My game's a mess, please help (Disappearing Rock Raiders in Frozen Frenzy)

[Mizuumi]

So, first things first I'm gonna try to quickly lay out where I am and how I got here.

 

I'm running Windows 10, Radeon HD 7800, i3-3240, 8GB ram.

 

In my initial install, I had a couple graphical improvement mods, QoL improvement mods, Community Edition, etc. However I wound up trimming things back greatly because I kept running into problems. In particular I couldn't get through Explosive Action because either the game would crash halfway through or the objective simply wouldn't complete when I brought the digger back.

 

So after taking a machete to all my mods, my game setup is as follows: dgVoodoo, the Music Fix, Cafeteria 1.0 beta, @Cyrem's Improvements Pack installed and built via Cafeteria (data method enabled), then some tweaks from @aidenpons' Improvements Pack and a few of my own selectively applied by hand to the modded Lego.cfg. (I don't have aidenpons' whole mod installed anymore as that seemed to be a source of a lot of conflicts, I've just looked through the Lego.cfg in their data method files and copied over the values I wanted to change.) I also copied over a few of the level folders from aiden's mod for the ones that the OP specified had changed, but I've yet to play any of those levels to see if they work correctly (I do have the Lego.cfg referring to the correct map files for those levels though). I also have @Cirevam's Extended Dynamite Countdown and Super Sonic Blaster manually installed in the Data folder. I am NOT using Community Edition, as I found it seemed to be the cause of my frequent crashes, as well as messed up lighting.

 

After a looOOOOooot of trial and error and screwing around, my installation has finally proven to be mostly stable, with I think just one crash thus far on my current setup. However, now I've reached a new problem: Frozen Frenzy, It seems to have something to do with either Monsters or Recharge Seams, seeing as how it's the first level that contains both. The issue that occurs is that sometimes spontaneously all of my crystals will de-charge, and then all my Rock Raiders will suddenly disappear from the map (still consuming oxygen though). It's been triggered 3 different ways on my 3 attempts: twice shortly after the death of an Ice Monster, with the risk seemingly increased when there are a lot of units on the map, and once when I brought in a Small Laser Cutter. Upon firing the laser, all my crystals were immediately de-charged, and when my raiders tried to recharge them, they once again all evaporated into thin air.

 

I've been trying my hardest to solve these issues on my own the past couple days, but at this point I'm at my wit's end and I have no clue where I should even start trying to fix an issue like this. So, does anyone have any idea what might be going on here?

 

 

Also, a small side question: Is there any way to play the game in an un-stretched widescreen resolution with Cafeteria 1.0? 0.93 has the options for other resolutions but they didn't seem to actually change anything for me. I eventually found the best I could do to get an un-stretched 4:3 game was to set the resolution to 1280x800 in dgVoodoo (any other resolution would just default back to stretched 640x480 no matter what I tried) which is good enough, but the extra screen real estate would certainly be nice if it's doable. My main monitor is 1600x900, which might be part of the problem since it's a bit of an odd resolution.

[Cyrem]

2 hours ago, Mizuumi said:

I am NOT using Community Edition, as I found it seemed to be the cause of my frequent crashes, as well as messed up lighting.

 

Which version were you using?

 

The mention of lighing issue is a suprise as the source of that is usually dgVoodoo. CE doesn't change lighting. You mentioned that you have the crystal drain bug and disappearing raiders, CE fixes the crystal drain and is known to fix the disappearing raiders on some levels.

 

dgVoodoo can cause crashes itself so its always good to double check by testing either with DDrawCompat or without a wrapper.

 

[Mizuumi]

About to head to bed so I don't have time to do any more thorough experimenting or testing tonight, but I tried using CE again and it seems like this time my setup plays more nicely with it, as I was able to play for ~an hour of ingame time without any crashes. However, while the "crystals all randomly discharging" glitch didn't pop up, even with me spamming lasers, I did at a certain point look around and realize all my men who weren't in vehicles had, once again, evaporated into thin air, seemingly around when an Ice Monster or two spawned, and/or when I teleported a Loader Dozer in? I didn't notice right away so I'm not sure exactly when it happened. The monsters WERE able to briefly pull them back into this dimension to toss them around a bit before they would vanish again, but... yeah. Couldn't teleport new raiders in without them also disappearing either (except for one who managed to blink into the nearby unoccupied dozer)

 

EDIT: Oh, and the version of CE I was/am using is 1.0.2.2

[aidenpons]

Cyrem said a lot of things directly related to your problem at hand, but I also have a bit to say

 

On 10/25/2019 at 7:36 AM, Mizuumi said:

then some tweaks from @aidenpons' Improvements Pack and a few of my own selectively applied by hand to the modded Lego.cfg. (I don't have aidenpons' whole mod installed anymore as that seemed to be a source of a lot of conflicts, I've just looked through the Lego.cfg in their data method files and copied over the values I wanted to change.)

