Moderator Toolkit Improvement Request

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Current -

- Lay hands on Marsons' clone-killer code, or some variation thereof. Clones are seldom game breaking, but can occasionally end up blocking a critical hallway, or staircase. Prime example that's easily replicable is swapping places with the leftover garbage version of norgan in the dwarven start zone, so that it clones you on the staircase, preventing leaving. Not common, but has occured repeatedly.
Priority - Low

- Ditto above for his 'enemies not spawning' code. Much more common problem, and has been known to happen with important targets, notably both the sandworm queen (Causing a loss of an unlock and 2 different powerful artifacts, and 2 prodigy choices.), and the ruined dungeon guardians (Preventing the postgame access, and an unlock). This has caused some outright abandoned games, and still seems to happen randomly to today.
Priority - High

If Dekar or stuntofthelitter have any further suggestions, drop em in here.

[Stuntofthelitter]

Only other thing coming to mind at the moment is the issue with world map NPCs. It's not nearly as common as it once was, but for some reason lately it seems that quite a few people got bit by this bug. Being able to force a respawn of the apprentice mage or the hermit would be useful.

[Stuntofthelitter]

Okay, thought of something else actually. There are a couple of game-breaking glitches that come up from time to time that I could fix if I was able to teleport someone FROM the world map into a zone (say, last hope). Right now those things can only be solved if they upload their save for me and I do some poking around in dev mode. Which reminds me, I still need to do more work to figure out how to tweak some things without invalidating a save.

This comes up because one of those bugs just came up again in chat, sadly.

Edit - The ability to teleport people to specific zones/floors would be great as it could also help work around some rare issues, but that's not as easy to implement as a "port to last hope" button I'd imagine.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

If you need a port to town button, better make it 2. One for eastern characters, one for western. Otherwise you might have quest issues with being sent west when you're east, or vice versa. Warping someone who's glitched on the eastern world map into last hope might make issues, not sure how the game reacts to tinkering with the quest mechanics for the trip back/there again.

[Marson]

- Ditto above for his 'enemies not spawning' code. Much more common problem, and has been known to happen with important targets, notably both the sandworm queen (Causing a loss of an unlock and 2 different powerful artifacts, and 2 prodigy choices.), and the ruined dungeon guardians (Preventing the postgame access, and an unlock). This has caused some outright abandoned games, and still seems to happen randomly to today.

My current code pulls the "out of phase" monster back into normal existence once the other monster (the one that spawned first) is no longer standing on the same map grid—either because it moved or was killed. If you want to force a rephase for someone, you can either kill or move the current monster manually.

[Stuntofthelitter]

Ah, good point about the two ports. Yeah, if it's a specific location port there definitely needs to be two.

That out of phase bit makes me wonder. When I was testing what could be up with the cultist spawns I observed a singular Essence of Harkor'Zun, something I had heard people report but had never observed. I force killed things and then noticed the others start to appear. Makes me wonder if most of the missing creature issues are due to a similar thing, space issues but then improper appearances once the way is clear.

[Marson]

Aside from the world map, every "missing creature" issue I've personally encountered has been due to creature overlap. I haven't had any go missing since using AWOL—or at least stay missing, I should say. It's an issue with creature generation that I think deserves some attention. Adding an additional check to see if the grid is occupied (regardless of what the map plan says should be there) and then finding the nearest clear space should do the trick.

Here's a specific example using a vault layout from the codebase:
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=4 ... se#p177440