Bug report: Upon saving and reloading, nearby monster spawns disappear
Monsters tend to disappear when I save and reload with a monster spawn location nearby. This is how that happens:
1. I save the game near a monster spawn location (just outside of its visibility)
2. I move my character closer to the spawn location and "aggro" the monster
3. I reload the latest save
4. Now the monster is no longer there
Expected behavior: spawned monsters should not disappear when reloading the game.
1. I save the game near a monster spawn location (just outside of its visibility)
2. I move my character closer to the spawn location and "aggro" the monster
3. I reload the latest save
4. Now the monster is no longer there
Expected behavior: spawned monsters should not disappear when reloading the game.
Post edited by Balquo on
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Comments
Also, these monster spawns do not have a chance to reappear after reloading, they simply disappear forever.
Charmed creatures disappear when saving and then loading. When loading a game any charmed creature should respawn in charmed state together with party members.
Spawns usually don't reappear right on reload (in the visible area) for good reasons, again by design.
Disappearing spawn points will turn back active once they are out of the visible area (and some time passed).
All these features are intentional or you could get
1. overcrowded areas with spawns on load/save loops.
2. instant combat on load even when there was no opponent around you at save.
These problems weigh heavier than the problems you listed as both of them have the potential of causing a saved game dead.
BG:EE has a bug regarding disappearing spawns upon reload. It works very differently than in the original engine. I've just tested this using BGT - there, randomly spawned black bears do not disappear upon game reloads, nor do they duplicate (at least not regularly, I've tested it 15+ times just now and never encountered a duplicate, even after reloading various saves I've made around the area). In BG:EE they simply disappear. It's a bug and it should be fixed, because it's rather distracting.
If the regular disappearing I noticed is intentional as you've described, then it should be removed in favor of another workaround. Or scrapped entirely. The original engine worked better in this regard.
It would be nice to hear from the dev team whether or not a fix is in the works or at the very least planned. Even charmed creatures disappear after reloading, which, frankly, is ridiculous. I sincerely hope this behavior has not been dismissed as a non-issue.
It is totally game breaking for me, since i save and load a lot.
I think we disagree about what the bug is about. This is what my testing shows:
For those spawns that are affected (which is most of them), if you load while close enough to the spawn, the monster occupying it will NEVER appear. So lets say i want to redo an encounter where i saved 'nearby'. I can't. I have to wait 24 hours for a monster to respawn or use a save that's far away (if i have one). No matter how many times i reload, no monster will appear at the spawn.
I've cleared at least three of the first wilderness areas in the beginning of EE. In those areas, i removed about half the monsters in this way while exploring (i like to redo about every other encounter, maybe more).
This effectively (for my play style) reduces monster density by about half.
Dunno if game breaking is the best term - but i'd rather play BG1 than EE because of this (which is sad bacuse i am very excited about EE).
Haven't tested this very rigorously though (and i can't because i do not own the game) so i may be wrong. But i did do a few somewhat systematic tests:
1. save when gibberling or whatever is just out of sight,
2. make sure gibberling or whatever acutally is just out of sight,
3. load 'infinity' times and discover no gibberling or any monster where the gibberling was,
4. load far away from gibberling 'infinity' times and walk into it to discover that something spawns there frequently,
5. repeat for other spawns.
i did this test some time ago, so it may have been fixed in the mean time..?
With regards to an overall increase in monsters, in theory for every spawn group that disappears on a reload, another spawn should be generated somewhere else on the map, maintaining a more or less constant monster density in the area. I guess that the other spawns can appear in areas of the map where you've already been though, meaning that it could result in a overall decrease in the amount of enemies you encounter, especially if you reload very frequently when encountering enemies.
On a different note; i'm starting to suspect that this bug is a feature - to make the BG world seem more dynamic or something. Any thoughts on this?
And I can confirm that the bug has not been fixed, unfortunately.
Has a fix actually been committed? Was it tested at all? Did it work under any circumstances? When can we expect a fix that works?
-There's a set number of spawn points in each area (I'm somewhat confident about this)
-Each point has a pre-determined probability of spawning monsters (I don't actually know this, but I don't know why they would make the spawn probabilities themselves variable)
-The last 2 points would mean that there would be an expected value for the number of spawns for each area. So, for example, if an area has an expected value of 5 spawns, and you see one spawn disappear when reload, you would still expect a total of 5 spawns, so it's likely there's another somewhere else to make up for the one you lost. Of course this will vary due to random chance, as a missing spawn in one place doesn't influence whether or not another spawn will show up somewhere else, hence why I said "in theory".
This is all speculation on my part, so if you don't believe it I wouldn't hold it against you. I suppose it's possible, but I kind of doubt it, as for the most part I think they want to make the game function like the original. I think many players have a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality, which the devs are likely aware of, which would make it unlikely for them to deliberately change something like this.
1. explore one area making sure to remove ALL monsters by reloading near them.
2. Once you've gone through the entire area you've removed all monsters and they should have respawned around the map.
3. Go through the area again and see how many if any have respawned where you had already explored.
This bug added to the new ability of monsters to exit Areas - escaping from you with the loot and XP, this can hurt you (try Horror, Spook, or just Turn). Added that the overall difficulty is lowered in this edition, new powerful kits are added, and new even more powerful characters added (Dorn is stronger as Kagain, You now who is stronger as Edwin), this game is lot easier as it was.
The Bandit Camp is no more a challenge, I saw 0 Elites, and there is/was a bug with the Chills, they didn't attack us. Only the Firewine Bridge was as hard as it was in the vanilla. But OK, I am older now, I think I would have a hard time to play trough this game with the original difficulty.
I think that this is a different bug.
Also I could play a game outside of the gamestent - because the gamesman runned out from a fight. Also I could stay and sleep in an Inn without to enter: the bartender fled from the building before. I also saw skeletons run away from me entering a cave full of ghasts.
You should check with NI to see if this is indeed the case.
By the way, I also find this bug annoying, especially considering that the spawning system in both vanilla BG1 and BGtutu worked fine. I understand that the spawning system from vanilla BG1 cannot be used because BGEE uses the BG2 engine, but BGtutu used the BG2 engine too.
Quite sure that the ghoul was spawned. I loaded far away and walked into it several times. Sometimes it's there, sometimes there's nothing, sometimes there's a hobgoblin.
What is NI?