I’m currently stuck in part 4, so I’ll share the bugs, odd things I’ve noticed so far using v1.0.866 in hard mode, w/ annoying jokes turned on.
Some of these are definitely bugs, but some may not be (please avoid spoilers if I’ve missed something).
Visit the cemetery before entering the town. The description of the name over the tomb before we know who chuck is (w/Reyes), as if we already knew who he is (given the later plot developments, the agents probably do know how he is, but the players don’t). Shutting the cemetery gates before we know about Chuck could solve that if you don’t have a suitable recorded sentences for the nameplate at that point in the game (you could re-use a sentence used for another shut door).
Ransome flashback:
Coming back to his trailer the door is closed, but the suggested verb is “close”. Trying to close the door => “It’s already closed” and the default verb is reset to “open”. It looks like the suggested verb isn’t a direct function of the state of the door, but of another variable that goes out of sync.
Quickie Pal “No way the wallet was his” sounds like “No way! The wallet was his.” (reversing the intended meaning) shortening the delay beteen “way” and “the” could improve that (or maybe my computer lagged just between these two phrases?).
Part 2 With Reyes knocked out, automatic “I’d better find agent…” / “AGENT RAY WHERE ARE YOU?”
fired in the middle of a conversation with Ricky (as sh was coming back to hand off the wc 67 tube). Ricky interrupted the agent to say her line.
fired while reyes is saying somehting else, interrupting what he was saying
With Ray knocked out, the “Find Ray” item in the note book was marked as done before the agents had found one another.
Delores flashback:
She leaves the kitchen while the tap and/or fridge are open. David, where were you when that room was wired ;-)?
She agrees to pick up the glass of water from the microwave right ahead, even if it’s filled with boiling water (I understand both this and the previous items are there for player convenience, but having her close the tap/fridge when leaving would have been nice touches)
Too much nagging about fetching the mailbox
After getting the job offer, use Basic in C64 => she still says it won’t help her get the job she just got.
The speck of dust at the quickie pal (outdoors) can appear too low on screen, behind the inventory, so it’s impossible to pick up
The red neon on the right of the arcade door flickers too fast
Ray to Ransome (First encounter) the “don’t go anywhere I’ll be back” sound comes from the left channel only, with a weird sound texture (saturation/clipping/lower bit rate?)
Same for Reyes in the sewer looking at a valve near the bank? (“I can’t turn that one either”)
While running and holding, characters say “I can’t reach that” just before reaching their target (Using a 2012 MacBook Air trackpad, if it is relevant, maybe I’m doing something weird).
Pathfinding: Occasional zig-zag while holding the mouse button to let the characters walk for long (occurred in the cemetery and on the highway).
With Ransome, using a map to go to the river, then going to the highway (first time he goes there), the “double click to run”/“hold to keep on walking” tutorial lines are shown.
In the hotel lobby, I entered first with Ransome (thus not triggering the Franklin flashback) and it was possible to interact with the historic pictures at the bottom left. Not anymore after the flashback (mousing over them did nothing, as if they had their hotspot turned off). Then they were interactive again once I was stuck in with the front door spinning too fast (now that I think of it the hotspot may have been disabled only during the flashback, this could be intentional, I’d rather have them on all the time though, because people may miss them otherwise, not checking twice if they can be interacted with).
During the flashback, rooms at the 10th floor have 13xx numbers (maybe that’s a plot element I’ve yet to figure) Or maybe you implemented the flashback 10th floor as a 13th floor and forgot to change the room numbers?
Part 4: The bear repellent went from my inventory back to the quickie pal counter
I gave the tickets to each player before entering Thimblecon, yet got the ~“I’ll take your friends tickets as well” from the dragon, not sure this was intentional.
Enter Thimblecon with Reyes and don’t move, wait for him to start the idle animations. His eyes take two pixels vertically instead of one, and the eye moving animation is only applied to the bottom pixels. Likewise, in the same position, Ray has her eyebrows doubled and she “blinks” the bottom part of the brows rather than the eye.
In the hotel lobby, when you zap the computer (with Franklin), the computer screen (in game) looks like a room to be spied on, but zoomed in, if you lookat it, it is a password prompt
In the penthouse/patio (13th floor) when chilling the window, Xavier says the line appropriate for a cristall chill.
In front of the circus gate, the light effects on the ground are drawn on top of the characters, even though the light source comes from behind them. If makes their legs look translucent.
Use Sepp the navigator's head literally does nothing. (Reyes, in the forrest while the head is spinning).
missing feature (compared to SCUMM): Clicking an object then a verb (while the character is walking towards the object) changes the action but keeps the object. Likewise with verb keyboard shortcuts. I actually still have the click-verb-verb in muscle memory because you had to confirm the sentence in early SCUMM titles.
@RonGilbert: There should be an achievement for leaving all water taps in the game running!
I agree, I wasn’t happy to see this change (vs. Maniac Mansion). At least she could have said that she burnt her fingers (like in MI1 when picking up the cooked meat).
That happens sometimes, but normally they aren’t easily reproducable.
