Escort lost in limbo
Posted: Sat Apr 02, 2011 11:07 pm
Good news: The injured seer is still alive after meeting Wrathroot.
Bad news: While still alive, the injured seer no longer exists.
I'm playing a Yeek Corruptor in an attempt to unlock the psionic class, although that goal has been delayed by side quests*. While in the Old Forest, an injured seer appeared and asked for help in reaching the portal. While normally seers are a welcome sight, this one happened to be wandering around on Wrathroot's level of the forest. Sure enough, the instant I left the seer's side Wrathroot appeared. Thinking quickly, I threw the Demon Plane spell on Wrathroot. After a short scuffle, I emerged victorious with a pile of loot at my feet. Then I noticed that the seer was gone. The quest was still active, and the team status bar said she was still alive at 24% health, but the seer wasn't where I left her. A thorough search of the forest turned up a heap of soon-to-be corpses, but no seer. Finally, I started a new character on cheat mode.
Using cheat mode, I forced an escort quest and set out to reproduce the limbo effect. The first monster I found was a cute little level 1 fox. "Ah, perfect!" I said, and dragged the newborn fox pup down into the flaming pits of hell.** There was small orange explosion, and I was alone on the demon plane. This was surprising, since the spell is supposed to end when the target dies. After waiting a few turns for something more to happen, I deactivated the spell. The escort had vanished, confirming the first bug, but now there was a second bug to confirm. A few casts of Demon Plane revealed a pattern. Trolls would take a single step, take 50 damage, and end the spell as planned, but foxes would leave me hanging around the demon plane without a partner.
Finally I took a close look at the Demon Plane talent and found a third bug - according to the talent description, the fires of the demon plane were supposed to dish out 30,000 damage per turn. The aforementioned troll only took 50.
It's pretty obvious what's going on in the third bug. The damage in the talent description factors in the insane god mode damage multiplier, while the damage from the lava floor doesn't. The code for the Demon Plane talent*** uses the lineto control lava damage, while the description usesIn the first block of code, the base damage before damage multipliers gets passed to the lava floor. The lava floor never uses the caster's damage multiplier. The second block calls damDesc(), which factors in damage multipliers. Since the damage is dealt by the floor rather than by the player's own hands, I think the un-multiplied version is correct and the talent description should be changed to reflect the spell.
The second bug was a little harder to track down, but I think this is it. Again, this is from the Demon Plane talent in Shadowflame.lua.
In plain English, this block of code goes through these steps.
1. Move the caster to the demon plane.
2. Move the target to the demon plane.
3. Give the target instructions.
4. Give the caster instructions.
Note the order here. First, the caster moves to the demon plane. The move command allows the possibility that the person moving might move onto dangerous terrain. The terrain in the demon plane might kill the caster on that first move, if the caster were heavily injured first. The same thing applies when the target moves to the demon plane - the automatic movement to the demon plane can kill a weak opponent, such as a level 1 fox.
Then we move on to steps 3 and 4. Among the instructions given to the target and the caster are orders that if either of them die, they should deactivate the Demon Plane spell. The problem is that this only applies if they die. It doesn't apply if they're already dead. If a small opponent dies during the movement to the demon plane, their death happens before they receive on_death commands, and they will not end the spell. It's not that far of a stretch to say that if the caster dies during the movement, the target will be probably be stuck there forever.
There are probably several fixes to this. The first one I would try would be to reverse the order - first give the actors their instructions, then move them. If that turns out to have potential errors, then maybe an is-dead test would fix it.
The original problem has me beat. I looked through several file mentioning escort quests, but none of them had anything on moving the escort when the player goes to another level. My next guess is that the level map doesn't save the existence of an escort when the player switches levels, but I have no idea where to look for something like that. Cheat mode has nothing that can summon an existing actor. If nothing else comes up, I'm going to leave the level and hope that that terminates the quest, allowing cheat mode to give me another one. If that doesn't work, the seer will just have to remain lost in limbo.
UPDATE: Going down a level spawned the injured seer on that level. The seer headed out to where the recall portal would have been, had we been on the previous level. Unfortunately, that spot happened to be on the far side of lake Nur, and the seer drowned on the way.
*I reached the halfling ruins at level 10 and realized that killing Subject Z would prevent me from getting the arena quest. So I used the Rod of Recall to skip that fight. Neither the problem nor the solution seems like intended behavior, but they cancel each other out quite nicely.
**In hindsight, this might not have been a very nice thing to do.
***http://svn.net-core.org/repos/t-engine4 ... wflame.lua
Bad news: While still alive, the injured seer no longer exists.
I'm playing a Yeek Corruptor in an attempt to unlock the psionic class, although that goal has been delayed by side quests*. While in the Old Forest, an injured seer appeared and asked for help in reaching the portal. While normally seers are a welcome sight, this one happened to be wandering around on Wrathroot's level of the forest. Sure enough, the instant I left the seer's side Wrathroot appeared. Thinking quickly, I threw the Demon Plane spell on Wrathroot. After a short scuffle, I emerged victorious with a pile of loot at my feet. Then I noticed that the seer was gone. The quest was still active, and the team status bar said she was still alive at 24% health, but the seer wasn't where I left her. A thorough search of the forest turned up a heap of soon-to-be corpses, but no seer. Finally, I started a new character on cheat mode.
