Balboa on 11/5/2020 at 19:44
OK, I am throwing up my hands, and asking the Dromed Brain Trust for help.
In my most recent mission (yeah, that one) there were a few minor bugs (all now fixed , BTW), but some annoying patrol quirks that I could never pin down. Playtesters reported it, sometimes. I never saw it. deadline was approaching. Yada yada.
Anyway, I was finally able to reproduce the quirky patrol problems (and after I had fixed everything else - really).
Normal mission
Start the mission, Easy difficulty (i.e., Garrett mission, if you're keeping track).
No problems.
Everything goes to hell mission
Start the mission, Easy difficulty. ...
Quicksave. Reload.
No problems.
Quicksave. Reload.
Now, AI are reteleporting, ignoring their patrol paths and wandering about, dogs and cats living together... You get the idea.
So, I am not expecting that this kind of bug is covered in the Dromed 101 tutorial (although, if it is, I'll just go back to Scrabble, even though my wife cheats). What I am interested in, is how to debug this and prevent it from happening again. :erm:
Balboa on 12/5/2020 at 13:17
A bit more information:
- There seems to be no difference between a Quicksave and a normal Save. Both can produce the problem.
- Any Save can potentially produce the problem. The second, the third, the eighth - it seems random.
- It can happen if no conversations are active.
- It can happen if only one AI is patrolling.
- The AI can sometimes recover after a subsequent save and load.
Balboa on 12/5/2020 at 15:12
The AI are teleported from air, then the M-DoesPatrol metaprop is added, so that should be good. (but you never know)
The curious thing is that when the problem occurs and you reload the save
1. the AI reappears at the teleport point, and begins a normal patrol
or
2. the AI reappears at the teleport point, and begins a brain dead patrol
or
3. other AI swap patrol paths, and stop when they get to a door that they don't have a key for.
I believe I've ruled out having too many AI patrolling, or having too many never-efficient AI. Going to experiment with no teleporting next
Balboa on 12/5/2020 at 16:10
Hmm... teleporting from solid is no better than from air. Still buggy.
But, NOT teleporting seems to have done the trick on a small scale (or at least I'm back to not-reproducible). Now to figure out how to retrofit. :eww:
vfig on 12/5/2020 at 16:20
This sounds to me like your AI is sometimes just picking the wrong patrol point after the teleport. If this is indeed the case, you can explicitly create an AICurrentPatrol link after the teleport, but before adding the metaprop. (Note that TrapTeleporter will break AICurrentPatrol links when it does its thing, although Object.Teleport in scripts will not.)
Balboa on 12/5/2020 at 16:31
True, but that doesn't explain why a reload would cause an AI to re-teleport. The conversation that frobs the button that does the teleports deletes its starting link as a first step, so it should not be triggered a second time, right?
nicked on 12/5/2020 at 17:19
I've no idea what's gone wrong, but have you tried loading the offending save in Dromed and checking the state of all relevant triggers, traps etc. Also worth generating a report from the save and running a compare to the base mission report. NVSpy is also pretty handy for debug.
Balboa on 12/5/2020 at 17:26
I love NVSpy, but it doesn't help me here, since I, er, haven't figured out how to load a save into Dromed. :confused:
john9818a on 12/5/2020 at 18:05
It might also help to delete the conversation marker at the kast step.
I have noticed that sometimes AI will just stand around if they were in a conversation and the conversation got interrupted. The archer in First City Bank in the convo with the other guard about working overnight will sometimes get stuck and won't do anything unless he sees the player attack him or he is informed by another AI.