Wow - lots of good bug catches there! I could see how some might not be considered bugs, but several look like real bugs to me as described. Nothing critical, but I’m sure Ron and team would want to know about them. What do you think, @robert.megone?
It’s really not worth fixing any of these. Some are not bugs, they are intended, some are just difference in option. Others are issues, but fixing small stuff isn’t free, it all takes time and money and nothing on this list is unknown to us, we decided to not fix it. Every game is filled with little stuff. You’ll go crazy trying to fix it all.
I guarantee if you fix all this, someone else will just find another big list. It’s part of game dev to just let the little stuff go. It’s called “shipping a game”.
I noticed about half of what is mentioned and it isn’t an utterly spotless game but they are not things that meaningfully mar the gaming experience as is the case with every Daedalic titles I’ve played, where the myriad of bugs and errors are inexcusable.
Guys, I understand how your looking for bugs is an act of love, but I’m sure that if we stop for just a while our look as fans and look at the product as a whole, we won’t probably be bored by any of those bugs. After I finished the game playing only the very first release with no patch, I wasn’t able to tell one bug. Maybe I’ve been lucky, because there were big ones, but they’ve been fixed.
When you’re trying to ship a game, bug fixing is a tradeoff. You only have so much time and you focus on the big issues first, then hit the small ones if you have time. When you get to the last two weeks, you stop fixing small stuff, because for every bug you fix, you run the danger of creating new ones, so you let stuff slide.
Part of our evaluation is how many people are like to notice it, does it impact the game and how risky is it to fix.
Some of the bugs on this list might seem simple, but they involve touching a lot of code and that is time consuming and risky. Fixing even the smallest bug means the game goes back through a full test cycle.
I reported these just in case, knowing that some were probably not bugs, and with no expectations of having them fixed. I’ve followed the dev. blog/podcasts I know that you left minor bugs in knowingly. I just didn’t know what your threshold was. I suppose I should not bother collecting similar issues going forward.
[quote=“RonGilbert, post:5, topic:594”]
It’s really not worth fixing any of these.
[/quote]Most of them are really minor and easy to miss indeed.
But the bug when some voiced lines are panned hard left or right is really annoying. I’d say, at least that one should be fixed.
I find the 30Hz flickering neon physically disagreeable to watch (and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was epileptogenic in predisposed people). If there was one thing to fix for me, that would be it.
[quote=“pygy, post:11, topic:594”]
I find the 30Hz flickering neon physically disagreeable to watch
[/quote]Yet it is realistic. Flourescent tubes do that annoying stuff all the time. Being set in 1987 doesn’t help either, since those had just an inductor, prone to flicker. Even today, I still see quite a lot of those conventional power supplies for those tubes.
Actually, I find that blinking in the Quickie Pal much more annoying. I wish there were a slingshot in the game to disable that tube forever. Or simply a light switch.
I don’t think TP is hard bent on physical realism… Epilepsy is real too. That being said, it isn’t a regular 30 Hz flickering. It is possibly random, making it less likely to cause neural circuits to resonate with it (that’s how stroboscopic stimulation trigger epilepsy). I wouldn’t mind if it were twice or three times as slow though.
Yeah, agree. I spent months trying to track that down and have no idea what is causing it. My guess is it’s deep in the sound system, which I didn’t write.
This happens at least once during every playthrough I made, but I don’t find it too annoying.
I know you can never fix everything, but I thought there is one content update planned so it would be great to fix as many of those easy ones before making another such test cycle.
Maybe I’ll list some (non-story related) stuff which I deem relatively easy to fix.
For whomever it may concern
fix phone book entry ‘tobi jabs’ (change first letters to upper case since in-game check is case sensitive)
swear glass and Chuck journals: allow paging using cursor keys (similar to phone book)
help pages: left/right keys switch pages, but sound is played only when pressing up/down
pausing game: add (hidden) option to not display dialog, I only want the snail!
Delores flashback: job application: dialog option ‘C’ is too short to allow direct selection via up/down (by default the cursor is a little bit too far to the right positioned; maybe add whitespaces to the text so it gets selected anyways?)
voice message missing for phone book entry ‘Ron Gilbert’ (I know the phone book entry deadline was strict, but geez…)
coroner: when looking at tubes of FingerTron an FaceTron their names change even when using non-Delores characters
a lot of cutscenes cannot be skipped, e.g. intro, part X (OK, this may not be a quick fix)
I suggesed above to make it slower, but that may kill the effect… Maybe biasing the sampling so that it is only turned on 1 out of 4 frames (on average) rather than 1 out of two could keep the mood but make it less annoying.
As I wrote somewhere in the blog: Ask the SDL developers. They are very kind and I think they will help you. There were some reports with SDL_Mixer in the past that were similar to your problem.
These were fixed when we added “swiping to turn pages” when using touch.
Also fixed when we did touch. The dialog lines now extend the entire width of the screen, no matter the length
Not going to happen.[quote=“Nor_Treblig, post:16, topic:594”]
a lot of cutscenes cannot be skipped, e.g. intro, part X (OK, this may not be a quick fix)
[/quote]
