Tormentor's BG2 bug thread

[tormentor]

Well, lynx said to open a new thread, so here it goes.

 

SoA without extension, patched, fixpack 9, perhaps some tweakpack bits, no other mods except generalized biffing and that might not be installed.

 

Started testing with current git both on Linux and Android.

 

New game.

 

Bugs.

 

1. When Shillelagh runs out, "the party has lost an item." Same for Cause Serious Wounds. VERIFIED vanilla doesn't print this

 

2. Sanctuary spell has no effect whatsoever, enemies should ignore the character unless attacked. UPDATE enemies ignore sanctuaried char but sanctuary not removed when casting spells that affect enemies.

 

2a. Sanctuary overlay (and others?) persist after rest.

 

3. Minsc doesn't join the party after his initial dialogue Talk to him about Dynaheir. His dialogue will end after he talks about redeeming himself. This seems to happen only when it is the player char that talks to him. Approach him again. He gets mad and the bars break, but he does not join the party. Sometimes there is an invalid scripting trigger error but I don't always get that message. SEEMS FIXED

 

4. Thief leaving shadows intentionally doesn't stop the shimmering effect. Same in vanilla

 

5. Invisibility Purge does not work. Invisible character remains invisible. Acts like vanilla, only works on enemies.

 

6. Lightning-immune character will say "My weapon has no effect" when hit by lightning spell.

 

7. "Charname: Entangled" not displayed when affected by Entangle spell (ISTR this was the case in the original.) Spell does work though. My error, vanilla doesn't do this either.

 

8. Summon Insects: "Goblin did 1 damage to Goblin" instead of "Char did 1 damage to goblin." FIXED

 

9. Hold Person is whacky. Sometimes it doesn't work when it should (many tries on party member), sometimes the effect "halo" appears above the target but it can still move (ogre mage was the case), sometimes the target is held but the effect doesn't appear (goblin was the case.) Hold Animal was seen to work, halo and all. Message "X: held" doesn't appear. UPDATE This might well be working, perhaps there is just a problem with the halo effect and the messages.

 

10. Spell learning: Failing to learn a spell wrongly displays the success message. Failure message is displayed when character already knows the spell. Sounds are not played.

 

Imported the cleric character for these tests. The amount of things that simply work now is impressive, though. Also tested a lot of my other cleric/druid/mage spells and they mostly worked.

[SyntaxError]

did you turn on subtitles? I'm not sure, but maybe that setting is checked for the messages. if not then i have to assume its just not implemented.

[tormentor]

11. Melf's Minute Meteors: The spell creates the meteors "weapon" but the char cannot throw it. The console says "Weapon unusable." FIXED

 

12. Chill Touch: Target takes damage, but THAC0 malus is not always applied. Actually in vanilla, the target (unless save vs spell) takes both the hit damage plus the extra and Base THAC0 as well as THAC0 are increased.

 

13. Ghoul Touch: Target takes damage, HELD icon appears on target's portrait (and char screen) but target can freely move around. In vanilla, this spell doesn't do much besides display "paralyzed."

 

14. Shocking Grasp: Spell description says mage has 1 round per level to make the attack, but spell fizzles out after 2 rounds. CHECKED doesn't work either in vanilla.

 

15. Character generation: Mage book spell selection: Description box scrollbar does not work (text scrolling does work with touch input on android.) Also it should display the spell level. The number of spells you get per level needs fixing: In vanilla SoA you get 4,4,4,4 and one extra per level if you're a gnome with 19 INT. In ToB you get 5,4,3,2 - it needs to check if the game is SoA or ToB.

 

16. Slow: Spell doesn't work. Works only on enemies, as in vanilla.

 

17. Wizard Eye. Should the wizard eye be able to open doors, attack and damage enemies? Not sure what the original does there. VERIFIED It can not do any of these things in vanilla FIXED

 

18. Spook (and Horror): Targets do not flee away from caster when panicked. Halo is sometimes displayed, circle turns yellow sometimes, but no consistent behaviour.

 

19. Avenger kit: Shapeshifting into a baby wyvern crashes the game. FIXED

 

20. Tutorial: Minsc and Jaheira don't join the party when they're supposed to. UPDATE can't test anymore because spell learning with Xan trashes the UI now and makes the tutorial unfinishable

[tormentor]

21. Buying reputation in temples. You can buy as many points as you want, but they are never displayed on the character screen and the price should increase over time. FIXED

@SyntaxError, no, subtitles were not active.

[lynx]

interesting choice, playing without tob.

1. actually happens, since the spells create a temporary magical weapon for you.

[tormentor]

I have an English SoA DVD and a German TOB so I get language mishmash. I prefer to play through SoA in English. I have never finished ToB so far, perhaps because I can't stand the German voices (I got a German Black Isle Compilation.)

