Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Enemy post]

I've been trying to update Jawa Fortress, and I've come across unusual behavior at the far end of the caste system. Partially, I wanted to ask for help, but I also wanted to share this just because of how weird it is.

I don't intend to brag, but I need to give some context. There are about 400 castes in the "megaraces" of Jedi, Sith, Aliens, Pirates, and Rebels. These are used to simulate the various aliens in Star Wars. Each is stored in a separate creature file, about 1.4MB long.  My unreleased update increases the caste count to roughly 450, counting males and females. Also, I'm working on a 32-bit computer, if that matters.

So, for the actual bug. My current goal was to add castes to represent all the aliens from both Clone Wars series and Rebels. I made them, but then I tried actually playing them. Jedi gain much of their combat skill from having natural Adept skills in dodge, sword, throw, and discipline. I spawned a Karkarodon Jedi and tried to use it in the arena. I then found out as my human opponent was painting the walls with my blood that castes below a certain point in the creature file don't have their natural skills.

With some process of elimination, I found that the bug started with the Lurmen caste. I took out Lurmen to see if they were the cause of the bug. After they were removed, some castes after them regained their proper skills, but Karkarodons still weren't working. I couldn't find anything wrong with the Lurmens, so I put them back in the same place without changing anything.

Somehow, the Lurmens were now fixed.

I then kept working down the list to see which castes lacked their skills. I noticed that the Jango Jumpers and Vonomi both had broken names, but fixing that didn't solve anything. I found that Bivall were the lowest working caste on the list. Putting lower castes in their place would fix the lower caste, but break Bivall. Erasing all castes but the broken ones would make all broken castes work.

Note that skills are the only things not transferring to the lowest castes. Interactions and materials are working fine. So, I assumed that it probably had something to do with the length of the list. I tried giving the skills to only males to see if cutting the number of castes involved in half would solve the problem. It did not.

Around this point, I created creature variations that could assign the Jedi skills with one tag instead of several. Not sure if that's relevant. I tried assigning the Jedi skills to only Moogans, because they were the caste directly below Bivall. This didn't seem to affect them. At least, that's what my notes say. I don't remember doing that. I then tried it again later, and it did work. Moogans had the skills, but nobody else did.

I then tried assigning the JEDISKILLS variation to all the male castes, and an identical in all but name JEDISKILLS2 variation to all the females. Using this method, Moogans and Vonomi worked, but Karkarodons were still broken. I forgot to test Phindians, which come between Vonomi and Karkarodons.

I then tried assigning JEDISKILLS1 to all pre-Moogan castes, and JEDISKILLS2 to Moogans and lower. While this didn't fix the Karkarodons and lower, I decided to go look at the Sith versions.

Apparently, the Sith were just as "fixed" as the Jedi despite not being changed from when I started, aside from the fixes to the Vonomi and Jango Jumper names.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on here?

Here's the download link to the unfinished version of the update, if anyone wants to look at it.