I am having problems with any new quest events I create not firing. All the old ones which were in the design before this latest update seems to still work fine. But I created two new quests, and no matter how I try to get them into the party (I have tried many various event trees, and even tried to flat out put it in the party with an 'Always happens, automaically accept' Quest stage event) the event never takes place. Even with all the various methods I tried, the same error message always turns up in the UafErr_Eng.txt log :

0036e0aa Event 115 triggered: always triggers
0036e0aa Quest Event 115 at -1,-1 level 0 not triggered (Curr=65002, Quest=1)

Anyone have any clue as to why this is happening or what specifically this message means? Sadly, it will be very difficult to do any more work until I can get this problem resolved.

Thanks for your help!

I am very unskilled at these things. But I can tell you
what the code says.

The only reason I can see this happening is that the
quest stage is not what the event specified. The quest
stage is 65002 and the event stage is 1. The trigger
condition is that 65002 is equal to (1-1)...obviously
not true.

As to why the quest is at stage 65002?????? No idea.

[ 09-15-2003, 09:15 AM: Message edited by: Paul Stevens ]

Yeah, I even went so far as to put a utilities event which is supposed to put the value 0 into the quest before trying to set the quest stage to 1. The utilities event fired (as seen in the log), but the same error occured.

OK... I created a new design and added a quest and planted
a 'Quest Stage' event at location 1,0. Result:

00cbc34a Event 1 triggered: always triggers
00cbc34b Event 1 at 1,0 level 0 is triggered
00cbc34b Quest Event 1 at 1,0 level 0 is triggered (Curr=0, Quest=1)

So....what is that -1,-1 business? What kind of quest event
is at location -1,-1? Something special happening here. Any
ideas? Is this a step event or something?

Wonderful, wonderful. I tried a 'step' event and this
happened to me:

00f348ed Event 2 triggered: quest present
00f348ee Event 2 at -1,-1 level 0 is triggered
00f348ef Quest Event 2 at -1,-1 level 0 not triggered (Curr=65002, Quest=1)

So now that I can make it happen, we can figure out what is
going on. Stay tuned.

Oooops. That was a simple mistake on my part.
In the 'Step Event' I had forgotten to specify
which quest I was interested in. The absence
of a quest results in the 65002 value. After
putting in the name of the quest the following:

01328979 Event 2 triggered: always triggers
01328979 Event 2 at -1,-1 level 0 is triggered
0132ae74 Quest Event 2 at -1,-1 level 0 is triggered (Curr=0, Quest=1)
0132b1a0 Marking event 2 happened

So we are back to square 1.

Are you working with a 'Step Event'? Did you edit
the event and specify the quest name? Is there such
a quest in the 'Edit Quests' list?

Hey Paul.

No, I am not working with Step events, specifically I am working within a Question Yes/No event. (But the problem exhibits itself outside that event).

Yes to the quest being selected in the Quest Stage event box, and Yes, the Quest exists in the Edit quests box as well.

Although I will go back and check it all again.

OK. I see that the -1,-1 is listed for the x,y
coordinates when an event is a chained event or for a
step event. That answers one of my questions. Three or
four to go.

Let us get out of here. I doubt that many people are
interested in this. We can post the final resolution if
it seems helpful. Write me privately. My
email address is in my profile settings. If all else
fails, we can arrange to ship your design to me.

please do post what you finally come up with. i'm interested and may want to stick it in the faq.

-manikus

Well, I think I know where the problem (if it is in fact a problem) lies and how to get around it.

Save Game files.

It seems that when you save your design, then run it for a while, then save it, then change the design and re-load the saved game, wierd stuff starts happening. Perhaps one of the devs can explain why, but clearly when you save a game, change the design, the reload that saved game, the results can be....unpredictable...

When I re-ran my mod from the start without using the save game, everything seemed to work fine. I'm guessing that when you save the game, it puts some hooks into the various databases the game uses, and when you change those databases some of those hooks may not be valid and screwyness ensues.

This is good news in the respect that I can get back to work on my mod. Bad news for a couple of points. 1) The idea we were talking about a 'persistent' DC world will not work. 2) This stresses the importance of testing your design THOUROUGHLY. If a problem occurs with your design after it has been released, and you need to 'patch' it, it will mean that anyone who has been playing it for a while will need to start again from scratch.

Unless I am totally wrong about this (and hopefully the devs will let us know), those two points will exist unless the design changes (which I know can be difficult).

Thanks again for everyone's input!

In my view, this is a terrible problem. I have
written privately to Cocoa Spud to see what he
thinks. I will let you know what we conclude.

65002 is MAX_QUEST_STAGE+1, and is returned by the quest lookup function
when it cannot find the asked for quest.

We store all quests in the saved game file. So what's probably happening is that you play a design and save the game. Then use the editor to add new quests and events that reference the quests. Now play the edited design and load the saved game and the old quests replace all of the new ones. When you trigger one of your new events, it tries to reference a quest that was removed by loading the saved game.

I think we can fix this problem. Looking at the code it appears that the same problem exists for special items and keys too.

Do you understand what has happened here? I will say what
I understand.

There are two sets of files: 1)The Design and 2) The SaveGame.
When you edit a design you naturally edit the 'Design' files.
So, if you add a quest, you add it only to the 'Design' files
and not to any 'Savegame' files that are lying about.

When you save a game, all the quests are written to the 'Savegame'
files. When you load a savegame, the program discards any
quests that are in the 'Design' files and loads all quests from
the 'Savegame' files. So any quests that you added to the 'Design'
files after saving the game will not be there!!!!

CocoaSpud tells me that he is going to change the behaviour of
the program when it loads a savegame. Instead of deleting all the
quests from the 'Design' files and replacing them with the quests
from the 'Savegame' files, he will update the 'Design' file quests
with the 'Savegame' quests. If the same quest exists in both
files then the 'Design' quest will be replaced with the 'Savegame'
quest. If the quest exists in only one of the files then it, of
course, will be used.

There are some additional, rather technical, details that make this
possible....a little foresight by CocoaSpud several years ago has
paid off.