The Balance Thread

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Elafar

Oh I did experiment with those alot , unfortunately nothing helped.
The same skills worked perfect when I tryed other combinations of classes. As I've mentioned, even Tief / Deffender as opposed to Deffender/Tief didn't caused any problem.

Thx for advice thogh

I just created a Defender/Thief, chose Gut as my skill, then realized that I can't use Gut on the axe I had, so I had to find a dagger or sword to use Gut with. I found a level 2 dagger which I couldn't use until I was level 2... long story short, once I had the dagger, I had no issue with right click using a skill, so I'm not sure where that problem comes from. Sounds like it's unrelated to Defender/Thief.

Does this issue happen also when you play without the mod?

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Elafar

Tbh I am confused a bit....

100 % of time when it happend , it happend while selling items to Vendors.

90 % of times happend after I saved town. Sadlly, remaining 10 % blures whole picture, and almost certainly removes that as an decissive factor.

I am also 90 % sure that it happends only with certain elixiers and potions. Also it doesnt happend always , neither with all of them.
I also noticed that their selling tag price states zero, and it is shown as an red colored number, it's kind of minus zero, like -0.

Yeah the minus zero is probably really minus a huge number that can't be displayed on-screen. I must've triggered some kinda bug that generates these values occasionally. When you reload, the value is recalculated properly. Ugh. It sucks. I wish I could reproduce this problem easily.

If it happends again, than I will repeat the whole thing few times again and if it always repeats on one particullar item... than I could even e-mail you a saved char files if you want ?

Yes. PM me the file uploaded to rapidshare/any other share site or just PM me and I'll send you my email address to send it directly. I suspect that it really isn't one item though -- it's some change I made globally that's triggering the problem occasionally.

Regarding the time you are spending on this Mod, you already have spent so much that nobody should have a right to put a pressure on you. Actually nobody should be entitled to criticise any amount of work you've done so far, it is your gift to people and as a such we all should be gratefull (I know at least I am )

Well, I appreciate the compliments I have put a lot of time into this mod, and I'm glad you're enjoying it. It's a fun usage of time though (when I have it) so I'm happy to do it

After I cleared a level and delivered few quests I went to vendor to identifie and repair stuff....
Than I payed attention to all flask I may have to sell.
I had a flask of minor cold resistance. I noticed that Price tag was writen in Red color and its stated minus zero ( -0).

So to test it and retest it I first saved a game and made a backup. But, when I resumed the game, the prace tag of the same flask was changed into normal color ( kind of gold color). No minus at all. And selling it doesn't caused any problem.

So, I could do screen save once I notice red color price....but this hardly could help you to analize the problem.
No wonder that you couldn't spot the problem after retesting.

What could be done is intentionaly try to play and focus on gathering different flasks and than selling them (if they have a red colored minus zero tag) there would be a big chance that bug will apear.

Yep. This pretty much confirms that it's a general bug that pops up every once in a while. Here's my request: since I haven't seen this bug yet, could you play without the mod for a while and see if this bug comes up? The hard part is saying how long -- basically it should be for as long as it takes for the bug to come up twice on average. There is a slight possibility that the problem is not in the mod, but somehow stems from your specific setup. It's a very slight possibility, but we have to cover our bases.

I hope you don't mind I'm putting you to work like this. Since I can't reproduce the problem on my end (yet), you can help me debug this problem remotely if you wish to.

After we cover that possibility (assuming you want to do it), I'll send you old mod versions and we can figure out which version caused the problem by going through the mod's history. My guess offhand is that it's the change I made to the way elixirs work.

[Elafar]

I could do the testing, no problem, although I wonder in a first place why those flasks have to be worth 0 ?? Couldn't you just asign something like +0,1 C if you realy want them to be that cheep on selling them to Vendors?

IMHO just asigning to all zero worth stuff any positive value will fix the problem, unless is something much more complicated?

On the other hand as a temporary solution, I was just ignoring all flasks of resistances , not bothering to picking them anymore, and not a single time I expirienced any problem after I started doing so.

I will do some additional testing...

[Elafar]

I've just done few tests...

elixiers of minor (or any ) resistances are supposed to boost your resistance for short amount of time, right?

