Bug with Generals 1.16b Coming Fury

[Scotters1]

It appears that the fix for the biographies has caused most of the Northern generals to disappear! (UFO abductions?) In both Coming Fury scenarios I only had two Northern Generals to start with. McDowell, McClellan, and all the Western generals were gone. I forgot to check the South.

[Scotters1]

After further investigation, it appears that in both of the Coming Fury scenarios with the "More generals" option selected, the North starts with only 3 generals: Banks, Butler, and a random third one. The South has no generals. However, when "more generals" is not selected, the North has only 2 generals: Banks and Butler, and the South has one: Bonham. I have investigated the other scenarios and they do not appear to be affected by this bug. (The good news is that no cow mutilations have been reported.)

[Gil R.]

Could you do us a favor and try something? I'm attaching the datafile for July generals BEFORE Erik made changes at his end. If you could rename it to commanders.txt and stick it in the Scenarios folders for Coming Fury and run the game we'd know whether the problem involves Erik's changes or is a bug. Thanks!

[Walloc]

Testing it in 5 mins. Alien attacks suspended atm. Let u know in 15 mins time.

Rasmus

[Walloc]

Apparently the commanderjuly.txt file isnt included as in lacking all together in the 1.9.16b upgrade.
Cant explain why 3 US generals show, no CSA does. Before putting in commanderjuly.txt

Cant say copying it in helps. Now i see 2 US and 1 CSA general only. Ill investigate more and let ya know.

Kind regards,

Rasmus

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Scotters1976
After further investigation, it appears that in both of the Coming Fury scenarios with the "More generals" option selected, the North starts with only 3 generals: Banks, Butler, and a random third one. The South has no generals. However, when "more generals" is not selected, the North has only 2 generals: Banks and Butler, and the South has one: Bonham. I have investigated the other scenarios and they do not appear to be affected by this bug. (The good news is that no cow mutilations have been reported.)

That's extremely odd and annoying. In my testing it worked fine, but I'll go back and check it again. I have no idea why it might be so finicky in some cases and not in others.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Walloc
Apparently the commanderjuly.txt file isnt included as in lacking all together in the 1.9.16b upgrade.
Cant explain why 3 US generals show, no CSA does. Before putting in commanderjuly.txt

Note: There should not be a "commanderjuly.txt" file, you need to rename it and overwrite the existing commander.txt file.

[Walloc]

ahhh, btw that file is identical to the 1 included. So no help.

[Gil R.]

Walloc, you're positive they're the same? In that case, this might be a bug. One of the last things Eric did for this patch was to fix a PBEM bug that caused all CSA generals to come in as 1-stars, even though the Union's generals came in at the correct ranks. Perhaps he did something to introduce a bug. Odd that it would only affect the July scenario, though.

Just to make sure everyone understands what's happening here, the Data folder (for the "Standard" scenario and each of the four scenario sub-folders has to have a file called "commanders.txt" -- but there are actually two versions of that file, one for July and one for November. The file I posted up above has to be renamed before it can be used.

[Erik Rutins]

Gil,

I'm working on this and I'm pretty sure it's some kind of unknown issue with how the game prefers the commanders file to be sorted, since I had it coming up fine before the last revision and the November file still comes up fine. Any code bug would likely have been reflected in November as well as my earlier July testing. As soon as I figure out what it didn't like in terms of the file changes, I'll post a 1.9.16c.

Regards,

- Erik

[Gil R.]

This seems like as good a place as any to warn people NEVER SORT THE COMMANDERS.TXT file. The main reason is that if you don't know what you're doing you might move the end-of-file line to the beginning of the file. But more importantly, the commanders.txt file (all versions of it) will be updated every time there's a new patch, since I'll be adding new bios, historical ratings, teachable special abilities, and accurate start dates for guys who were previously randomized, and if you've modded the file on your own you'll have a devil of a time transferring any changes to your resorted, modded file. By always keeping the generals in the same order, all one has to do to update the file is just copy and paste the appropriate columns. So, all you modders out there, consider yourselves warned!

(In the case of the generals files for this patch, it's fine that Erik sorted them differently, since I'll be adding the changes he made to my master files, so the "gold" patch will keep the generals in their "official" order.)

[Gil R.]

In case anyone needs it, here's the file that is to be used for the two November scenarios (after renaming to commanders.txt). This file does not include the OOB-related changes Erik made.

[Erik Rutins]

Gil,

ORIGINAL: Gil R.
(In the case of the generals files for this patch, it's fine that Erik sorted them differently, since I'll be adding the changes he made to my master files, so the "gold" patch will keep the generals in their "official" order.)

It's not a problem if you know that the game cares - no one warned me it was sensitive to sort order before I made the last revision, turns out it wants it sorted by Chance. Also, since each general has an ID, even with sorting you can still always find the same one. As long as you keep the end of file where it should be, sorting is not an issue. Problem fixed and 1.9.16c is building now and hopefully the last for the day.

There were no issues with the November file so that shouldn't be necessary. Once .16c is posted and confirmed fine, we should probably remove these files from this thread to make sure people are using only the ones in the installer.

[Walloc]

Problem found. I hope i dont step out of line but fix is incomming.

Kind regards,

Rasmus

[Erik Rutins]

Please don't post any more fix files here, a new installer is incoming.

[Erik Rutins]

Ok, 1.9.16c is available, this should fix all the commander issues. Please use 1.9.16c and report if you find any other problems with generals showing up in any of the scenarios. Thank you for all the reports, it definitely helped fix this quickly.

[Gil R.]

People should use the newest version of the patch instead of plugging in the files I posted.

[Walloc]

Tested and works on all the scn.

Kind regards,

Rasmus

[blueduck]

I am using the latest download on coming fury and all the southern generals seem to have the wrong bio.

[Gil R.]

What are you seeing, exactly? I just checked, and found the right bios for Sibley, Johnston, Lee, Hill and Zollicoffer. Is this really multiple generals, or maybe just one guy for whom I mistakenly pasted in the wrong bio?