Some weird bugs I've come across.

[Luthius]

Hello, all who may still come here. I know this section has been pretty dead lately, but I figured I would post anyway. First of all, congrats and thanks to dmpdesign for making this great game. It's awesome and all, but I seem to have run into a couple of bugs. (And yes, I'm playing the 1.07 version.) I'm not sure if you knew about any of these already, but just in case, I feel like I should point these things out so that you might finally manage to eradicate all of the bugs (I understand that's pretty difficult to do with SoM games, but with me running through the game and discovering some of them, I hope I'll have at least made the search a little easier for you!).

First off, Raffy in South Village will not speak to me at all. I've tried talking to him from every possible angle, but still he refuses to associate with me. He seems to be the only NPC I've encountered so far that won't respond. Also, I'm not sure if this is a glitch or not, but whenever I filled a Crystal Flask with Blue Water and used it, it permanently used up the flask. Was that supposed to happen?

This next one is a strange one. I had two Dragon Crystals in my inventory, and when I loaded up a save one morning, they were gone! I never used or sold them, as I was saving them for later, but I have no idea how long they've been missing. I remembered that I had recently obtained the Gaia Stone on that save file I loaded, but I don't know if that had anything to do with it. Also, when I go to the library, it freezes up for a minute or more, and when I finally regain control, the framerate is extremely slow, and I have to quit and restart to return the framerate to normal (though that's probably the fault of my crappy computer). Also, I can't seem to get the black skeleton with the long sword into the library. I've killed it quite a few times, and it still won't show. A couple of displays have also disappeared on me, though the only one that I'm certain has disappeared is the giant yellow scorpion.

I am not sure what is causing these things to happen, but hopefully I provided something for you to improve in the next version, if there will be one. I will keep on playing, and will mention if I come across anything else odd. You've done excellent work on this game, so I hope you can find the time to eliminate the rest of the problems someday.

[Holy_Diver]

Hello, all who may still come here. I know this section has been pretty dead lately, but I figured I would post anyway. First of all, congrats and thanks to dmpdesign for making this great game. It's awesome and all, but I seem to have run into a couple of bugs. (And yes, I'm playing the 1.07 version.) I'm not sure if you knew about any of these already, but just in case, I feel like I should point these things out so that you might finally manage to eradicate all of the bugs (I understand that's pretty difficult to do with SoM games, but with me running through the game and discovering some of them, I hope I'll have at least made the search a little easier for you!).

First off, Raffy in South Village will not speak to me at all. I've tried talking to him from every possible angle, but still he refuses to associate with me. He seems to be the only NPC I've encountered so far that won't respond (besides the ghostly king at the fountain who fades in and out; by the way, what's the deal with that guy?). Also, I'm not sure if this is a glitch or not, but whenever I filled a Crystal Flask with Blue Water and used it, it permanently used up the flask. Was that supposed to happen?

I had the same prob with Raffy in my Beta game. I think Todd said he'd (had or would) fixed that, but may not have. He added the colour appropriate flasks last second I think, so there may be bugs. Originally they were all gold wherever you drew the water from, and the red fountain was not drawable.

Unfortunately DD isn't really a finished game (whatever Todd says) ... Dragon Crystals can disappear when you die. You will respawn at the gold fountain if all goes well. Otherwise game over.

The library was cool, but totally unreliable in my (pre whatever the latest version is) game,,, so can't really comment. If one monster is your only prob that's probably a relative success

[dmpdesign]

Hello, all who may still come here. I know this section has been pretty dead lately, but I figured I would post anyway. First of all, congrats and thanks to dmpdesign for making this great game. It's awesome and all, but I seem to have run into a couple of bugs. (And yes, I'm playing the 1.07 version.) I'm not sure if you knew about any of these already, but just in case, I feel like I should point these things out so that you might finally manage to eradicate all of the bugs (I understand that's pretty difficult to do with SoM games, but with me running through the game and discovering some of them, I hope I'll have at least made the search a little easier for you!).

First off, Raffy in South Village will not speak to me at all. I've tried talking to him from every possible angle, but still he refuses to associate with me. He seems to be the only NPC I've encountered so far that won't respond. Also, I'm not sure if this is a glitch or not, but whenever I filled a Crystal Flask with Blue Water and used it, it permanently used up the flask. Was that supposed to happen?

This next one is a strange one. I had two Dragon Crystals in my inventory, and when I loaded up a save one morning, they were gone! I never used or sold them, as I was saving them for later, but I have no idea how long they've been missing. I remembered that I had recently obtained the Gaia Stone on that save file I loaded, but I don't know if that had anything to do with it. Also, when I go to the library, it freezes up for a minute or more, and when I finally regain control, the framerate is extremely slow, and I have to quit and restart to return the framerate to normal (though that's probably the fault of my crappy computer). Also, I can't seem to get the black skeleton with the long sword into the library. I've killed it quite a few times, and it still won't show. A couple of displays have also disappeared on me, though the only one that I'm certain has disappeared is the giant yellow scorpion.

I am not sure what is causing these things to happen, but hopefully I provided something for you to improve in the next version, if there will be one. I will keep on playing, and will mention if I come across anything else odd. You've done excellent work on this game, so I hope you can find the time to eliminate the rest of the problems someday.

Wow I am sorry I totally missed this post...thanks for the great review of the game and I will certainly see to fixing these bugs.  Let me be sure I understand all of them though...

Raffy not talking - Damn i thought I fixed that bug, i must have forgotten to throw the output event fiile for the fix into the last build.  I will test it once more and correct the files.