 

What was it conflicting with? Providing it was down the very bottom of Cafeteria (mods at the bottom are patched in first, mods at the top are patched in last) there should be no issues.

 

Quote

I also have Cirevam's Extended Dynamite Countdown and Super Sonic Blaster manually installed in the Data folder.

Data, or DataSource? Depending on how you set Cafeteria up, and whether you told it to use the Data Method or not, Cafeteria will use two folders: Data and DataSource. Data is rebuilt from scratch every time you hit the Rebuild button. So if you put those mods in the Data folder manually and launch LRR they'll work. Hit the Rebuild button on Cafeteria and they'll vanish from existence. Put them in the DataSource folder & then hit the Rebuild button.

 

On 10/25/2019 at 7:36 AM, Mizuumi said:

my installation has finally proven to be mostly stable, with I think just one crash thus far on my current setup.

LRR is inherently unstable and I can usually get a 70% success rate on levels (the remaining 30% of the time it crashes on me). So some crashing is expected.

 

 

 

On 10/25/2019 at 7:36 AM, Mizuumi said:

I am NOT using Community Edition, as I found it seemed to be the cause of my frequent crashes, as well as messed up lighting.

I have found that applying Compatibility Mode for XP SP2 has vastly reduced the crash rate of CE, although I'm yet to test it enough to see if this is something that remains instead of just fluke.

 

As for the messed up lighting, do you mean this?

Spoiler

How shadows aren't applied to tiles and only some of the time on walls which just looks a little glitchy, when it's supposed to look like

 

Spoiler

 where the cursor behaves as a spotlight?

 

Yeah, that's only on a per-level basis. The source of this is much more likely to be my Improvements Pack. To illustrate, copy out a new LRR installation and put Cafeteria on it. Tell Cafeteria to enable Improvements Pack and load any level you like. The lighting should be stuffed up as per the first screenshot. Shut LRR, tell Cafeteria to rebuild without Improvements Pack. Load that level you did before and the lighting should work.

Current estimates for a cause are ????????????

Seriously, I have almost no clue why it happens, but I've noticed when it does.

 

19 hours ago, Mizuumi said:

About to head to bed so I don't have time to do any more thorough experimenting or testing tonight, but I tried using CE again and it seems like this time my setup plays more nicely with it, as I was able to play for ~an hour of ingame time without any crashes. However, while the "crystals all randomly discharging" glitch didn't pop up, even with me spamming lasers, I did at a certain point look around and realize all my men who weren't in vehicles had, once again, evaporated into thin air, seemingly around when an Ice Monster or two spawned, and/or when I teleported a Loader Dozer in? I didn't notice right away so I'm not sure exactly when it happened. The monsters WERE able to briefly pull them back into this dimension to toss them around a bit before they would vanish again, but... yeah. Couldn't teleport new raiders in without them also disappearing either (except for one who managed to blink into the nearby unoccupied dozer)

 

EDIT: Oh, and the version of CE I was/am using is 1.0.2.2

 

Did you enable the DivideByNeo fix on CE's launch box? That's this box, by the way:

 

Spoiler

 

It is rumored that that this might fix the issue, or at least help it out.

 

There's some musing on the glitch over here, if you want to do some reading. There's a particularly relevant bit here. Are you restarting your PC occasionally? I don't mean Shut Down & turn on, as Windows' idea of a "Shut Down," unless you explicitly disable it in a forgotten setting, is "Log off and hibernate," which doesn't do what we want - whereas Restart will. (Good explanation by other competent people here, by the way) So restarting your PC may very genuinely help LRR out.

 

The glitch can be reliably triggered by a) screwing with Digging with Vehicles tutorial or b) using the Tunnel Transport, but I don't think you were using either of these.

