Huge bug at ABI

[Dark Reality]

Great work on the first part of ABI by the way, guys. A lot of the mod is impressive but this is among the best.

I'm taking the back/side way in, took out half a dozen guards, did the stupid*little jump puzzle (btw, the jump down after the first ladder seems to be based too much on luck), went up, broke the glass (ice?) and sniped off a couple guys, retreated back into the caverns to hide. The alarms went off, and I'm just thinking "OK, I'll just kick it here until they forget about me." (Oldest trick in the DX book.) I'm waiting... then I notice I can't move. At all. I try to quickload, and the Vista/7 "working" cursor comes up over my crosshairs. I hit / again, and it tells me the program has stopped responding.

No Unreal Engine error message, I just hit cancel, eventually it just quit and dropped me back on the desktop. Something about the alarm, I also heard dogs barking, not sure at all what did it. It's late though, I gotta get some sleep, hopefully somebody can advise on this. Oh yeah, spoilers... tagging... done. Spoiler tags hiding ABI intel; if you haven't been there yet, or especially if you don't know what that means... highlight at your own discretion.

ABI reminds me of the end of Invisible War, but already it's more impressive.

The original DX needs your "press escape to skip" feature you use when going to ABI. Leaving the graveyard after talking to Dowd is the worst. Does Jock really need to do a 720 degree spiral in slow motion prior to heading for the superfreighter? Or was somebody at Ion Storm feeling particularly sadistic or vindictive?

*The 'stupid' remark wasn't at all a slight against TNM, but jump puzzles aren't really befitting the Unreal Engine, I don't think. Maybe if it were third-person? There's this medieval game also based on the Unreal Engine, started with an F, I think. Fate, Fable, neither of those but close. Anyway, it was pretty, but it was one bloody jump puzzle after the next. I bought it, but I had to give up on it. *2 minutes on Wikipedia later* OK, way off. It was Rune. Still...

[Hassat Hunter]

Probably the famous tnmdoberman crash...

[Dark Reality]

I see. So doing killall TNMDoberman is the solution?

[JC_Helios]

just to be safe you might want to killall spiderbot2 as well, 2 or 3 people reported that spider causing freezes in that same map.

EDIT: Meh, already mentioned in that topic.

[Dark Reality]

OK, it's more than that.

I did 'killall' on both 'tnmdoberman' and 'spiderbot2'. Everything was going good until I met Rey Mysterio or whatever his name is in the game and he told me to disable the security systems. I'm running around looking for a terminal, alarms go off. 2 guys come in, pop pop pop, they die, I search them, look some more, 1 more person comes in, pop pop, he's dead too, search him, look some more... then it crashed.

[Hassat Hunter]

Is that inside ABI?

Because bots have the nasty habit to crash too (the one in the Ruins trying to kill the mechanic for example in the rare case it can actually find, target and kill it...)

[Dark Reality]

Yes, or at least I think it's inside ABI. Not the secret labs I'm supposed to be going for. This is more of a factory setting. You come up from the hole in the ground, like I said before... behind you there's that guard shack, to the left those gates... dead ahead's a building with INF/INF doors, looks like an administrative building. The building to the right of it, the one with the snipers on the roof initially. And of course the Mexican wrestler - I know Rey Mysterio isn't the only one who dresses like that, he's just by far the most well known, since WWE doesn't employ any others, and as far as I know, TNA, their biggest competitor, doesn't, either.

[Hassat Hunter]

This is the most recent thread I could find about the TNMDoberman issue, so therefore I decided to rezz this one. In my most recent game I noticed a severe amount of TNMDoberman related crashes, unlike any amount I ever had before.

My most recent save became pretty handy in tracing the source, because as soon as I turn the milbots friendly I can expect imminent crashing (100% guaranteed!). And they only shot 1 guard and 1 dog... hmmm. Wait? Aren't they supposed to be patrolling with 2? A reload later and manually killing of the guard showed me that he definitely was the cause. So where was his dog that caused this bug? I found it here:

Hi! I am TNMDoberman3, and will crash your game as soon as you kill my boss. I probably shouldn't be here... ;)

and, not unsurprisingly, killing it, then the guard left me crashless (unlike killing the guard without the dog). I think this specific area and the tubes near the maingate should have BlockMonster zones in 1.0.3, that should severly lessen TNMDoberman crashes already.

[Jonas]

The dobermen have been removed in version 1.0.3.

[Skilgannon]

The dobermen have been removed in version 1.0.3.

Aawwww, you got rid of the doggies! Actually that's a good thing as I'm always filled with guilt whenever I have to kill a dog in a game.

[Hassat Hunter]

But KK will still mention the guarddogs probably not?
Since the crashes are caused by stuck monsters BlockMonsters could potentially almost eliminate it, no?

[Jonas]

I'm not confident in my ability to sort out Unreal's shitty path finding. The guard dog mention will now forever be a reference to early versions of the game, and so be it.

[Hassat Hunter]

And moving around the patrols to less geometry-intensive areas (like the parking lot) is a no-go either?

I like my doggies.

You're so soft and fluffy! -Trestkon

[Dark Reality]

I'm not confident in my ability to sort out Unreal's shitty path finding. The guard dog mention will now forever be a reference to early versions of the game, and so be it.

For what it's worth, you could drop a few Doberman corpses and a few WC troop corpses, since, y'know, they did raid the place. You don't start seeing WC until you're in the catacombs, but if ABI is that heavily guarded, surely they would have taken casualties sooner? I suppose we can presume WC came in through the main gates, so rather than starting the trail of WC/ABI bodies in the Catacombs and research labs, just start it a little sooner. Then KK winds up with less pie in his face when he tells you about guard dogs and instead of there not being any, there are some, only WC's taken care of them for you.

FWIW, back on XP (Vista/7 can suck my user I/O port), I went through ABI without crashing. All the dogs, and the part with Rey Mysterio in the factory (or whatever that skinner's name is). Didn't do the 'killall' codes either.

[Jonas]

I never got any ABI crashes in either XP or Windows 7, nor did Lawrence with Vista.