Generals not matching their Bios

[Klahn]

I restarted a bunch of times without closing out the game when it happened to me. (I continually restarted with "no starting legendary units" turned off until it didn't give me any duplicates of legendary units to start the game with.) I can try your suggestion in a little while and see what happens after dinner.

[Gil R.]

Well, that might be it. We're not going to be able to fix this in time for the patch, since it would take a few days to pin it down. It would be helpful if you would pay attention to how you start games and whether it happens to games started just after loading the game.

Regarding those double-LU's, Eric thinks he fixed it this afternoon.

[Gray_Lensman]

ORIGINAL: Ryvan

I restarted a bunch of times without closing out the game when it happened to me. (I continually restarted with "no starting legendary units" turned off until it didn't give me any duplicates of legendary units to start the game with.) I can try your suggestion in a little while and see what happens after dinner.

I noted in another thread that restarting without closing out the game has a rather large internal memory leak, see:

end reply of: tm.asp?m=1446232

This may possibly be what caused his BIOs to get scrambled. On a positive note, if you close out and restart the program, which frees up the system resources, it generally loads much faster than the first time around.

[Klahn]

I did some experimenting and can't seem to reproduce the bug. I'll keep my eyes peeled if I find it again though.

[Gil R.]

Thanks. Let's keep watching this. In fact, it happened to me for the first time the other night, but that was when I kept restarting games, so maybe that was the reason.

[MarcusCSA]

Happened to me too, some rather sharp looking CSA general (Davis... something like that) guy got some Hungarian Union general's bio... nothing game breaking, but still quite annoying, he showed up after a few turns and was the first one with a wrong bio, no manic resetting on my games, so that might not be what you're looking for.

[Gil R.]

Were you also playing a July scenario? And also using any of the randomized options that relate to generals?

It looks like I'm going to have to spend some time pinning this down, since if it's not related to starting/loading games repeatedly it might be linked to one of the options.

[Gil R.]

So here's a question -- has anyone ever noticed a general starting with the right bio and then having it replaced with another, or is it always that generals come into the game with the wrong bio?

[Diggypiggy]

I noticed it on the first turn when I was trying to create the problem, But I was only able to do it once and I was restarting the game without exiting. I really thought we might have been on to something but I guess MarcusCSA has proven us wrong.

[MarcusCSA]

ORIGINAL: Gil R.

So here's a question -- has anyone ever noticed a general starting with the right bio and then having it replaced with another, or is it always that generals come into the game with the wrong bio?

To clarify, the general with the wrong bio starts off with the wrong bio straight away (when generated a few turns into the game), but the two (now) guys that have had the wrong bio were generated later in the game. Correction on my above post, my 'wrong bio guy' isn't named Davis, but Clarke (and I can't remember who nr. 2 is, can look it up if really needed). Unit bio's seem to work fine.

This is in the Summer 1861 (lack of forts, help!) scenario. I played a full November campaign on the latest patch, and never had this problem.

No need to panic though, the Union has already been crushed and here come the Ironclads!

Did I mention that I really love this game and want to marry it? Keep up the good work guys!

[Gil R.]

Yikes! You're already talking marriage? At most, you've known this game for a little over five months. Don't you think you should slow things down a bit?

Thanks for the further info on generals. It would be helpful for people to let me know both the names of generals and whose bios they got, since maybe there's a pattern, such as Gen. X always getting the bio of Gen. X+20. Info like that could help.

The Legendary Units aren't relevant to this issue. Different file, different code, etc.

[Diggypiggy]

The two time I noticed it were both early in the game and I remember the Generals were giving the same wrong bio in both games. Check out my saved game I submitted near the beginning of this thread.

[ericbabe]

I actually don't see any incorrect bios when loading Diggypiggy's save file.  Further digging into the internals of the data structures shows that all biographies seem to be in the right spot.  Did you load the save file from the main menu or from within the game?

[ericbabe]

On further inspection, although I still am not able to duplicate this issue with this save file, I do see something that might be causing this problem in some situations.  I'll try a fix for this and we'll see whether it helps in the next build.

[Klahn]

Out of curiosity, I've also posted my save file earlier in this thread. Did you see it in mine?

[Gray_Lensman]

ORIGINAL: Ryvan

Out of curiosity, I've also posted my save file earlier in this thread. Did you see it in mine?

Ryvan, I just downloaded and loaded up your save file, but could not find any incorrect "Bios". If you can, tell me which ones you had that were switched/incorrect.

[Gray_Lensman]

OK, I loaded Ryvan's save file, and even though he observes "all" of his Bios are incorrect, none of them are incorrect when I load his save file, which leads me to believe even more that this has something to do with his specific machine resources getting "buggy", instead of an error within the game, possibly caused by running out of memory when restarting within the game. Even the latest test beta still has this memory resource "growth" when restarting the scenario without exiting the game.
 
I could not duplicate these incorrect Bios specifically, using Ryvan's file, even by forcing my memory over the top so to speak,with internal reloads, so my conclusion for now is that when you reach the top of memory while running this program, it tends to cause "random" buggy behavior, which is to be expected in that situation, virual memory is a tricky thing when you get into that realm. It may help for Eric to find and get rid of the memory growth problem to mitigate the situation.
 
It might be asked of anyone who experiences incorrect Bios, to report the status of their game memory at the time, if they know how. It can be easily checked (in XP)&nbsp;by windowing out of the game, then <ctrl> <alt> <Del>. The windows task manager box that pops up will have some tabs across the top, and "performance" is the one to look at here. Check the lower green box labeled "PF Usage". If the number within, is near the top end of your known internal RAM memory capacity, then you have either reloaded the game internally, several times, or if not, in the case of 1Gb machines, you just need more RAM memory to start with.
&nbsp;
FoF straight off, loads up in my machines, (I have 2, one a laptop), at around 1.04 Gb, before even starting to play. After reloading within the game several times, I find that I am approaching my laptop's top end of 1.5 Gb, and I too observe strange things happening. This by the way, happens with most games, and is a signal to buy some more memory resources when feasible. I would not be surprised at all to hear that most of the problems with incorrect Bios are from players with 1 Gb Ram, as they will hit their "top" end very quickly.

[Klahn]

I have the incorrect bios as soon as i load the game from the file I posted here. My machine has 2GB of RAM. When I start a new game, the bios are correct. Quite strange....

[Gil R.]

In one of the sets of files I loaded -- I forget whose -- I did indeed see the wrong bios.

Eric thinks he may have fixed this, and since any day now he'll be posting a third public beta patch for a quick (one or two days) public testing we should see if that's indeed the case.

[Klahn]

Just for the record because it was asked earlier, here are the generals I have with bios (on the left) and whose bio it links to (on the right)

Banks = Hill
Thomas = Polignac
Wright = Shelley
Wade = Robertson
Sherman = Taliaferro
Butler = Shelby
Meade = Chesnut