Flight History - Bug?

PANI

Spaceman
hi again - i was wondering to see, that the flight history isn't in the right "timeorder".... is this bug known, if this is one?

regards
 
Yes, this is a bug (WCP - not ours). It's got something to do with some kind of changes in Windows between 1998 and 2005. Not sure exactly when it appeared - for example, I've only been encountering this bug since I changed my computer in May. I now have XP... and before, I had XP. But others have been encountering this bug much longer, so go figure :p.

Anyway, the bug is caused by the way WCP stores savegames. The flight history is actually a set of separate savegame files, one for each mission. Each mission file is referred to by a number... and while originally, this worked fine, for some reason these days, the game believes that after "1" comes "10" rather than "2". So basically, the mission order is - 0, 1, 10, 11 ... 19, 2, 20, 22 ... 29, etc.

The problem is easily fixable - all we'd have to do is renumber the missions so as to skip the first ten numbers, and start off with number 10. Unfortunately, if we did that, we would force every single Standoff user to delete their savegames and start over from scratch, which we don't want to do (and we definitely don't want to release two different versions).
 
Quarto said:
The problem is easily fixable - all we'd have to do is renumber the missions so as to skip the first ten numbers, and start off with number 10. Unfortunately, if we did that, we would force every single Standoff user to delete their savegames and start over from scratch, which we don't want to do (and we definitely don't want to release two different versions).

Hmm.. couldn't you find some way to reorder savegames in the next episode that does this? If you know how to fix it, and it's something along the lines of making 1s into 01s and 2s into 02s, then can't you just rename them rather than force the game to start over making new savegames? I don't know the specifics of the fix, but alternately, couldn't you incorporate something that adds ten units to the identifier of each current savegame and then begin episode 3 savegames at a higher number?
 
The problem is not making the game auto-rename people's existing savegames or anything along those lines... the problem is that there's a few files (the ones which hold the campaign tree information, and such) which go berserk on savegames after you edit them.

Re-numbering the missions would require us to edit these files, and therefore, anyone who loaded their old savegames after having installed our "patched" campaign files would get all sorts of weird bugs everywhere in the game.

At this stage, we can't even do something as simple as adding an extra global variable to the game without corrupting people's savegames (not that we weren't ready for that... we even have variables named something like "Extra_Variable_12" in case we need them :p The flight history bug went unnoticed until after Ep 1's release, though).
 
Yep. The game is very twitchy about savegame files.

We probably will release a patch for this bug after episode 5 is finished - once the game is done, it won't be a problem for us to make an alternative, renumbered version.
 
(But people will nevertheless need to start over if they wish to use the patched version).
 
Eder said:
(But people will nevertheless need to start over if they wish to use the patched version).

Hmm.. so could you just release the patch with or before episode 3 so then people would only have to replay the first two episodes? If they haven't yet done episode 2, like me, they'd only need to replay the first episode at this point. If you're going to make another starter pack with 1-3, you could include it in that, and then by the time the run is complete, there'll be no need for a separate version or patch anymore really.
 
the other savegames, which the player makes, are still functional. only the "flight history savegames" have to patch. i had also the idea to call them s01 (s1)....

regards
 
Quarto said:
the game believes that after "1" comes "10" rather than "2". So basically, the mission order is - 0, 1, 10, 11 ... 19, 2, 20, 22 ... 29, etc.

0, 1, 10...
1, 2, 3, 5...

Now I see where you get your math from Q. :p

That's a windows problem I believe. If you get a lot of files numbered, say, from 1 to 35 and get windows to arrange it in alphabetical order, it will work like this too (if I am not mistaken)
1, 10, 11 ... 19, 2, 20 ... 29, 3, 30 ... 35, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
 
KillerWave said:
That's a windows problem I believe. If you get a lot of files numbered, say, from 1 to 35 and get windows to arrange it in alphabetical order, it will work like this too (if I am not mistaken)
1, 10, 11 ... 19, 2, 20 ... 29, 3, 30 ... 35, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Actually I believe this WAS a Windows/DOS problem. DOS and Win9x did what you say. However XP does sort the files right (at least in the Explorer).
Checking - ok, it is ONLY the Explorer. The command shell still does lexicographic ordering.
 
cff said:
Actually I believe this WAS a Windows/DOS problem. DOS and Win9x did what you say. However XP does sort the files right (at least in the Explorer).
Checking - ok, it is ONLY the Explorer. The command shell still does lexicographic ordering.
Well, whatever it is that XP changed, apparently it broke WCP, even if it fixed the problem anywhere else :p.
 
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