 

1. actually happens, since the spells create a temporary magical weapon for you.

 

 

I'll have to check with real BG2 if that message should be displayed, though.

 

Here are some more:

 

22. Android: Shapeshifted party members slow the game noticeably. If both HC and Jaheira are shapeshifted, the game becomes very slow so it seems to add up. Not sure why this is. Makes the game hard to play even on my relatively fast device (on PC it's blazingly fast in any case.) Thus a shapeshift-heavy strategy is not a pleasant experience on Android right now (GemRB has a little bias against clerics and druids currently, it seems, what with no sanctuary and shapeshift penalties!)

 

23. Android: Touch input: Casting a spell on a party member by clicking on the portrait is nigh impossible. On PC, this is doable, although the "move portrait" marker gets in the way a little. Reordering party members on Android almost never works, either.

 

24. Berserk Rage: Minsc sometimes goes yellow and can't be selected, but this seems to be random. Not sure what's happening there. Is he panicked? He should be fear resistant while berserking. Is it normal Berserk behaviour? In that case, he should not switch randomly between geing green/selectable and yellow/unselectable. It's still possible to access his character screen while he's yellow, too. Vanilla behaviour is that he turns yellow as soon as he enters a fight and doesn't flip back and forth.

[tormentor]

25. Minor Globe of Invulnerability: As per original BG2, this should protect against the user's own spells. In vanilla BG2, you can cast a fireball on yourself if you have MGOI and you'll be immune. I tested it. FIXED

 

26. Imported premade characters don't have names; in vanilla their names are displayed in the box where you normally enter them (but you can change them if you wish.)

 

Edit: Went over this again and tested in freshly-installed vanilla BG2 without mods to get the intended behaviour.

[lynx]

I'll get to this list soon (need reinforcements with all the great fronts opening at the same time ). Re 25: did you take care to really target yourself and not the ground?

[SyntaxError]

No need to report anything related to touch input, the SDL2 driver is in the process of being completely rewritten and all the event logic is being relocated so no fixes for any of that stuff will be done until then.

 

no idea why shapeshifting should be causing a slowdown; doubt it has anything to do with android. also doubt that it will ever be addressed.

 

Its also obvious you are re-reporting many of the same bugs over and over again (anything with hold/panic state)

 

also some of these arent bugs, but rather implementation differences that shouldn't matter e.g. the "party has lost an item thing"

[tormentor]

@lynx:

 

#25 - in vanilla, you're immune no matter if you target yourself or the ground. You're just immune.

 

@SyntaxError:

 

Yes, some of those probably have the same root cause. The shapeshifting thing really slows the game to a crawl on Android. It's just not noticeable on a fast PC. "Party has lost an item" of course is just a niggle. The game really plays very well on GemRB, so most of those bugs aren't showstoppers (the dialogue break / no party join thing is not nice tho, it happens with Aataqah as well so it's probably a general issue worth looking at.)

 

I'm really just posting a list of niggles for you guys to go over when and if you see fit.

[lynx]

I don't see why we would never optimise shapechanging? Pretty weird comment Brad!

The slowdown is likely from the fact that we have to apply many changes each tick (1/15 of a second). We do use a special cache, but seems that's not enough. Could be an interesting case to profile and compare the traces before and after.

 

And: oh nice, you already updated the list with the checks. Double thanks, less explaining and checking for me.

[SyntaxError]

 

 

I don't see why we would never optimise shapechanging? Pretty weird comment Brad!

 

I meant that the android slowness in general is caused by inefficient blitting and isnt likely to change unless an opengl programmer steps up to finish that work. If there are ways to optimize it outside the actual blitters then sure we can do that Certainly not going to fit on my plate anytime soon... what exactly is shapechanging doing that could slow things down?

[lynx]

off all the stats that it changes, the animation stuff is the heaviest. I'm not sure if we're just silent or we cache the file lookups for that too — at some point we were going to disk each tick (I just remember the console spam). Old stuff though, I'll need to try shifting under valgrind to get some sense of speed impact.

[lynx]

I fixed what you reported under Minsc and the wyvern morph. Probably fixes the tutorial one too. Also temple donations (mostly just wrong messages).

 

10 was probably just a timing issue, since it can take another tick to take effect and if the game was paused ...

[tormentor]

lynx: #10: Spell learning is broken in the tutorial now, at least if one has TOB installed. The dialogue script seems to continue before the message box disappears, as a result the GUI gets screwed, you can't get back to the game screen. Spell learning outside of the tutorial still works.

 

Also updated #15 - spell slots are different depending on SoA vs ToB.

 

27. GemRB doesn't find existing save files from ToB. o_O

 

Yeah, I installed ToB over my vanilla BG2 install now. I need to find a way to keep separate installs for those without wine crapping out.