Dredmor Patch 1.0.10 RC9 Feedback Thread - I Believe in The Lever Fix

Keep in mind that this patch has been "in the works" for exactly a month now (original post: Feb. 28th), plus the time before that when it was announced but no versions were ready for testing yet. It's long overdue (for various reasons) and I'm pretty sure most of us - including the dev team - want to get it out the door so that the game as a whole is in a more playable state while they iron out the remaining bugs.

 

No, that's not supposed to happen. I've never seen that, personally.

 

I have seen the black void problem. I don't think I've seen it yet in RC9 but I used to see it all the time.

 

I've seen both of these happen in 1.0.9 rev B.

Monster spawning in a wall is super rare, but happens. I've seen it maybe 2 or 3 times in my 471 hours of play. There's some sort of bug there, but it's pretty minor. I've seen Eely's spawn on dry land about twice as often as I've seen monsters spawn in walls.

No it does not.

The wall breaking void thing is weird, but in 1.0.9 rev B I've encountered it a few times. My guess would be that those walls do not normally break, yes? That doesn't look like any familiar destructible-wall room to me. And the couple times I've seen the black voids like that, they appeared when Radiance randomly destroyed a wall that, according to the rooms.xml files, is not destructible. I believe the dark clouds appeared when the second layer deep of a non-destructible wall was destroyed, yes?

Everytime I've experienced it, it happened for the first floor only, ended as soon as I left that floor or saved the game, sometimes ended sooner than that, and I've only had it happen if I started the game with Astrology. I'm surprised to see that you've got Fleshsmithing and Demonology instead. I've experienced it frequently with Astrology, probably 3 out of 5 times I've started a character with astrology, and never without, so I've always assumed it was some sort of bug with Radiant Aura.

Anyhow, I've never filed a bug report because I've never been able to get a save game to replicate it, and it's always stopped doing it before I thought to take a screenshot. When I've saved the game, and then reopened, not only did the non-destructible walls stop being destructible, but the black clouds or voids all went away, replaced by normal dungeon floor. Without the photographic evidence like you've got there, it's hard to describe what the problem is. Anyhow, my bad, I should have filed that bug report months back. Part of what got me into room modding was this bug and trying to figure out what was going on with the walls.

My gut instinct would be that the breaking wall void thing is probably related to Nicholas' statement that the game wasn't saving breakable walls correctly, and that chances are his recent (post-RC9) fix to the walls will probably fix it. Perhaps RC10 is warranted, though? I'd be willing to generate 3 astrologers and a flesh-smithing demonologist in the next 48 hours to see if I could replicate it on RC10.

 

No.

(Sorry for the double-post. I just now noticed he'd asked me a direct question. I could have added it to my previous post via edit, but then there'd be no alert to him that his question was answered. Also, I posted my reply without thinking about the fact that no one had replied on this thread in the 15 minutes previous.)

 

You need not directly answer. I understood the reply of Essence. Thank you for the courtesy though.

If I had bothered to go look at SwiftStriker I would have figured out the answer to my question that way too.

But I am wondering what is causing it even more now.

 

Nothing game breaking this end really. Some bugs left but if all of them are addressed then this patch is never going to be released, and it's a huge improvement over 1.0.9RevB. I say give it a push when the week is up.

 

Mac Mod Bug definitely did not get fixed all the way. I suspected it from the doubling-up thing in my other post, but then I went to play again, and got this from the Mod Loader:



You'll note that there's a mod there (ID) that's showing up twice on the list, despite only having one copy in the mods folder.


EDIT/UPDATE: It gets better.

I decided I'd see if I could get it to play despite the obvious glitch. So I select two room-mods (Interior Dredmorating and Roguish Renovations) and a single skill mod, Dire Gourmand. Launch the game. Go to make a character, and I get this for my skill options:

Instead of Dire Gourmand, I'm given three copies of Wind Mage to choose from. Not knowing which skill it will actually give me, I click on one of those wind mages that should be dire gourmands, and take just basic warrior and rogue skills to fill out the character. The first floor loads just fine. However, my skill bar looks like this:

That's three copies of Gust, the first-level spell from Wind Magic.

I'd give you a save game, but I always play on Permadeath, and the first door I opened had a horde behind it.

EDIT #2: Apparently, Roguish Renovations comes packaged with a skill as well, so I wasn't just missing Dire Gourmand from the list, I was missing both of them.

Also, I've tried launching again twice since then. Each time it doubles up just Interior Dredmorating on the mod list. No clue why.

EDIT #3: Just noticed that Jay's Megaphoneme Mod is the next one after ID in my mod folder, but does not appear on the list in the mod loader.

So I pulled the phoneme mod out of my mod folder, and tried again. Now Interior Dredmorating only shows up once.

