[XP] Need Help Finding an Intermittent Bug!

[Heretic86]

I have an Animation Bug in a Battle System that I wrote.

http://downloads.chaos-project.com/here ... cripts.exe

My biggest problem is not my ability to Script, but to actually RECREATE THE BUG ITSELF. The Bug occurs RARELY. What I'd like to ask is to find the conditions of how to RECREATE THE BUG, REPEATEDLY. I do this, then this, then this happens, then the Bug occurs. It seems to happen more often with Spell or Item Effects.

What happens is that ANIMATIONS STOP PLAYING. Character dies, attacks, cast spells, nothing gets Animated once the Bug occurs. Damage is taken but no Animation takes place. Other attempts to fix this Bug will cause it to be fixed at the end of Battle, but even pulling out the fix has not made the bug repeatable and is still very intermittent. What seems to be beyond my ability is to find those conditions for recreating the bug over and over again so I can trace it back to its source and fix it.

Can anyone help me out with this?

 

[Glitchfinder]

I've moved your topic from Scripts to script support. In the future, I asking for script help in Script support, since new topics in the Scripts board end up on the forum homepage. I don't have time to take a look at the moment, but possibly tonight or tomorrow I'll look into it. I've got a fairly good idea of the situations that cause something like this to happen as it is, since I've dealt with them before. (Typically, they involve something that's intended to stop the script from doing something (like animating) while it happens, and then accidentally doesn't get turned off.)

 

[Heretic86]

Thanks for moving and taking a look when you get a chance. Im not too worried about the timeframe.

 

[coyotecraft]

I played around for about an hour and never noticed the bug.
But I did notice a problem with the party commands. That is Attack and Escape. It pops up usually after the 4th character's action. But the forth character, the mage, is slow so the others can usually get in 2 turns before her. Or sometimes more if she is stunned. So it pops up at odd times.
I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

 

[Heretic86]

I played around for about an hour and never noticed the bug.
But I did notice a problem with the party commands. That is Attack and Escape. It pops up usually after the 4th character's action. But the forth character, the mage, is slow so the others can usually get in 2 turns before her. Or sometimes more if she is stunned. So it pops up at odd times.
I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

When I did that bit of code for updating the Attack / Escape window, I wasnt really sure how to do it in a way that worked. What I came up with was based on Turn Increments. Basically, every time the Attack / Escape window would come up, the Turn Counter would be intermented after the player selects one of the two options. The original version of the script I worked with incremented the Turn Counter about 20 times before that window would appear which made Battle Eventing damn near impossible. I guess I could go back and rewrite it so instead of the slowest character (current design) that it would count the number of characters that are "movable" (not stunned or dead) then increment the Turn Counter once that many actions has taken place? I'll take a look at how to improve this code, and it could be the source of the originally mentioned bug. Any suggestions on how to better improve the Fight / Escape window triggers?

Other thing I should have noticed about the bug in the original post is it seems to occur when using States that alter "movable", again, such as Death or Stunned, or other conditions that would prevent normal interaction with a character. Things like Stunning an enemy or resurrecting a character during battle after a knockout during battle. But like you said, playing for an hour and not being able to get the bug to occur makes finding it damn near impossibe for me, yet, I know its there and want to fix it badly. Were you allowing your characters to get killed off during battle, then resurrecting them during battle at all?

 

[coyotecraft]

The mage was stunned for a while. The fight with the Fire Lynch saw a characters getting k.o.ed but only for a few turns. Still kinda weird that state conditions would be related to animations. Dazzel and Mute were the only states I saw that used an animation. Unless stun and ko [no animation] setting somehow effects all the animations.
If you could recreate the bug, try inspecting the battler.animation_id's while it's running. See if they're nil or set to 0 or something.

 

[Heretic86]

Once I can find out how to recreate the bug, fixing will be easy, but recreating it is proving damn near impossible. I did try altering the code to force the bug to appear, but that doesnt seem to work either.

So frustrating...