Pretty serious/game-breaking bug

mforww

So right after I freed Hendak and the slaves and Hendak kills Lehtinan, I hit "quick save" and the game crashed. I was like "woah, I hope that the quick save worked before that crash. Don't want to have to do that quest all over again."

Once I re-loaded I encountered the most bizarre scenario ever. The quest was "done" but Lehtinan was still standing there (alive) even though he had been killed. I spoke to Rumar and there was the dialogue option mentioning how Hendak had guaranteed a discount. I had the items in my inventory from Lehtinan's body. I thought whatever, I'll just ignore this undead Lehtinan. But then I realized all of the area I had uncovered was now covered in the block "undiscovered" fog of war. I went to leave the Copper Coronet, and you know that guy who wants to fight you? Well I had fought him previously but lo and behold, there he was again. I accepted his challenge and the game skipped the whole fight (the marker for his death must have still be valid) and just gave me 9500 experience all over again. I went outside and freaking Gaelen Bayle grabs me and Chapter 2 somehow starts all over again, including the cutscene with Irenicus and Imoen!

I checked my journal and there's absolutely nothing in it, but based on my experience with the Copper Coronet punk and Hendak's quest, I'm assuming that completed quests are still "marked" as completed even if they're nto showing up in my journal. Hopefully this won't affect my game from here on out, but I could see this being a serious problem. If this happens again the ramifications could be huge. Plus, it seems to re-cover every INCH of the game in the fog of war for areas you've uncovered, so that's already inconvenience enough. Somebody should get on this one.

Sliceofhell

Looks to be similar to "Circus tent reset bug" http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24160/circus-tent-badly-glitched-spoiler

Leinhart12

I am experiencing a similar bug.

I just completed the druid quest associated with Trademeet and when I went to the world map to go back to the city, all map icons were gone, even though all the information is still there in my quest journal. The only place I can go is the city entrance, and then from there to the slums, where Gaelan Bayle starts talking to me, as if I just started chapter 2, offering the 20.000 gold bid. It's like the entire chapter just reset, because Firekraag is offering me the same deal, even though I already defeated him.

I really hope Beamdog, or anyone else, has a solution to this.

mforww

Yup. Also, here's another bug I just found: the kobolds in the sewers that you first encounter when you enter the sewers to do the Cult of the Unseeing Eye quest cast hold on you. I used anomen to cast "remove paralysis" on Aerie... the spell worked but for some reason the "held person" icon remained floating over her head (even though the indicator was removed from her portrait and she could move around freely).

Beamdog is going to have their work cut out for them.

sunset00

Oh my.....beginning to scare me again, those kind of bugs...(sigh).... the dudes should really concentrate on TOTALLY fixing things like that BEFORE releasing such games than trying to add some *ù*$^ù**ù 'new' bi/mono/tri/multi/blas/'trendy' romances thingies for 7.05548% of the populace pressuring them for that, ok, but still, for the others.... damn it... O_o (sigh2..). Not even beeing aggressive, but yet.. 0_o

mforww

Andddd I knew that this would somehow be game-breaking... it just took me a second to figure out how. Here's the game-breaker (or at least one of the results of this bug): Nalia leaves the party because we won't go to the D'Arnise keep. Guess what? Because her quest (and hence the location of the keep) got wiped, it's impossible to travel there. So that whole part of the game is broken for me, essentially.

The only good news I was planning on ditching Nalia and keeping Jan this playthrough, so it could be worse I guess. Maybe I'll try to cluaconsole my way out of this...

mforww

By the way, how do you enable the clue console on the EE version for BG??

Nebse

I'm having the exact same problem. The game crashed after quick-saving right in front of the statue that wants you to answer the various rituals while on the quest in the Umar hills (morning ritual, noon ritual etc). When i loaded the quick-save after re-entering the game, I proceeded as normal and noticed that I had 2x remains and 2x cell keys, and Mazzy was gone (I had already freed her before quick-saving) Eventually I killed the shade lord in the end and proceeded as normal.

When I got back to the world map, everything was gone, and only the gate district of Athkatla was available. I went there, and then entered the slums district, where that shadow-thief guy starts talking about giving him 20k gold to find Imoen.

In other words, the entire chapter was reset, but all my completed quests and available quests were present in the journal.

Really discouraged to continue playing, as i dont want to do all those quests again.

prophet1

If game crashes while/after saving, *don't* load that save - load the previous one instead.

But yeah - bugs like this should be top priority right now.

Tysn

I've had this issue too; it's pretty much game-breaking. For me I loaded a quicksave in the slaver's house, and it was rather bizarre as enemies I had killed were alive again, to the point where killing them again resulted in me getting duplicate items. I figured it was just an odd bug and kept playing, only to to notice that now the entire chapter appeared to have been reset, will all of the quests reset and map markers gone. Unfortunately before I noticed this I had already saved-over my backup save, which completely wrecked the playthrough.

I gave up and started a new playthrough, being careful to watch on reloads for strange behavior. However it seems to have happened again (more subtly) as the world map icon for Watcher's Keep disappeared. So now I'm not really sure if I should continue this playthrough and just use console commands to warp there, or if more stuff is bugged as well.