Blue water using a flask permanently - Ya that definitely should not happen...do you recall which map that was on?  Unfortunately when you have to build the use item event over and over on every map sometimes you forget the little things, so its possible I only have the mistake on one or two maps but most it works ok on.  I will fix this.

Dragon Crystals disappearing - the only event in the game that consumes a dragon crystal (besides using it from the inventory) is by dieing.  Every map has an event that checks whether or not you have a dragon crystal in your inventory, upon death it is supposed to resurrect you at the fountain if youre carrying one.  Maybe you died a couple times and they were consumed that way?  Otherwise I have no idea how it could be happening.

The library stuff - ya this one is very hard, the library itself uses a set of events that is probably 500+ lines long so there is bound to still be errors in it.  I will check the black skeleton and the yellow boss scorpion and get those fixed, if you find more please let em know, I do know its a lot better than it used to be though with over 50% disappearing in version 1 heh.  As for the slow down, the real issue is youre loading the entire game's model contents into your RAM when you walk in, so that probably is the cause of it, so yes, a better pc will help fix this problem, other than that i dont have much advice to help.

I will try to revisit the game and fix up all these bugs by february...and to Holy...yes this is a finished game regardless of what you think of it :P

Thanks again for the post Luthius, I will definitely see to getting these bugs taken care of.

[Holy_Diver]

Unfortunately it's not uncommon for unfinished games to be released onto the public. But with DD at least there is hope it will eventually have its act cleaned up overtime.

I see this is still Luthius' thread, so I guess the poster hasn't disappeared long ago per usual. I'm curious myself about your library slow down experience...

A) Whenever you enter a new map there is a loading pause, even though there is no loading screen proper. With Ex the cursor will appear/spin a la the app is busy, and it won't say "(not responding)". It would be pretty simple for Ex to add a loading distraction of some kind, but a lot of the time the load time can be very negligible / almost feels seamless, so that would disrupt those times. Still if an author wants that Ex can deliver. There will be an option for a custom "now loading" cursor soonish provided anyone would like that. A custom loading screen in many cases would be longer than the actual load time lest you risk having the screen appear to spaz out for a split second.

B) Is the framerate still slow after you leave the library? If not it's probably just that map is too much for your comp, though there are worse maps in DD. If the game stays in a bad way after you leave, it could be something pathological, though my first guess is your card couldn't keep all the library's textures in video memory and is basically having to read some of them back across the video bus every frame to keep things looking right, which is not a very real-time friendly operation. Ex could in theory mitigate that scenario a little, but you'd probably still see hick ups while turning around quickly if you were able to see across the entire length of the library. Level designs like the library are pretty atypical.

PS: Using my little evtcat program would make global events a lot easier to manage and guaranteed to be reliable, but it's never caught on. In my project I had global events with 100s of lines, so doing them by hand, was not an option!!

PPS: To not miss posts, use the "Show most recent posts to the forum." semi-daily, or better yet subscribe to the RSS feed (http://www.swordofmoonlight.com/bbs/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml)

[dmpdesign]

Thanks to Verdite, I figured out why all the things I thought I fixed arent actually fixed, including why blue/red water remove the items from your inventory permanently.

The dummy that I am, I didnt replace the event files for all the maps when I zipped up 1.0.7, so I will fix it this week and reupload it with the proper event files.

Thanks for finding the cause Ben.

[Verdite]

No problem Todd, looking forward to playing DD again.

[Holy_Diver]

I have some Ex stuff for DD. The Dark Destiny patch is still the premier patch I guess. But I don't intend to try to monkey with any of the game elements for an Ex release. I'd appreciate it if Todd took an interest in improving DD by way of Ex. But he keeps insisting he's "finished" with it and is damn adamant about leaving it as is more or less. My major concern with DD are the technical shortcomings, though the game itself I think would benefit from a little added enthusiasm which I think Todd was lacking during the final phases of development.

I think the Zero Punctuation guy makes a good point once upon a time, when he said you should focus all your enthusiasm/budget on the beginning of the game and the end of the game, and don't worry about the middle until you have the that much set in stone (kinda like building a bridge) that way if your enthusiasm/budget runs out at least it will feel psychologically less like an incomplete product. And it's always easier to pull major chunks out of the middle than to wrap things up prematurely or run out of steam along the way. I'd also add to this, don't worry about the game content itself until the gameplay is ironed out / technically sound.

[dmpdesign]

I am pleased you dislike it so much Holy.

[Luthius]

Thanks, Todd! I can visit Raffy's shop and keep Blue Waters now, and the charred skeleton and giant yellow scorpion have reappeared in the library, so it seems that all of the problems I listed have been fixed. If I run across any more bugs, I'll be sure to mention them. I appreciate you fixing these.

[Holy_Diver]

I am pleased you dislike it so much Holy.

Quite the opposite

I like it so much I wish very much that it would be finished up. You can tell when you walk into an unfinished house whether its finished or not. Sure you can live in it, sure the owner / occupant can be done with it. But it's not finished until the last finishing touches are applied.

I call it unfinished purely on technical grounds, and also because you've confided in me that it was never really finished, even if it's now "finished, and that is that".

On the basis of presentation alone, like I'm sure I've said before, I'd still have to classify it as a project versus a finished game. Like if I was the admin of a website that had a list of games and a list of projects (which I will most likely be at some point) DD as is would not make it into the game list. It would not even pass the game industry definition of finished, and we know just how many unfinished commercial games make it onto store shelves. Eg., reviewer A says... the game just doesn't feel finished.

Technical disclaimer per request: This is my personal opinion / not misinformation.