Well I opened character screen to chek what they do...after I consumed one it happend nothing. Unless they are invisibly doing something ?

Also it happend with minor dexteritie flask...no boost whatsoever.

However this particular tumble , when I sold it menaged to negate all my gold, and this time it wasn't even red!!!.

And I tested it intentionaly without saving and resuming game first. Saving first somehow fixes the bug so it would not be good for testing.

......

I have tested now Unmoded game.

Tested 3 different tumblers. All have positive sell value. All do what they are supposed to do- increase they respective stats and that was easyly monitored via character info screen.
And no zero bug....although to be fair for this bug probbably I would need to play the game a few hours to be reasonably sure.

But even so, I think we could be reasonably sure that vanila game doesn't have that bug simply because by now someone else would report it?.

Not sure how much time it would take you to just fix sell values on those tumblers into positive ? Maybe you could copy / paste values from vanila game or from some version of your mod before you changed sell prices?
I would gladly test one such changed version. ( I hope that would be easyest and fastest way to get rid of that bug).

Tumbler-ones seems to be the worst ones considering that they may be bugged beyond only being zero priced.(meaning they are not doing their basic functions)

Certainlly worth of chekking...

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Elafar

I could do the testing, no problem, although I wonder in a first place why those flasks have to be worth 0 ?? Couldn't you just asign something like +0,1 C if you realy want them to be that cheep on selling them to Vendors?

Do you mean that even after loading the game, their price is 0? It's not supposed to be 0. If there are any elixirs which you find are always 0, let me know.

On the other hand as a temporary solution, I was just ignoring all flasks of resistances , not bothering to picking them anymore, and not a single time I expirienced any problem after I started doing so.

OK that's actually a really good test result. That would definitely seem to indicate that the resistance flasks are the problem. It's probably my last change to the elixirs that's causing the problem -- the game doesn't like it. Forget about testing with the vanilla game -- try this version instead. It's version 0.79. If you could play with this version, and go back to selling resistance flasks, that would really be helpful in figuring out if they're the cause of the problem.

[Elafar]

With a great joy and pleasure I am reporting that older version of your mod that I've just tested worked flawleslly regarding all elixirs and flasks.

Finaly

I hope you will not have big trouble in turning them back as they were before the last patch ?

Ofc, once you find a free time , no hurry needed .

[Bluddy]

Eladar, going back to the latest mod version, do your low level elixirs always cost you 0? If so, could you send me a save game with them to my email address? I'm trying to figure out why this change in the last version causes problems on your end but hasn't been doing so on mine.

[Elafar]

Yest, they were always zero but not only low lvl elixirs that costs 0, but there are some flasks as well and as far I've noticed, their next in a lvl counterpart that also costs 0.

I will, ofc send you my saved files, I just have to reinstall nack to latest version and find some Potions vendor, that will be fastest way I guess.

Will do that Asap...

[Elafar]

After many different things we tried , finally as last desperate move, I have reinstalled the game. But this time on Drive C.

Now it all works as it should.
All bugs I experienced was because my game was installed on another location than C.

At least and hopefully, this might be useful in the future if anything like this happens to someone else

[Bluddy]

Glad to hear it worked out Elafar. That was one crazy bug.

For those who are interested to know, I checked out Elafar's executable and assets003.zip and all seemed to be fine. The symptoms were several: potions were not finding the proper status effects (and thus having zero effects and zero costs), right click not working on a certain character (has that also been resolved now?), and I also noticed from the stats of a character Elafar mentioned in his email that a change I was applying in the mod (making all mana start at 100) wasn't being applied. The symptoms pointed to some files within the mod being processed while others weren't, which is really weird. The possible culprits were either memory issues ie. Elafar's system ran out of memory as it processed the data in the .zip files, or some drive system problem.

I'm still not sure what the problem was - it doesn't seem like "c:" is ever hardcoded in the executable - but it is seems like it's a bug with the override mechanism that's related to certain drive systems. Perhaps as the game decompresses the zip files into a temporary directory on C:, some problem is created under certain conditions. I'm not sure. Anyway, I'm happy everything works well now, and I can get back to working on the next version (albeit slowly )