Lytha on 2/6/2010 at 11:45
Alright, so I launched DX1 GotY, patched.
I did the tutorial, kidnapping Private Winslow through the whole of it and ending the tutorial while still carrying him around. Then I started a new game, realistic mode. I took the crossbow, because sometimes you need to do a silent takedown. Then I opened crates and dropped my pistol to the ground.
When I arrived at the dead NSF person with the crossbow, near the UNATCO HQ, I picked him up accidentally, because I wanted to make sure that I got all stuff from his inventory. When I dropped him, I got a bright box labelled "Do Not Place" infront of me. Picking him up and dropping him again leads to the same result.
I am sure that I didn't get these boxes all these years ago when I played the game last time, and it's the same installation - so what am I doing wrong? Is it related to the kidnapping of Private Winslow? Is it related to the dropping down of the pistol perhaps?
I find this bright box somewhat bad for the immersion, up to the point of total unplayability. :(
DDL on 2/6/2010 at 14:45
The "do not place" cube is a mesh they made to assign to classes that are never seen physically in-game, but that need to exist anyway, most probably so that mappers didn't add them by mistake.
For instance, all ammo for explosives (lams, gas grenades etc) is like this.
While for a pistol you would place a pistol and also maybe some ammo, grenades are their own ammo, so you just place the weapons themselves (i.e. weapongasgrenade rather than ammogasgrenade).
Ammogasgrenade needs to exist, because that's how the whole inventory system works, but it should never be seen. Picking up another weapongasgrenade when you already have one simply destroys the one picked up and then increments your store of invisible ammogasgrenades.
Soooo...somehow you've managed to make one of these things physically exist, rather than be invisibly attached to you.
Carcasses also can give rise to this, as a picked up carcass (POVCorpse) is actually an inventory item, sort of, and dropping it should make it destroy itself and spawn in an actual carcass..but if that goes wrong somehow, it'll drop the POVcorpse's pickup equivalent, which is another testbox.
What exactly does it come up with when you highlight the box? Anything? That should give you an idea of what it is.
Failing that, enable cheats (set human bcheatsenabled true) and open the legend menu (legend), select the view actors box and enter 'actor' in the text space, then exit. This will make your game fantastically ugly and confusing (it will stick a little icon on every actor telling you what it is), but it should also tell you what the box is. Once you know, just repeat the legend process and replace 'actor' with 'none'.
Lytha on 2/6/2010 at 17:23
I noticed that the arm of JC and the legs of the dead body are missing when I picked up that corpse. It's like "frob the corpse, the box appears and JC doesn't seem to be carrying a corpse, drop the corpse, and the box disappears from the ground". Maybe the game's memory pointers still memorized that I should have still been carrying Private Winslow around?
But I'm sorry, I can't check out that box now. I started a new game after relaunching the engine and skipped the tutorial this time. No "do not place" boxes this time.
I'll just try to replicate it by doing another training and new game.
Edit:
Yes, that did it. I stole private Winslow again from the tutorial, and the first dead body did give me that box again. The box is bleeding, too. I mean with that: a blood puddle grows below it.
I can't highlight it, and while I was alt-tabbing to see what you wanted me to do in the console, the game crashed. I didn't take a save and I don't really want to do the tutorial again.
I know that you can carry bodies from one map into each other - I mean, at one point, I brought Lebedev all the way to Hong Kong. So, the game assumed that I was still carrying that brave cadet from the tutorial mission and got all confused when I picked up someone else.
Or something like that.
And it remembered this even after a relaunch of the game's engine; that save game was screwed up for ever.
=> Don't kidnap Private Winslow before starting a new game.
Interesting. :)
