows. Tedious but totally safe. It only ever attacked when one of the rats died to its riposte and there were only 2 next to it.

 

*(With Gladwell's geas and not going the sneaky route) Micklebur/Transt seems to have no knowledge of the fact that his entire city and the nearby peasants were wiped out ("burninated," if you will) by an amoral lizard man who discovered that the bodies of the Anama are made of XP.

 

Comments:

* I like the Chitrach larvae in the hive. Nice touch.

[The Raman]

Here's a minor bug (that appears to be inconsequential) in Solberg's lands, during the "Endurance Test" in the SE quadrant (minor spoiler):

 

You can simply pass this test by running away into Solberg's Tower. (Three of my four party members died in the process; one made it to the Tower alive). After a few turns, potentially when the test is over, a dialogue starts.

 

I'm guessing it should be the servant telling you that the test is over. However, since I had moved to another area (the tower), I got into a dialogue with what seemed like Solberg. Very confusing.

 

The quest still registered as completet, and I got my reward, so no big deal.

[Duskwolf]

Yikes. I wonder what happens if you run into an area without dialogue, like the one directly to the west ("South Barrier").

[Bryce]

Area: Highground / Muck etc

 

Bugs

* The "Yet Another Shade" quest reported an error in the console when I completed it. The error was: "z75Thighgdlg.txt Procedure call error, line 1157" (Looking at that line, I'm guessing this is the part that dispels his magic barrier, but I had already dispelled it.)

After that, I can't talk to ANYONE in highground either, getting a message saying "Talking Error: Dialogue Script broken or absent." So pretty much this breaks Highground until you leave and come back.

 

I hope I don't sound overly critical, but perhaps your scripting system should be a little more robust in general? Wouldn't it be logical to have a procedure that kills an object if it is there and doesn't do anything otherwise? Likewise for the quests that give items, why not make a nice high-level function that gives an item and includes code to make it fall on the ground if no one has room for it?

 

* Incantor Temple's Garden: jewled wand reward disappears with full inventory.

 

Annoyances

Stunning creatures are absurdly hard to deal with for singletons. Perhaps you shouldn't be able to be stunned down to 0 AP for more than 1 consecutive turn?

[Bryce]

Area: Vahnatai city / lands

 

Bug: The crystal soul has the "I need a chip off you" dialog item before you get the geas message related to it. It is possible to encounter this by heading south from Muck through the barrier after stealing the radiant prism but before returning it to Gladwell.

 

Bug: leaving Vahnatai lands, when ruth attacks you, if you run back to the Vahnatai they are hostile.

If this is intentional there should be a message, but it really doesn't make any sense.

[Bryce]

Vahnatai lands:

 

I got the geas warning when leaving Vahnatai lands, but I made it to Ruth's ambush without getting the geas curse. Does it only take effect after that?

 

Edit: yes, it does. So this is only a minor problem.

 

Again, the state I'm in is: having taken the radiant prism, but not given it to Gladwell.

[Randomizer]

Quote:

Originally written by Bryce:
Example, the battle with the big giant who gets upset at your intrusion into his quarters in the spire: he will chase you out to the lift platform area if you go there, you can get on a lift and go down, then peck him to death with arrows with no risk to yourself - a strong solution.

I think this is a bug. The giant is supposed to stop attacking if you leave his room. The idea was for weak parties to run in, get the lift part, and flee before taking too much damage. Never tried it myself.

[Bryce]

General Bugs

The frozen worm's ranged attack does fire damage.

I really doubt that is intentional considering there is a cold damage type that would be appropriate.

[DarkTreader]

Couple of very minor annoyances:

 

The job board in New Harston has a job that the mayor gives to you for killing 20 rats. Well... the job is still up there if you kill the rat king first, and well, I already killed plenty of rats. Now I have the job and the mayor won't give me a reward. Either I should get the reward or I shouldn't have been able to get the job.

 

I was given a job to check out the Bargha defenses. I didn't do it until Cienna moved to the portal fortress. Now she won't acknowledge the finishing of the quest even if I have checked out the defenses.

[Randomizer]

Quote:

Originally written by Adrian:
I was given a job to check out the Bargha defenses. I didn't do it until Cienna moved to the portal fortress. Now she won't acknowledge the finishing of the quest even if I have checked out the defenses.

That bug was fixed back during beta testing. Are you sure you went to both points to check Bargha's defenses?

[DarkTreader]

Quote:

Originally written by Randomizer:

Quote:

Originally written by Adrian:
I was given a job to check out the Bargha defenses. I didn't do it until Cienna moved to the portal fortress. Now she won't acknowledge the finishing of the quest even if I have checked out the defenses.

That bug was fixed back during beta testing. Are you sure you went to both points to check Bargha's defenses?