If I put the phoneme mod back, ID shows up double and Jay's Phonemes doesn't show up at all. I've looked at the files of both mods, neither seems to be Interior Dredmorating is not problematic on it's own. They just don't like each-other, at least not on my Mac on RC9.

Both mods make extensive use of the text.xml file, mine adding hundreds of lines and his quite possibly adding a thousand. I'm wondering if we're overflowing some memory limit.


EDIT #4: Problem appears to specific to the phoneme mod. If I put it back in, and remove Interior Dredmorating, the issue still happens. Instead of ID showing up twice, whatever mod is above the phonemes (in this case, Essential Skills II) appears on the list twice, and Jay's Mega Phoneme Mod never shows up.

 

This is not a priority, but I sometimes really, *Really* wish there was a "Pick up all adjacent Zorkmids" binding. You grab all Zorkmids adjacent to you as you walk, but sometimes you need to grab an item without having to move, or your movement choices could be limited. And it could take a dozen turns to grab all the Zorkmids in the pile of bodies to get to the item underneath.

I am certain this has happened to many others. Call it a strategic problem or even defend it as not being needed since it enforces movement, but that argument would be easily shot down by not being able to move diagonally.

In a related, but different problem, when you teleport, you do none of the usual things that you do while walking, like grabbing adjacent Zorkmids and setting off traps. The first can be problematic. The second is helpful. Zorkmids are still pretty useless in later levels, but I suspect that will change with balancing. It would be nice to have these little issues balanced before Zorkmids matters.

I have been considering adding value to Zorkmids via a mod. It would use Zorkmids as mana for it's own spells/skills.

And *Yes* I do happen to know it is Zorkmids. I use gold because of because. So there.

 

I may be have been proven by Nicholas to be retarded, so it may just be me, but I have no clue at all what you're talking about, OmniNegro. Can you give me an example of when you'd need a special Pick Up Gold key?

 

You don't. Since you can't drop zorkmids anyway, it's more sensible to just get rid of the situations where you don't pick it up, like when you teleport.

 

Say there are monsters in a room with an item you want to pick up. And say that you can get next to the item to pick up the item, but while getting there you fight monsters. If one dies on the item, you cannot pick up the item in any way until you first pick up the Zorkmids because they sit on top of the item.

And at times, like when using the Celestial Circle skill, you cannot move to collect all Zorkmids in reach, so you must use a turn for each and every monster that died on that square to pick up the Zorkmids. It does not at current auto-restack, nor put itself under the items that you may want to grab.

As I said, it is not a big issue. It is just annoying to have to move over the item or waste potentially many turns if you prefer to stay where you are and grab the item buried underneath.

Does this clarify well enough? I could make some screenshots to show you what I mean if you like. (No, that is not meant as sarcasm.)

*Edit* In my opinion, this is inconsistent with the behavior of automatically picking up all Zorkmids in range every time you move. I would be satisfied with a button to behave as if you had just moved while not actually moving. Pressing space to wait does not pick it up. But then it does not risk triggering traps too. I would be satisfied if it did the trap roll too, so long as it picked up all Zorkmids in immediate range.

*Extra Edit* I changed all instances of "gold" to "Zorkmids".

 

One situation in which I could see this zorkmid thing being very inconvenient is if a kleptoblobby stole a vital stack of food. Then, after you kill him, for reasons of midas touch, other monsters dropping zorkmids on the same tile, etc., a bunch of zorkmids get in the way and prevent you from getting that food back.

 

Upon further reflection, it would seem that I somehow do not have RC9 installed correctly. That, or RC9 is completely FUBAR on Macs, and no one else has reported it. Which seems really unlikely, so I'm going to go on the assumption that I did something wrong.

Currently, I've got access to everything xml-related, the new recipes, the corrected rooms, fungal arts working the way it's supposed to, etc.

But as near as I can tell, I am experiencing the entirety of the long-standing Mac mod bug. It seemed unlikely that no one else had tried using more than one mod on a Mac since RC7 went up, so I thought I should double-check that my copy thinks on the main screen that it is indeed RC9. Lo and behold, the lower corner of the start-up screen still says 1.0.9 rev B.

Apparently, there are at least three ways to interpret those instructions. I know, because I tried two interpretations of it, and can now only assume that neither has worked. There must be some other way to go about this, that I just am not seeing.

Prior to RC 9, there was nothing on my computer named dredmor.app. I've got the steam build installed. It has one spot where it includes something called Dungeons of Dredmor.app, and another spot where it includes something just called Dredmor (no .app extension) that claims to be executable. I tried comparing both to the Dredmor.app that came in the tarball to see if that would give me any indication what I should do. One was an order of magnitude larger than the version in RC9, the other was an order of magnitude smaller than the version in the RC9 tarball.