Overall the issue seems to be that occasionally when loading a game it glitches and puts the game into a messed up state. Where it becomes disastrous is when you then save this messed up game over your current save, trapping it in the screwed-up state. Even worse is that unless there's something readily visible upon loading that it's messed up (npc positions, etc.) you have no way of knowing that it's screwed up until it's too late. Something this game-breaking should be fixed ASAP.

prophet1

Tysn said:

Overall the issue seems to be that occasionally when loading a game it glitches and puts the game into a messed up state. Where it becomes disastrous is when you then save this messed up game over your current save, trapping it in the screwed-up state. Even worse is that unless there's something readily visible upon loading that it's messed up (npc positions, etc.) you have no way of knowing that it's screwed up until it's too late. Something this game-breaking should be fixed ASAP.

Did you happen to notice if this happens after you've already reloaded a few times in a session, or this can happen anytime? It's been reported that loading a save produces a significant memory leak every time: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24041/memory-leak-in-bgii-ee-on-windows-7-pc
and as it stacks up can lead to eventual crashes. I suspect it could cause issues like this as well.

mforww

Does anybody know how to open the clua console???? there is no "baldur.ini" file in the bg2ee folder, as far as I can see.

mforww

Ok I opened the CLUA console and managed to get myself out of the locked room, but I didn't even realize how bad this bug actually is: I literally can't complete the Cult of the Unseeing Eye quest because the scripted NPC event with Gaal yelling out to the peasants respawns when I re-enter the Temple District. That causes the priest to respawn there with him, and I can't walk into the temple of Helm and complete the quest/get my reward.

I'm afraid to keep playing with this being a known issue because I have a strong feeling it'll break the chain of events on a lot of quests, rendering me unable to complete them as opposed to merely being inconvenienced by having to re-fight the same monster.

mforww

prophet1 said:

Tysn said:

Overall the issue seems to be that occasionally when loading a game it glitches and puts the game into a messed up state. Where it becomes disastrous is when you then save this messed up game over your current save, trapping it in the screwed-up state. Even worse is that unless there's something readily visible upon loading that it's messed up (npc positions, etc.) you have no way of knowing that it's screwed up until it's too late. Something this game-breaking should be fixed ASAP.

Did you happen to notice if this happens after you've already reloaded a few times in a session, or this can happen anytime? It's been reported that loading a save produces a significant memory leak every time: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24041/memory-leak-in-bgii-ee-on-windows-7-pc
and as it stacks up can lead to eventual crashes. I suspect it could cause issues like this as well.

It mostly seems to crash during saving/loading. But considering that this is Baldur's Gate, simply not saving isn't really an option (well, for me at least. Some people are super hardcore and do that for "fun").

SerpentCoil

Something very strange happened when I was about to kill Aran Linvail. The game crashed to desktop and when I went back and played little further I noticed that all the characters in the game had come back to life and all the dialogue had reverted back to chapter 1 talk. Every location except Waukeen's Promenade had gone gray and outside map locations like Trademeet were not to there.

When I made my way to the Slum district Gaelen started talking to me like it was the beginning of Chapter 2. And after that the chapter in my jounral updated to chapter 4 and everything like quests, dialogue, character positions had reverted like they were in the beginnging of chapter 2. Clearly this happening has ruined my game as I already was in chapter 3.

Sadly all my save games are from the period I noticed this insane bug. I'm greatly despairing that I have to start all over again and all my current playing has been in vain. How is it possible something like this can happen? Is there anything at all that can be done to remedy the situation? Or is everything doomed and all I can do is weep in a corner and wait for the dreaded workday in Monday.

-Also I have no mods installed.

prophet1

What I meant was - if memory leaks are the cause, then in theory it should be possible to prevent this from happening by restarting the game before loading a save.

Depending on how often you reload, this can be a minor or a major pain in the ass to do, but it's still better than not knowing when you game breaks after consecutive loads.

Purudaya

sunset00 said:

Oh my.....beginning to scare me again, those kind of bugs...(sigh).... the dudes should really concentrate on TOTALLY fixing things like that BEFORE releasing such games than trying to add some *ù*$^ù**ù 'new' bi/mono/tri/multi/blas/'trendy' romances thingies for 7.05548% of the populace pressuring them for that, ok, but still, for the others.... damn it... O_o (sigh2..). Not even beeing aggressive, but yet.. 0_o

Soooooo much heterosexual angst in these forums lately.

Khoryace

I just had this bug while I was in the middle of the shadow thieves guild. Even the fog of war reset for me. And once I reach outside I figured most everything soft reset as well. This is very unacceptable to release such a bugged game :S

Aramina

I've encountered this bug myself. The game has probably crashed about 15-20 times on me so far, and once right as I was quicksaving. I ended up with the same problem as mforww, where it seemed like it had reset all my quests back to square 1. Example: I had already finished the skinner murders investigation, but when I went back to the bridge district I was accosted by the guard as if I'd never been there before. Also, all the areas on the travel map were either removed or set back to "unexplored". I was forced to load a (much) earlier save to fix the problem, as the autosave had already been overwritten by the corrupted quicksave by then.