 

Oh, and

On 10/25/2019 at 7:36 AM, Mizuumi said:

the objective simply wouldn't complete when I brought the digger back.

The launch option -programmer enables Debug Keys and from there you can hit Ctrl+S to win a level. I think CE borked something with recorded objects but I need to look into this myself before making any conclusions. I suspect Run the Gauntlet will similarly break.

 

 

TL;DR

- LRR likes to crash anyway

- Stuffed up lighting is a per-level basis

- CE has DivideByNeo fix which may fix the disappearing raiders, also try restarting your PC

 

[Mizuumi]

Thank you for the thorough response @aidenpons, sorry for taking.... uh, three months!! I guess!!! to respond!!! oof!!! It's been an incredibly busy period for me and my interest in the game has been very on and off, so I wasn't really checking back here much.

 

I guess I'll go over where my situation's at now: I switched over to Baz's Mod, and I can't quite remember if I added any other mods, but I think I decided to just play it as safe as possible and not install anything else, instead just manually tweaking lego.cfg a good bit to incorporate some of the fixes I wanted from the 2 improvement packs and tweak various settings to my own liking. I'm using CE and not using Cafeteria, since as far as I could figure out there wasn't any way to make Cafeteria launch the CE executable correctly.

 

Part of why my interest waned so much was because the issues with crashing and game-breaking bugs just became more and more intolerable. There were a good number of levels I had to debug mode ctrl+s past, because they would crash during the home stretch after sinking an hour in, or my raiders would all disappear, or the tutorial-based objectives wouldn't complete. By the time i was halfway through the game, i was running into lots of levels that would 100% consistently crash after getting some amount in, and it was just way too frustrating to deal with.

 

And then a week or so ago, I did two things: fixed a broken change I'd made to STTs, and cranked up the video memory in DGVoodoo, and I haven't had a single crash since. Other than my hand crashing into my face for being so dumb. 

 

I am still having problems though, especially in the later huge entity-laden levels like Hot Stuff and Rocky Horror. Despite having both the CryDrain and DivideByNeo fixes enabled, I'm still having problems with my raiders disappearing, either from crystals being drained or from raiders attempting to recharge them, I'm not sure which. It doesn't always happen and seems to be a greater risk once a base is more developed and there's a lot going on. I also completely disabled the ability for monsters to grab raiders some time back, because that was another trigger for one or all of my raiders to disappear or get trapped in an animation loop.

 

However, I think that thread on Idleness Syndrome (another issue I've often run into) and the other info you linked might be a big help. Restarting the computer and having fewer raiders seem like very promising leads, as I do tend to notice an increase in game-breaking bugs after long play sessions, and at points in missions where I have a lot of units with a lot of potential tasks to complete. And it would help explain why these problems are cropping up so much for me in the last couple days particularly - normally I shut down my computer about every night (though until now I did unknowingly have the Win10 Fast Startup option enabled) but in the last half-week I've developed the worst flu of my life and I've been sleeping at essentially random times, so I haven't really been going through Bedtime Rituals like shutting down my PC, ahah.

 

So I think this info already does help a lot! Knowing in the future to restart my PC when I start having issues in-game, and to lean even harder into the approach I've had in my own personal tweaks, of making raiders far faster and better, but consuming more oxygen thus limiting the number that can teleport in. If there are any other tips, tweaks, or mods that could help out with preventing the disappearing raiders glitch though, I am all ears!

[Cyrem]

16 hours ago, Mizuumi said:

I'm using CE and not using Cafeteria, since as far as I could figure out there wasn't any way to make Cafeteria launch the CE executable correctly.

 

Perhaps you're using an older version of Cafeteria? Cafeteria should have no issue launching CE. In fact if it finds CE, it will launch it instead of standard LRR. Maybe check for the latest versions of Cafeteria and CE. CE 1.0.3 is out which adds back resolution support.

 

I'm fairly certain disappearing raiders is a graphics card compatibility issue as I've been able to cause it on demand through various experiments with d3d, I usually have no such issue otherwise. The issue isn't caused by the things you've disabled as the issue's apparent cause is almost different for every one who has it, but really the real issue is occurred somewhere upstream of the visible effect.

 

I've researched idleness syndrome much beyond the topic that discusses it and I'm closing in on a solution. But it is much to do with Rock Raider tasks.