Apparently it was, my bad. Didn't know there were two points to check. I shouldn't read so fast

[Bryce]

Highground, captain Glavine, Giant Raiders - ruby chain reward disappears with full inventory

[Slariton]

The full inventory bug is one bug. Fixing it would involve changing the way give item calls are handled, not changing every individual encounter where an item is given. So listing them is not really necessary.

[Bryce]

That would certainly be the right way to fix it in our shared opinion, but currently some quests have the bug and some don't, that is, it is handled correctly in some cases and incorrectly in others.

 

At a minimum, this means that there is some way to fix it without changing how giving items is handled, which Jeff might choose to do. Not that I think it would be a good idea, but it's not my call.

[Slariton]

That's because there are two different calls used to give items to the party. Try looking at the scripts.

[Bryce]

Darkside loyalist encounter at the gate at the end of the dark river - the Dervish there is referred to as Tholmen even though Tholmen is dead and other text in the encounter suggests he is a different one. (Similar to the Anama dude bug mentioned earlier.)

[Randomizer]

I thought that Jeff had fixed this bug. Tholmen is supposed to be there if he hasn't been killed.

[Lilith]

Nope, the bug's not fixed. If you kill Tholmen, a different dervish shows up, but he uses Tholmen's dialogue, the introductory paragraphs of which refer to him as Dervish Tholmen.

[Bryce]

Lich Vesna: lich vesna will pursue the player to attack in melee and can end up occupying the doorway to one of the side rooms of her lair. If you then beat her down while she is standing there, she becomes peaceful of course. However, since she doesn't move after becoming peaceful, you can end up trapped in there with no recourse but to use backtostart or else kill her, forfeiting your quest reward. Perhaps she should go back to her throne/chair after becoming peaceful?

[Lilith]

Quote:

Originally written by Bryce:
Lich Vesna: lich vesna will pursue the player to attack in melee and can end up occupying the doorway to one of the side rooms of her lair. If you then beat her down while she is standing there, she becomes peaceful of course. However, since she doesn't move after becoming peaceful, you can end up trapped in there with no recourse but to use backtostart or else kill her, forfeiting your quest reward. Perhaps she should go back to her throne/chair after becoming peaceful?

Amusingly enough, there's a second possible bug related to this: if you kill Vesna after she surrenders and agrees to pay tribute, it still counts as having successfully exacted tribute from her.

[Bryce]

Darkside lands -

I'm not sure how exactly this was triggered, but the loyalists are fighting amongst themselves. Some of the warriors that spawned on approaching the castle attacked (unsuccessfully) the camp with the cultist near the lancing fungi. The friendly loyalists think I am on their side and tell me to go see Dorikas, but I'm pretty sure I never told them I wanted to join, and even if I did they shouldn't be fighting each other.

 

Also I killed Dorikas and the game didn't end. Maybe I missed something? I went back to Blackchasm outpost and General Redmark wasn't there to report to either, if that was what I was supposed to do. I killed him somewhat unconventionally, by luring him outside the fort and then repeatedly whacking him with arcane blow (burnt a lot of energy elixirs, but this is what I was saving them for) - apparently he couldn't pathfind his way back and he just stood there attempting to freeze me. (Which usually was not successful.) Anyhow he died and I left via the pylon. Nothing has happened yet... what did I miss?

 

Edit: walking into the fort triggered the ending. Heh.

[Fael]

Your method of killing him may have been the problem. Since the order in which you do Dorikas's is highly variable, the game doesn't end with you killing him, since it's possible that you could do that and still have most of the fortress left unexplored. The trigger for the end of the game is to kill him and then exit the fortress. Since you lured him outside to die, you missed that trigger. Try going into the fortress and then exiting and see if that ends the game. Otherwise, you may have to revert to an earlier save and kill him inside.

[*Milu*]

Does the slith/nephil experience penalty exist?

 

It doesn't show in the total exp penalty that's shown in the Statistics window and it doesn't seem to affect the speed of leveling up unless I counted wrong.

[Lilith]

Quote:

Originally written by *Milu*:
Does the slith/nephil experience penalty exist?

It doesn't show in the total exp penalty that's shown in the Statistics window and it doesn't seem to affect the speed of leveling up unless I counted wrong.

The speed of levelling up is a bit of a funny thing. Characters who strike the final blow on a monster get a bonus to experience, so it's possible that your Nephil or Slith character is killing slightly more things than your other characters, balancing out the experience penalty. Of course, it's also possible that you're right and Jeff forgot to put the penalty in.

[Ephesos]

So I stumbled upon something that should count as a bug... I know it's been brought up before that you can get 'stuck' in the tunnels under the Drake Pillars if the rat lift goes down. And while usually you can open the gates leading back to other places' basements, I hit upon a problem when I tried taking my two-pc party through to kill Lysstak. My characters' combined strength wasn't enough to open any of the gates, save the one below the Three Tunnels mine (which was lovely, because it took me back to a sealed room that can only be opened from outside).

