Sunday, November 21, 2010

NCCS - Partial Success

I've been having a bear of a time with the thing; script data gets stuck in the savegame, so I have to fully clean it every time I make an edit or change an NPC's script.

Had to scrap the code that automatically started combat for the NPCs. NV seems to use the calls oddly - when you fire on someone, the game decides you're under attack... which of course trips the Companion's 'go hurt them in defense of your master' code, making stand-off fighting all but impossible.

I modified the code so it would only fire if the player wasn't sneaking...

...And this somehow made the companions randomly attack everyone who wasn't us. They shot Sunny's dog, even. Many, many times...

Anyhow, this needless to say made the game nigh-unplayable, what with them axing quest NPCs left and right.

I commented out the code, and they seem to work fine again. It looks like the update to the game itself at least partially addressed the hesitating to enter combat issue that had me instituting the code in the first place.

I finally made it onto the strip, too. My stalwart partner's solution to the robo-twits conflicting with the companions appears to be solved, and without modifying a single base game script or faction.

Unfortunately, the method we chose to test the theory was a stopgap, and not suitable for wide use. I'm going to modify the dialog resultscripts some to get a correct method working... although I fully expect it to not work in that method; because this damned game obeys no form of logic my mind can conceive of.

The problem now is going to be sections of the main quest. There are spots that teleport the player to areas rather than letting them move normally. This, of course, leaves companions behind.

As noted before, I've found one; but not a second. Apparently there's some "island" having to do with Caesar that you get sent to while in the service of the latest iteration of Fallout's cliche and boring supercomputer AI controlling everything behind the scenes schtick.

I've been through the backend of more than a dozen quests and their accompanying scripts, and can't find a single moveto command anywhere in them; nor any mention of said island in quest notes or script comments.

Why they insist on hiding this shit is beyond me.

At this point, all I can do is play the damned quest myself and try to see exactly where it happens.

Worse yet, my pip-boy plugins don't work right in the new game. Cycling the tracking quest works fine, but the reset command does nothing. As always, the script passes the GECK's checks just fine, but in game does nothing.

On the up side, I got my Katawa Shoujo demo up to 100% last night. Now I just have to wait on them to release the full game. HURRY UP!

...What? I totally see the hypocrisy of me bitching at someone else's free project to hurry up; I just don't care. So Nyah.

5 comments:

  1. Wow

    Can we just say the game is broken and put it on the shelf for a few years?

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  2. Don't. Tempt. Me.

    I'm hoping for a patch similar to FO3 1.5 that will helpfully unfuck the game for the most part.

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  3. @David:

    We could (and maybe we should) but unfortunately, like most things in the world, we would all need to stand together to get the powers-that-be to notice and then fix the problem. I hate to be pessimistic but, as I've lamented before, everybody joining hands across the globe and singing "We Are The World" just ain't gonna happen, and definitely not for a video game.

    @Matt:

    It just amazes me how the game can work right one minute and turn to crap the next, but I certainly don't doubt that it's happening to you. As we've both pondered before, one person's install can work perfectly while another person's identical install works like crap without rhyme or reason. Vista and Windows 7 should be similar enough that there shouldn't be a major difference, and I've even got the game running on XP. I think in the end I have to agree with David and simply say the game is broken. I just hope it doesn't actually take those powers-that-be two years to release enough updates and patches to fix all the issues.

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  4. Yeah... joining hands and singing folk music didn't really work on Communism, the Vietnam war, or Gulf War Part II.

    I kinda doubt it would do much good against Bethsoft...

    Besides which, I'd be willing to bet NV has already sold enough copies to recoup production costs, so they probably wouldn't care no matter how much outcry there was.

    We've already seen that people will keep buying the games no matter how badly coded they are.

    And don't worry: it won't take take years to get all the bugs patched. In a year and a half or so, all the DLC will be out, and they'll simply declare that it's as fixed as it's ever gonna be.

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  5. Well, I didn't get to play as much Sunday as I did Saturday, but I did play enough to reach my goal of level 20 and the Explorer Perk. The companions are still working well for me. Now I need to start figuring out where to place all the NCCS Scouts...

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