Using cheat mode, I forced an escort quest and set out to reproduce the limbo effect. The first monster I found was a cute little level 1 fox. "Ah, perfect!" I said, and dragged the newborn fox pup down into the flaming pits of hell.** There was small orange explosion, and I was alone on the demon plane. This was surprising, since the spell is supposed to end when the target dies. After waiting a few turns for something more to happen, I deactivated the spell. The escort had vanished, confirming the first bug, but now there was a second bug to confirm. A few casts of Demon Plane revealed a pattern. Trolls would take a single step, take 50 damage, and end the spell as planned, but foxes would leave me hanging around the demon plane without a partner.
Finally I took a close look at the Demon Plane talent and found a third bug - according to the talent description, the fires of the demon plane were supposed to dish out 30,000 damage per turn. The aforementioned troll only took 50.
It's pretty obvious what's going on in the third bug. The damage in the talent description factors in the insane god mode damage multiplier, while the damage from the lava floor doesn't. The code for the Demon Plane talent*** uses the line
Code: Select all
local dam = self:combatTalentSpellDamage(t, 12, 140)Code: Select all
The damage will increase with the Magic stat]]):format(damDesc(self, DamageType.FIRE, self:combatTalentSpellDamage(t, 12, 140)))The second bug was a little harder to track down, but I think this is it. Again, this is from the Demon Plane talent in Shadowflame.lua.
Code: Select all
local x1, y1 = util.findFreeGrid(4, 6, 20, true, {[Map.ACTOR]=true})
if x1 then
self:move(x1, y1, true)
game.level.map:particleEmitter(x1, y1, 1, "demon_teleport")
end
local x2, y2 = util.findFreeGrid(8, 6, 20, true, {[Map.ACTOR]=true})
if x2 then
target:move(x2, y2, true)
game.level.map:particleEmitter(x2, y2, 1, "demon_teleport")
end
target:setTarget(self)
target.demon_plane_trapper = self
target.demon_plane_on_die = target.on_die
target.on_die = function(...)
target.demon_plane_trapper:forceUseTalent(self.T_DEMON_PLANE, {ignore_energy=true})
if target.demon_plane_on_die then target.demon_plane_on_die(...) end
target.on_die, target.demon_plane_on_die = target.demon_plane_on_die, nil
end
self.demon_plane_on_die = self.on_die
self.on_die = function(...)
self:forceUseTalent(self.T_DEMON_PLANE, {ignore_energy=true})
if self.demon_plane_on_die then self.demon_plane_on_die(...) end
self.on_die, self.demon_plane_on_die = self.demon_plane_on_die, nil
end
game.logPlayer(game.player, "#LIGHT_RED#You are taken to the demon plane!")
1. Move the caster to the demon plane.
2. Move the target to the demon plane.
3. Give the target instructions.
4. Give the caster instructions.
Note the order here. First, the caster moves to the demon plane. The move command allows the possibility that the person moving might move onto dangerous terrain. The terrain in the demon plane might kill the caster on that first move, if the caster were heavily injured first. The same thing applies when the target moves to the demon plane - the automatic movement to the demon plane can kill a weak opponent, such as a level 1 fox.
Then we move on to steps 3 and 4. Among the instructions given to the target and the caster are orders that if either of them die, they should deactivate the Demon Plane spell. The problem is that this only applies if they die. It doesn't apply if they're already dead. If a small opponent dies during the movement to the demon plane, their death happens before they receive on_death commands, and they will not end the spell. It's not that far of a stretch to say that if the caster dies during the movement, the target will be probably be stuck there forever.
There are probably several fixes to this. The first one I would try would be to reverse the order - first give the actors their instructions, then move them. If that turns out to have potential errors, then maybe an is-dead test would fix it.
The original problem has me beat. I looked through several file mentioning escort quests, but none of them had anything on moving the escort when the player goes to another level. My next guess is that the level map doesn't save the existence of an escort when the player switches levels, but I have no idea where to look for something like that. Cheat mode has nothing that can summon an existing actor. If nothing else comes up, I'm going to leave the level and hope that that terminates the quest, allowing cheat mode to give me another one. If that doesn't work, the seer will just have to remain lost in limbo.
UPDATE: Going down a level spawned the injured seer on that level. The seer headed out to where the recall portal would have been, had we been on the previous level. Unfortunately, that spot happened to be on the far side of lake Nur, and the seer drowned on the way.
*I reached the halfling ruins at level 10 and realized that killing Subject Z would prevent me from getting the arena quest. So I used the Rod of Recall to skip that fight. Neither the problem nor the solution seems like intended behavior, but they cancel each other out quite nicely.
**In hindsight, this might not have been a very nice thing to do.
***http://svn.net-core.org/repos/t-engine4 ... wflame.lua
