And based on other earlier statements by Pry, I believe that all saves sent to him need to be from games that were started after patching to 1.3.
To clairify I need saves from games started in 1.3 anything from a game started eariler and patched up to 1.3 is no good because we simply can not be sure what kind of problems got carriered forward.
Testers/programmer
There are about 6 empty slots in the Leader database. These slots show as rank WO with zero values including leadership and inspiration. At least one of these entries has a delay date of 9999, the rest a value of zero.
IIRC, one of the leader bugs is that units are controlled by WOs.
Now, the program knows how to skip these empty entries in the leader array (at least I am assuming it does[;)]).
The question is: When a leader is killed (eg goes down with his ship), he is removed from the leader array by ...blanking out the entires in the leader array as if he never existed?[&:] or is his attributes (leadership, aggressive,etc) still there and somehow he is being selected based on them even though he is DEAD.
This is one of those times when showing the leader unit's ID would be useful to see if the KILLED leader is coming back to life as a WO.
[These are just my thoughts and have nothing to do with the way the game actually is programmed.[:-]]
Hey, at this point personally I'm considering this possibility (listen carefully, its a bit involved):
Grigsby, in an attempt to simulate the historical instances of leaders falling sick or dying in car crashes, has secretly added a routine to randomly change leaders at intervals. The other programmers, not aware of this, structured the databases with some empty slots for expansion later, filling them with 0/0 WO's and did other programming work related to the changing and loss of leaders which are incompatible with Grigsby's Gotcha. The interaction of these incompatible routines is progressively trashing the game, with the most obvious symptom being the Leader Leak bug.
Comments? [:D]
This game does not have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff.
Misspelling a word in a program is actually pretty hard to do. The compiler tends to choke. But what does happen is you either A) forget a period where you need one, or B) put a period where you don't want one. Now, those typos are really hard to find.
This game does not have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff.
Yeah, but something has to have done it. With as hard as the testers tested it, and they never saw it, yet on day 1 the community finds it, Then its declared fixed in 1.3 and again in day 1 we find it, I dunno....
Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.....
Designer of War Plan Orange
Allied Naval OOBer of Admiral's Edition
Naval Team Lead for War in the Med
Author of Million-Dollar Barrage: American Field Artillery in the Great War coming soon from OU Press.
Eennnhhh... <wags hand back and forth> I've done debugging and tech support. Some things you literally can't see when you are approaching it as a programmer or tester. You already "know" enough that you don't try some things that "obviously" no one will ever do because they shouldn't be done. But the first user who comes along who doesn't have the programmers' outlook does three keystrokes and *boing*, the whole thing crashes. You can also develop a kind of tunnel vision, where you are just looking at the code without looking at or considering what the user sees. (And it is hard to get around this. Testers tend to get hired because of their compatibility with the programmers, having similar outlooks. If their outlook is different enough to get around this, they don't get hired/signed up because they don't work well with the programmers. This isn't limited to just Matrix/2by3.)
The impression that I am getting is that specific things were tested in WiTP as individual features. But no one took a few steps back and just played the game as an entire package. Hmmm, not sure that gets across what I'm trying to say but I can't think of a better way of saying it.
But, yea, as much as I hate the implied and unintended slight, it does seem like QA was lacking. (Sorry guys. [:(])
This game does not have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff.
Though I hate it, I am technically a COBOL programmer (not bad for a 19 year old, eh?). I remember I made a program, and it worked fine except for one thing screwed it up. I read the code over and over for about a week before I realized I had 1 period in the wrong place. Course when I fixed that it screwed up a lot of other stuff.
I'm kinda betting what happened is like what you said. They made all these features, and either 1) tested them, but not sit back and see what they do, or 2) looked at the code, thought it was flawless, and expected it to work.
OTOH, look at this. Pry says he has been trying his darnedest to recreate the bug, and he can't. Yet in 4 turns we can count about 10 instances of it. It makes me wonder if the testers were told not to do something (Such as don't manually assign TF commanders), yet that information was not passed on to us, the players.
All I can say is I am hoping....no,no, I am praying this gets fixed. With Kid already hinting that 1.4 may be the last shot, if this doesn't gets fixed then we are doomed.
Designer of War Plan Orange
Allied Naval OOBer of Admiral's Edition
Naval Team Lead for War in the Med
Author of Million-Dollar Barrage: American Field Artillery in the Great War coming soon from OU Press.
My last job was COBOL. Usually you don't find the little typos with big consequences until you're running the program thru an animator and see the execution suddenly jump to a section that has nothing to do with what is supposed to be happening or not jump past a chunk of code.
I think the biggest problem with finding the source of the Leader Leak bug is that it is random. We may be finding saves where the probabilities of it repeating are high, but I don't think it is possible to get a true "repeatable" save. If its something corrupting what's in memory or a broken pointer or link, then the only way to find a cause is to run the code thru the animator over and over and over and over and over and .... Even then, that only finds one cause. I don't think there is only one source. Either multiple things are breaking or the same piece of buggy code was copied to multiple places. Just a hunch though.
This game does not have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff.
The fact that a Japanese infantry major whose name doesn't appear in the database can pop up in command of a PT boat with the subscript "best suited to command an air combat task force" ought to tell a troubleshooter something.
Particularly when you click on the commander's name and get a list of three other Japanese infantry majors (all pre-qualified as air combat TF commanders) who are ready and willing to be plugged into RN MTB command.
I think this is so far broken it will never be fixed. I believe this to be one of many reasons everybody just decided to fold their hands behind their backs, whistle a happy tune, and walk away from the UV/WitP system.
Put my faith in the people
And the people let me down.
So, I turned the other way,
And I carry on anyhow.
While I've been one of the people predicting that this will not be a quick fix, lets not get too "doom and gloom" people. Give Pry and Mike some time to work on this.
This game does not have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff.
Mike is an awsome programmer, and if I learned one thing from talking to him on the phone, its that he knows his business. We just have to give this time, and the bug will be killed.
Designer of War Plan Orange
Allied Naval OOBer of Admiral's Edition
Naval Team Lead for War in the Med
Author of Million-Dollar Barrage: American Field Artillery in the Great War coming soon from OU Press.
We just have to give this time, and the bug will be killed.
That's what the first Sky Marshal in the Starship Troopers movie thought. Next thing you know, it was 100,000 killed (humans) in one hour. Then, the Joycelyn Elders clone Sky Marshal announced, "To defeat the bug, you must understand the bug."
Let's just remember - none of the "substitute" commanders actually exists in the database. They are all coming from the "random generation" routines and are being unintentionally superimposed at some point in the turn sequence. Moreover, their "specialty" is completely unrelated to the command they undertake (you would not expect a Japanese WO to be especially suited to command of an aircraft carrier, for example). This did not happen in UV. Something was added in WitP. It's not a bug. It's wacky design.
Isn't this enough of an indication of where the problem lies in order to track it down and correct it? What is the need for "repeatable saves?"
Get 'er done.
Put my faith in the people
And the people let me down.
So, I turned the other way,
And I carry on anyhow.