First I replaced the smaller one with the new larger one and tried to run it. Crash to desktop before getting to the mod-loader screen. So I asked here and on IRC if anyone could walk me through the correct install. I got no responses, so after a couple hours, I tried again myself by interpreting it a different way.

I restored from backup, and then copied the new Dredmor.app over the old. That seemed to fix it, as the game now launched, and I immediately got to see new fungal arts, new crafting recipes, and run two mods at once (swiftstriker and ID worked just fine other than the double-y-ness mentioned in one of my other posts). I played for a couple hours, things were great. Then I got my character killed, and decided to try loading more than two mods at once. That's when I hit all the problems mentioned in my other posts... which suspiciously sounded like 1.0.9 rev B problems, so I looked and saw that my main screen things it's on rev b, as previously stated.

Grr. Sigh of shame. What am I doing wrong?

So, I'm repeating my request from the other day:

Could someone who has a Mac and has RC9 installed, and feels they could walk a total idiot through the RC9 installation process please post for me a detailed step-by-step guide to installing RC9 on a Mac? Please include the folder location of the Dredmor.app you're copying things onto, because I can't seem to find the right file.

And, in case no one has the time or patience to do that, I'll make a second, easier request. Could someone please verify for me what the start-up screen is supposed to say? Does it indicate that it's on RC9?

Please? I could really use some help here.

 

Thank you for the personal reply.

At least now I know that my bug is legit. I think.

I'm really quite sure I _did_ copy it over Dungeons of Dredmor.app, the second time. Despite that certainty, my screen still says 1.0.9 rev B, and the massive bug I'm encountering is suspiciously similar to the known 1.0.9 bug that the changelog says you fixed.

I will download RC9 again, and copy it over it again, just to make sure I didn't hallucinate the entire process before. (Those pesky CIA agents better not be enrolling me in their MK Ultra program without my permission again. )

If that doesn't work, I'll just sit tight for 24-ish hours, since it sounds like the full version of the patch goes live tomorrow.

EDIT:

It would be nice. Thank you.

Thank you again. That is very helpful. If that level of detail where in the instructions on the original post, it would have saved me a lot of confusion.

 

1. I am totally okay with patches taking a long time. My only issue with the way things have been done with this current build is that the random crashes and save-eating bugs have been in 1.0.09, and they are only now getting fixed. It hasn't bothered me too much, but I worry about what it is like for other people just coming into DoD for the first time (after the big Christmas sale, for example). How would they feel? I wonder if there are people out there who started playing the game, got screwed over by those crash or save bugs, and then decided not to come back because of that...that would make me very sad, because i feel like this game deserves a lot of attention. And also, they would miss out on lots of diggles in their life.

I guess what I'm saying is that in the future, if there are ever super horrible bugs like that, just a quick hotfix (after a few days of testing to be safe) would be preferred over making people wait for weeks/months for the larger patch that fixes lots of other things, rebalances, etc. Otherwise, taking your time like you did this time is certainly preferred.

2. I think Gaslamp has done a great job working on all three fronts simultaneously. No complaints, would not change anything really.

3. I feel like Gaslamp Games and its programmers and and other folk have been incredibly open, accessible, and transparent for a small dev. I imagine that this must take up a ton of time and effort beyond an 8 hour a day job, for sure. So I am pretty humbled by how great you've all been. When I had a concern, it was always directly addressed very quickly and politely.

4. Steam Cloud could be really useful since there's two computers in my household. Might try my hand at workshop.

5. Thursday?

 

My $.02...

• Is it better to have patches once every three months (say), but knowing that they have gone through the level of inspection that this patch has? Or has this been too slow?

I think the three months and a great patch works much better for the masses while a faster release schedule with less comprehensive testing/fixes would be better for the die-hards. My vote is for the three month/well tested patch.

• How concerned are you about: a) balance issues b) software bugs c) user-interface issues? How do you feel that these things have been addressed, or not addressed?

a) I haven't played the beta versions but it sounds like melee got buffed significantly. I would say that was the one major area out of balance from my experience. A lot of the minor balance tweaks seem right on to me
b) I think you guys did a great job fixing all the really annoying ones
c) Most have been addressed but my biggest user-interface? gripe has to do with crafting and inventory. While characters shouldn't be able to carry *everything* it's really annoying playing a character with multiple crafting skills.

• How do you feel about how the things that have bothered you have been addressed?

You guys did an awesome job listening to the community and don't feel bad that you have to get the patch released. I think most of us realize that it's not feasible that *everything* can get fixed. I've never seen a gaming company this involved with their players and solicit so much feedback, big kudos.

• Are you going to be using any of the new features (Steam Cloud, Steam Workshop)? Was this worth our time?

I'll definitely take a look at them but can't say for sure right now. The ability to easily add mods could be a huge hit and might get a lot more casual games into using the mods/deeper into Dredmor.

• Are you as worried about Thursday as I am?