[0.4.2] [Blood] Enemy state is reset on savegame load

[Gammli]

This is a problem inherited from DOS Blood. I assume it wasn't fixed in NBlood for accuracy reasons, but in any case it might be desirable for Raze to include a fix.

By resetting state, I specifically mean properties such as current HP, current AI action and current target.
For example, a zombie that was shot and downed when the game is saved will be standing upright once the save is loaded. Furthermore, all its HP will be restored, and it will have lost sight of the player.
This appears to apply to every enemy in Blood.

BloodGDX fixes this problem, as a sidenote.

[Graf Zahl]

Holy shit, that's gross. Yes, that absolutely needs to be fixed - if I just had an idea how. With such crippling bugs the savegame feature is useless, that's even worse than Doom's original issue with the target pointers. This really is a case where accuracy is entirely misplaced.

[Kinsie]

Between this and the difficulty-flipping bug in the DOS version I'm starting to think Blood didn't handle savegames very well.

[Graf Zahl]

Doom didn't either, really, if you think about it.
Not only did it lose its target pointers, it also lost the flicker light effect from Doom 2.
Ultimately these are caused by not writing a proper object management that could automate these things. ZDoom went out of its way to build something that handles these tricky things under the hood - otherwise I'd never have been able to rewrite the savegame code 3.5 years ago to use JSON.

But not even restoring an enemy's health points - that's an entirely different level, of course.

[sinisterseed]

Between this and the difficulty-flipping bug in the DOS version I'm starting to think Blood didn't handle savegames very well.

That was more like a feature but it eventually turned into a bug.

To my knowledge, the intention was to have the difficulty decreasing after reload, but it got borked and instead it ramped the difficulty. Only Lightly Broiled was not affected by either.

[Graf Zahl]

Ouch! Looks like the load game code runs through the full actor initialization logic again.
This will be one nasty thing to fix because all data that may need saving but isn't needs to be identified.
The real irony is that the only thing in there that might have caused problems is the AI state, it's like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. What a fucked up mess...

[sinisterseed]

And it also causes silly bugs too - remember the broken Butchers after reload?

I think that's actually still there in 0.4.2, not seeing any commits or posts reporting that it was addressed yet.

[Graf Zahl]

Yes, that'd explain such a weird error for sure. Well, I'm afraid that until this is fixed I consider Blood broken and not usable.
The worst thing is that now I have to go through the ENTIRE code and find global data that needs saving.
What makes this worse is that the code contains virtually no 'const' qualifiers to help identify unchanging data. And what do you expect? Of course it writes into global tables for some cheap hacks.

[Manuel-K]

I've encountered a weird glitch where I couldn't attack with any weapon after loading a save game. The glitch was repeatable. That might be related or it might have been a problem caused by switching to a newer version.

[Graf Zahl]

I'm not surprised. Of course savegames break if they do not restore the state 100%.

[sinisterseed]

I swear Build is a comedy of hacks and poor design decisions sometimes :v . Reminds me of Bethesda games before their time - both are funny and frustrating at the same time - especially when having to deal with them.

I've encountered a weird glitch where I couldn't attack with any weapon after loading a save game. The glitch was repeatable. That might be related or it might have been a problem caused by switching to a newer version.

I've never seen this one the player's side. It might have been due to the upgrade if all was fine on a clean installation but broke while upgrading.

[Graf Zahl]

Without savegame versioning this can easily happen. Guess what was one of the first savegame related things I added...

[Manuel-K]

It was between two different versions of Raze. I didn't see anything in the git log that looks suspicious.

[sinisterseed]

There is a chance its explicit mention might have been omitted. Problem is, the eduke devs don't mention when the format gets bumped, so it's easy to overlook such things with no versioning.

Also: https://github.com/coelckers/Raze/commi ... 14e4501865

*speaks in MKII Shao Kahn voice* Round 1... fight!!

[Graf Zahl]

Going through the Blood source right now to find things that need handling. NBlood's source is interesting because it meticulously recreates every single fuckup of the original developers - and there's quite a few that affect the savegame state. And nothing was fixed thanks to the Holy Cow of demo compatibility. There's quite a few screwups in the code where all I can ask is "What were they thinking?" - and it's all still there and will remain so forever in NBlood.