Any game breaking stuff in Alpha9 ?

[roguedjack]

MP and Zaimoni, are there any game breaking stuff in alpha9 that you guys found out that I should be aware of?
Stuff that can make alpha9 unplayable or even worse ctd that I should fix for an hypothetical theoretical alpha10

[MP]

No huge issues that I can recall. I just checked my release notes and played a couple of quick RS9a games to jog my memory too.

There is one issue, which zaimoni discovered, that might interest you: roguesurvivor.proboards.com/thread/379/fraudulent-scent-suppressors-hunting-stores
I've not got round to looking at it myself.

If, hypothetically (), there was an RSa10, and it went down the sfx path, the latest SFML.NET is essentially required imo. MDX and SFML 1.6 can't cope.

[zaimoni]

Cf. the FDA action on scent suppressors thread. (Not game-breaking broken, but their ineffectiveness is in RS Alpha 9.)

Very early versions of RS Revived had comparable instability to RS Alpha 9 in the day 6-10 range (game crashed out on district change). The RS Revived empirical fixes turned out to address multi-threading issues. Most of the stabilization was from placing a lock on m_aux_ActorsByPosition whenever altering that dictionary was necessary, and a lock on the district being simulated in AdvancePlay. Other multi-threading issues were triggered by building out police threat tracking and would not be relevant to RS Alpha 9.

I do not recommend blindly copying any of RS Revived's turn scheduler (this invalidated most of the simulation options), cross-district pathing infrastructure, or police threat tracking. These are responsible for most of the speed issues RS Revived has.

[MP]

Apr 13, 2018 8:35:55 GMT zaimoni said:

g a lock on m_aux_ActorsByPosition whenever altering that dictionary was necessary, and a lock on the district being simulated in AdvancePlay.

Oh yes, that reminds me! I suspect (but haven't deep-dived) that occasionally RogueGame.StopSimThread() causes the simulation thread to deadlock when it’s forcibly aborted on changing district.

[roguedjack]

Thanks for the reports.
I'll look into it.

[MP]

I'm starting to suspect that there might be some thread racing going on. I say that because I notice that occasionally the firing LOS circles aren't drawn, and I'm noticing it again when playing around with forced appearance of hints (instead of the key prompt). Sometimes the hints fire, as the messages appear in the log, but the actual overlay doesn't appear in the playing area. I wonder if these cases are caused by a screen redraw happening out of ideal sequence...

I haven't followed the thread yet because finding enough solid time to sit down and focus on RS is really hard at the moment. It's entirely possible that I'm totally wrong. Thoughts?

[roguedjack]

Apr 29, 2018 13:33:04 GMT MP said:

I'm starting to suspect that there might be some thread racing going on. I say that because I notice that occasionally the firing LOS circles aren't drawn, and I'm noticing it again when playing around with forced appearance of hints (instead of the key prompt). Sometimes the hints fire, as the messages appear in the log, but the actual overlay doesn't appear in the playing area. I wonder if these cases are caused by a screen redraw happening out of ideal sequence...

I haven't followed the thread yet because finding enough solid time to sit down and focus on RS is really hard at the moment. It's entirely possible that I'm totally wrong. Thoughts?

That should be fixed in Alpha 10 which was released yesterday.
You are right it was related to threading. There was a bug in some actions DoXXX in RogueGame that cleared overlays when they shouldnt (overlays are things like firing los circles, hints popups etc...). The actors in the sim thread perform some actions, and as some of these actions sometimes wrongly cleared the overlays it messed up the player interface apparently randomly. It was very simple to fix but hard to find.

******

I also hopefully fixed a lot of problems or potential problems with sim thread.

The problem with Stench Killer is now not a problem anymore because i changed how Stench Killer works.

I didn't reuse any of your code guys but I implemented a simple route check (not really pathfinding but could be upgraded easily to an A*) for NPCs. It should fix the problem you had of NPCs trying to move through the impassable cemetary gates. Its very fast and can be used by all NPCs since its very simple and the search space is restricted.
The class is RouteFinder in Gameplay/AI/Tools and should be very easy to use right away. Example of uses in BaseAI.

The source code of alpha 10 is available for download. Check the blog. Most of the code changes have // alpha 10 around them to help you guys spot the changes.

[MP]

Wow RJ, you are prolific! So many changes in such a short time. I hadn't noticed you'd put out an update. An awesome surprise.

If there's any code or assets in Still Alive that you'd like to merge into your base you are, of course, more than welcome.
I'll do some testing of Alpha 10 this week.