[Slariton]

Quote:

Originally written by Thuryl:
Characters who strike the final blow on a monster get a bonus to experience

Are you absolutely sure about this? I know this was the case in Exile, and for all I know in Avernum 1-3, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist in A4 or A5. There does appear to be significant random variation in the experience awarded to each party member, but as far as I can tell it is completely random and balances well over time.

[Fael]

Quote:

Originally written by Eluctable:

Quote:

Originally written by Thuryl:
Characters who strike the final blow on a monster get a bonus to experience

Are you absolutely sure about this? I know this was the case in Exile, and for all I know in Avernum 1-3, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist in A4 or A5. There does appear to be significant random variation in the experience awarded to each party member, but as far as I can tell it is completely random and balances well over time.

I'm not convinced, either. When I was trying my all warrior party, I had a pair of Nephil archers and they both had the exact same XP total through about tenth level. What finally caused them to separate was when one of them died and didn't get any XP for the combat that killed him.

[Lilith]

Quote:

Originally written by Fael:
I'm not convinced, either. When I was trying my all warrior party, I had a pair of Nephil archers and they both had the exact same XP total through about tenth level. What finally caused them to separate was when one of them died and didn't get any XP for the combat that killed him.

Weird. I always reloaded if my characters died, but characters with the same experience penalty still ended up with different experience totals. And I definitely noticed that my priests pulled ahead of the rest of the party in experience soon after they got Divine Retribution, while my mage caught back up once he got Fireblast and Arcane Blow. Similarly, my fighter, who didn't get many kills after the early stages of the game, was consistently about a level behind everyone else despite having the same experience penalty (although he was a Slith and everyone else was a Nephil, so this could also just be evidence that the racial experience penalties exist and are hidden).

The real clincher, though, is that I had two nearly identical Nephil archer-priests, but because of the strategy I was using, one of them was getting nearly all the kills for a whole area early on in the game. That one ended up about 200 XP in front of the other by the end of the area.

Maybe it was just random and I'm imagining things, but I'm convinced that although there's not as big an effect as there was in the Exile games, it still exists.

[Slariton]

Hmm. Time for an empirical test, or preferably two (one for A4 and for A5). I don't have any time at the moment, maybe later this week...

[*Milu*]

Quote:

Originally written by Fael:

I'm not convinced, either. When I was trying my all warrior party, I had a pair of Nephil archers and they both had the exact same XP total through about tenth level. What finally caused them to separate was when one of them died and didn't get any XP for the combat that killed him.

The same thing has happened to me.

EDIT: Well, at least I seem to have counted wrong. My human had -45 % xp penalty (in the Abilities screen), two nephils (nephilim?) -27 % each, and the Slith -23 %. The human is level 25, the slith level 26 and the nephil party members are level 27.

It seems to match the experience penalties for Nephil (10%) and Slith (20%).

Anyway, the race experience penalty is only mentioned in the Create New Party screen, though it should be in the Abilities window also.

[Spidweb]

Just as a general note, the best thing to do with a bug report is E-mail me. Saved games, screenshots, and so on are very useful. I notice threads like this sometimes, but not often.

 

The quest item disappearing problem will be fixed in the v1.0.2 update, out sometime this month.

 

I'm looking into the other issues in this thread.

 

- Jeff Vogel

[Fael]

Quote:

Originally written by Eluctable:
Hmm. Time for an empirical test, or preferably two (one for A4 and for A5). I don't have any time at the moment, maybe later this week...

Okay, I created a party of identical characters and ran them through the first couple combats in A5. Their XP totals did indeed diverge slightly, but it definitely wasn't based on who got the killing blow. It may, however, have been related to the number of points of damage done by each character.

[Slariton]

Interesting. I did the following test: four identical characters (Human Soldier defaults, no traits) fought the first four skeletons in the game. Each character received between 144 and 156 experience, inclusive, in every trial.

 

For the first set of trials PC #1 did all the fighting (and defending) and the others stood back. PC #1 got an average of 151 experience (range: 148-156) and the others got an average of 147.6 (range: 144-154).

 

For the second set of trials each PC stood by a crate and did all the fighting (and defending) for one skeleton. For these trials the average experience earned per PC was 149 (range: 144-152).

 

This does seem to suggest that, overall, the fighter (if not the killer) gets a very tiny bonus. In individual cases he may get less XP: this was actually true with comparison to one other PC in 50% of the first set of trials. However, taking all three other PCs into account, the killer got more than a passive PC 66% of the time, the same amount 17% of the time and less 17% of the time.

 

Conclusion: there is some kind of bonus, but it is very tiny, possibly tinier than the random factors, and certainly tinier than the adjustment made for your experience level. Therefore, in the long run, it is practically irrelevant.