Sometimes before crashing I've also had extreme lag leading up to it; last time it happened I was trying to swap weapons in the item screen and there was a good 3-4 second delay for it to register. Reloading an older save wouldn't fix it, I had to completely reset BGII before the lag resolved itself. Assuming this is from the supposed memory leak that's being talked about? Not a computer person so I have no idea what could be causing it.

prophet1

Just to give the developers some sense of appreciation of the SCALE of this problem, I'll list all current threads with similar symptoms (quest progress reset after loading):

http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24324/game-reverted-back-to-chapter-1-state-insanity
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24346/bodhi-thieves-quest-looping-chapter
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24160/circus-tent-badly-glitched-spoiler
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/23958/gaelyn-bayle-giving-me-his-offer-to-help-rescue-imoen-twice
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24236/garren-s-cabin-bug

and possibly also these ones:
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24202/umar-hills-disappears-from-map
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24232/map-bug-watcher-s-keep

It seems unlikely all people in this thread and all those other threads have corrupt installs. This problem must be looked into ASAP.

@LiamEsler @Jalily @aVENGER @Dee

LiamEsler

@prophet1 You bet.

AlexT

@prophet1 it's on our high priority list

Avenger_teambg

We'll try to figure this out.
So far we know that areas reset because the saved game becomes corrupt.
Since it is relatively rare, we need more info like:
does this happen in single player?
does this happen in multi player but single client?
only multiplayer over the net?

A clean saved game from before the problem and clear reproduction steps would help greatly.

Also, when someone sends Dee a crash dump, mention that the crash happened during quick save and caused this bug.

Avenger_teambg

We are hunting this bug.

This should be like: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24200/pretty-serious-game-breaking-bug

Illydth

mforww said:

Does anybody know how to open the clua console???? there is no "baldur.ini" file in the bg2ee folder, as far as I can see.

The baldur.ini file is in your profile directory under the "Documents" subdirectory (In Win7 this is generally C:\Users\\My Documents or something like that.

Under there is a "Baldur's Gate 2 - Enhanced Edition" directory which contains the baldur.ini file.

The setting is:

'Program Options', 'Debug Mode', '1',

@LiamEsler / @Avenger_teambg: Would it do you guys any good to have someone dump a set of Global Variables at the point this happens? I would think Variables like "What Chapter am I on" might shed some light here?

Aramina

I turned on my task manager to see what actions were causing memory issues. So far I've found that quick save, regular save, quick load, menu load, combat, and picking up or dropping items in the inventory screen cause it to jump. Started testing it with BGII running about 100,000 K, is now up to over 600,000 K from a few minutes of repeatedly picking up and dropping an item in the inventory screen. Will try and snag a corrupted save if I can manage it. Testing this in single player mode, which is all I've played so far, so I don't know if this happens in multiplayer as well.

EDIT: It also seems that just leaving the game running causes the memory usage to increase over time, though not as quickly as the actions I listed above.

Avenger_teambg

Illydth said:

mforww said:

@LiamEsler / @Avenger_teambg: Would it do you guys any good to have someone dump a set of Global Variables at the point this happens? I would think Variables like "What Chapter am I on" might shed some light here?

A clean saved game before the issues starting and then clear repro steps would be better. It seems this happened in the circus tent (i guess that was early game), and much later too.
I doubt we'll find a repro case pointing at a specific location in the game, but what ^^ Aramina ^^ mentioned about the inventory might worth looking at.

Aramina

@Avenger_teambg Success! At a pretty impressive 1.6 million K of memory usage, I managed to do a quicksave crash, so I have a before and after save file. Unfortunately my saves are in the Underdark, so not as helpful as they could be. Do you need the whole saved folder, or just the BALDUR.SAV file?

Also, about the location, I'm pretty confident that it doesn't have much to do with it. I've had about 20+ crashes in various locations throughout the game, both new and old maps. The first corrupted save I encountered was in the Helmite Camp, and this second one is in the Underdark tunnels.

Illydth

@Avenger_teambg: If what Aramina is saying is correct (and I will try to repo it tomorrow as soon as I can...but I completely believe it) and there's a memory leak, a saved game and repo steps won't help you in the slightest...it's not content or actions or game scripting causing your problem.

It's a good old fashioned application crash due to an out of memory condition that isn't going to be reproducible through any given method other than "over time, it's going to happen." The trick would then have to be to save at the moment the game is going over the memory limit and crashing to get the issue.

And that description absolutely meets the concept of only some people some of the time losing their data in this way. You aren't seeing this in BG:EE because we've (you've) gotten most of the crash bugs discovered and flushed out of it.

Sorry for chatting you on 2 threads...I'll stop now.

Illydth

@Avenger_teambg: Info for you:

http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24352/spectacular-mistake-i-require-the-aid-of-supernerds

Check the last couple of posts.

Illydth

@Aramina: I'd zip the entire saved game directory if I were you. There's not enough there to worry about what does and doesn't belong. Just zip the whole thing.