RS 'Still Alive'

[MP]

Yikes. That is a truly odd and nasty bug. I'll postpone the planned releases and focus on ironing out these kinks if I can. Depending on timing, I might combine it with Alpha 10.1.

[zaimoni]

I have a reproducer for this in RS Revived trunk (throws an exception in debug build). It feels like a multi-threading issue. Unfortunately, the apparent correct fix strategies are savefile breaks. Edit Cannot be papered over in the ActionPoints setter, only displaced.

[MP]

Very interesting. A possible deadlocking issue?

[zaimoni]

Deadlock is an indefinite freeze. This reproducer showed as a free melee attack for a z during simulation (that is, the decrement of the z's AP was "overwritten"/"lost"). One of the changes I re-interpreted from RS Alpha 10 was an explicit check for this.

Since RS Revived takes a lock on the district when doing AdvancePlay, it's not clear what the trigger is. (RS Revived also has defensive coding against duplication of actors in the actor list when loading games.) Just confirmed that the bug is a true Heisenbug, it even reacts to what other programs are open on the target system. (Having an extra Visual Studio instance open was enough to prevent the bug from manifesting in the reproducer save.)

EDIT 2 failed commits so far.

[ericomont]

I just found out that the non-responding prisoner that should not be and the game freezes are related.
What happened was that the game went into the freeze state after I hit enter on the first prisoner sentence, it just about happened again.
I saved the game at this point and zipped it into a ~4mb file, let me know where to send this in case it is needed.

Also, I noticed that the non-standard weapons are not producing sound, I checked the santa shotgun and the hans von hans pistol, am not fully sure about Meyer´s axe though.

One of the last games I player I got over 2 months (can´t recall now, but I had almost all the abilities topped). At this point, changing districts, saving or loading, takes a lot of time. The game gets very unstable and I got many crashes. I´m playing vintage with top amount of npcs and Zs, 9 districts of the largest type.

[MP]

Thanks for grabbing the save. Please drop it here: www.mediafire.com/filedrop/filedrop_hosted.php?drop=aa37e431486ef0695a4cae5f9c92b300747d152cc15e25db1b7f832a8ef06db6

Unless I find any last minute issues, I'll be putting out Release 6-1 later today. It has Alpha 10 merged in, including the revamped threading, which will hopefully make it more stable.
I've been focusing heavily on adding content, but perhaps I need to switch gears and put out smaller, more frequent builds with a focus on streamlining things.

PS. I haven't added sounds for the unique actors weapons. To be honest, I'm almost certainly going to replace them with something quite different during Release 6.

[MP]

Alright Release 6-1 is now out. I got a bit carried away, so it's more than just an Alpha 10 merge.

Aside from Alpha 10 changes, here's what Still Alive brings:


STILL ALIVE 2.0.4.8 (aka Release 6-1, 12/08/2018)
---------------------

Features:
-Autosaving (optional) every 360 turns.
-Ponds:
-Moving through water is a penalty to stamina and movement speed, but does hide your scent.
-Intelligent AI have some smarts regarding water.
-Press F1 to view a legend of icons.
-Can now reset default options, instead of reverting same-instance changes.
-New audio for the "Those guys" raid and army supplies drop.
-Separated ambient SFX (eg weather) to its own instance, to allow for background music.
-Removed option to reveal starting district.
-Charisma skill influences trade negotiations.

Fixes:
-Reduced the amount of furniture in bars and clinics.
-Plants now only fruit every second day.
-Rain no longer increases the chance of extinguishing an actor who is indoors.
-Heavy rain is now more likely to extinguish fires than lighter rain.
-Flammable floor and wall materials are more likely to burn for longer.
-Rain sound effect stops when it should now.
-The prisoner will wake when you get near.
-The prisoner will no longer offer the deal if they've already been released.

Development:
-Improved tile fires implementation.
-Modified the way Alpha 10 implemented music, primarily to cater for multiple tracks per non-special map.
-Modified the way Alpha 10 rates items for the AI.

Known issues:
-Occasionally, popups (hints, trades) may not be displayed yet the player is still prompted for their interaction.
-Changing districts performance with simulation enabled decays as the game goes on.
-Lacking difficulty options, and the current scoring multipliers are broken. These will be addressed in later releases.
-Music is louder than other sounds. They will be normalised in an upcoming release.
-Random crash/hang bug.
-Occasionally, random turns take an extra second or two to process.
-Tile fires were heavily revamped and are probably now broken in some way

[ericomont]

Just uploaded the save, it is a few turns after the first chat with the prisoner.
I think your focus on 'content' is pretty great, it was what got my attention back into it.

...will check the newer version now.

edit: Quick feedback... Lots of new stuff right away!  

[MP]

Aug 12, 2018 17:37:15 GMT ericomont said:

I think your focus on 'content' is pretty great, it was what got my attention back into it.

I'm glad to hear that, because I'd rather focus on adding content at the moment. Roguedjack has a hotfix release in the pipeline, so I don't want to mess with the 'engine' too much right now. I'd rather leave the optimization until all the features are in, assuming people can live with the bugs in the meantime.

[ericomont]

Sure shot, the current bugs are far from "deal breaker" and can be avoided by saving a bit more often.
I really enjoyed what you did with the house generation.

[MP]

Well, to be fair, the gardens and parking lots attached to houses were put into Alpha 10 by Roguedjack. I can't take credit there, but I agree it was a good idea. Some extra variety like that is what the game needs.

[ericomont]

Ops, my bad, I didn´t read through the whole change log and haven´t played the latest rogue jack´s version.
I wonder if it would be possible to have more noisy roads, similar to the buildings, but I never checked the source.
I once made a map generator for a game that needs more noisy maps, attached is an example image.
Content wise, it seems to me that the ´geography´ the game is running over really counts.

[zaimoni]

Aug 15, 2018 4:24:46 GMT ericomont said:

I wonder if it would be possible to have more noisy roads, similar to the buildings, but I never checked the source.

Noisy tiles are easy (the next unstable release of RS Revived will have a number of tiles with reduced noise as I needed to construct a reference diagonal subway tile and had to get the color scheme to blend with the current scheme). Tracking which noisy tile variant is in use per-tile, requires extending the internal representation.

[MP]

Aug 15, 2018 4:24:46 GMT ericomont said:

I wonder if it would be possible to have more noisy roads, similar to the buildings, but I never checked the source.

Do you mean more randomness to the layout, ie less uniformity? Or do you mean a greater variety of 'stuff' scattered about the place?

Edit: I just saw an instance of what you were talking about: a particular AI got a whole bunch of turns in a row without anyone else getting one. I'd not noticed it before. Possibly an oversight introduced when I started rearranging the code followed when processing the next turn of the world - I'll finish that soon.

[galthaar]

Rogue Survivor is my favorite roguelike, I´m glad it is being developed again, thanks roguedjack and MP. I would love to have shields (ballistic and impact ones) implemented in the game, is this a possibility?