Prox mine weirdness

[Tsathoggua]

Having trouble (in a manner of speaking, although in this particular case it could have been worse)

 

Just sent in my most highly trained crack assault team to a terror ship, that the pilots had intercepted and brought crashing down in the arctic, after following it at standoff range to get it out of the dense trees and avoid a nasty close range and messy fight against a bunch of snipers hiding in the jungle terrain, and into the snows before hitting it with a pair of avalanche missiles to soften it up then bringing it screaming down from the skies, smoking and burning by means of repeated blasts from the interceptor's onboard plasma cannon.

 

The craft was when found, quite honestly, a smoking ruined MESS. Not a great deal left, bottom deck was an insurance writeoff to say the very least. Wouldn't be flying off to the nearest elerium filling station, let alone back to cydonia. A few bits of cover, but otherwise the power cores had all blown, punching holes in the deck above from the explosions. Outside was infested with a few snakemen. Two fell immediately upon being spotted by the laser tank, and a trooper inside the ship shouldering his blaster launcher and dropping a missile in between the pair of them, 3-4 tiles away from either. Result-snakemen completely evaporated, leaving nothing but a set of heavy plasma, grenades and plasma rifles, Hehe, trooper sent the guided missile zooming up into the skies before dropping it with a bounce right at their....errr..............errm...feet??? or at least, where feet should BEn, let alone back to cydonia. A few bits of cover, but otherwise the power cores had all blown, punching holes in the deck above from the explosions. Outside was infested with a few snakemen. Two fell immediately upon being spotted by the laser tank, and a trooper inside the ship shouldering his blaster launcher and dropping a missile in between the pair of them, 3-4 tiles away from either. Result-snakemen completely evaporated, leaving nothing but a set of heavy plasma, grenades and plasma rifles, Hehe, trooper sent the guided missile zooming up into the skies before dropping it with a bounce right at their....errr..............errm...feet??? or at least, where feet should BE.

 

Chryssalid comes howling out of a door, only to be turned back by the firestorm left there for just such an occasion by the autocannon gunner with their incendiaries. Next turn, gets heavy plasma right in the face.

 

To prevent a repeat of that incident, only going less in the team's favour, the doors were both mined with proximity grenades until such time as the team is ready to storm the UFO and slaughter the inhabitants.

 

Then comes the strange bit. Accident of gremlin-infested laptop mousepad, being more oversensitive than a 13 year old girl after a bottle of vodka (before anyone gets the wrong idea, the sole reason this has been experienced, is that at one point in his life, believe it or not, Tsathoggua WAS that age himself. Shocking, I know, but he was. He may have been a bit of an...odd..kid with stranger interests and hobbies but he did nevertheless start as a foetus and get older from then on, and of course spent a lot of time around that age drinking and smoking weed with others of contemporary age, Anyhow his point is that he is not hanging around parks plying young girls with spirits for any untoward purpose, lol. If he hangs around parks to ply anyone with anything its to ply himself with a full collecting basket full of tasty wild fungal delicacies for supper:D)

 

But anyhow, cursed mousepad sent soldier off like an idiot straight onto the landmine. Thought he was going to end up as pink mist, but no, it didn't go off. Nor when the problem repeated itself and another suicidal trooper ran up to join the first at his side, doubtless leaving soldier no.1 in need of a change of under armor.

 

No explosion. And as it had happened there was a damn chryssalid in the UFO on ground floor. Didn't get away with owt, as a trooper tossed in a HE demo charge, making one sodding big mess then stormed the craft from both sides simultaneously, with a rocket launcher trooper and one with a blaster launcher camped outside each door just waiting for anything not human to poke its head out of one of those doors.

 

But that prox mine wasn't the first to prove a dud. vanilla ufo. What gives?

[magic9mushroom]

- Did you arm the proximity grenade?

- Did you save and reload at any point prior to the dud?

 

All proximity grenades that have been armed are rendered duds upon save and reload (the list of active mines is not saved); this is a known bug.

[NKF]

And if none of the above, how long had you been playing the game straight? That is, without exiting the game. Sometimes the game gets a bit wonky if played for too long and weird things happen, as you've probably experienced first hand a number of times. Granted, bugs caused by playing for too long generally applies more to the CE/Gold version of the game, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of the Dos version being affected similarly under certain circumstances.

 

One possibility is that the game set proximity mine flag, but it ended up on some other item in the item table.

 

- NKF

[Tsathoggua]

Definitely armed the prox mine(s-this was not an isolated occurrence), and by time the game has been running, do you mean the length in game time that has elapsed since starting the new game or do you mean the length of time the software itself has been running continually?

[Zombie]

To be honest, I'm not sure. I never had trouble (even while using AutoHotKey to gather thousands of data points over the course of 8-9 hours), but I was reloading from a save. So maybe it's a continuous game where the problem happens. I assume that maybe there's a memory leak somewhere, but you should be able to tell that from Windows Task Manager if the game is suddenly using more memory than it should.

 

- Zombie

[NKF]

I was thinking of the length of time you've been continuously playing the game from the time you loaded it up until the event happened.

 

Unfortunately there are any number of things that can cause problems with old games like this, right down to what sort of hardware you're using. If you can reliably replicate it, then we can have a field day dissecting it and explain what's happening. One off bugs or crashes are a bit harder.

 

- NKF

[Tsathoggua]

Its happened a few times. So chances are it might just potentially, maybe, happen again. (watch it never show itself again for the next ten years now:P)