Bug report: Building "malfunction"

[rocketman]

I have never seen this before, but on this QB map, which was used for a scenario I previewed, several Level 1 buildings lack walls. And sometimes if viewed from different directions some walls appear and new ones disappear.

What is even more strange is that if you try to move infantry into the building you get the "Roof" option which is never shown for Level 1 buildings. But you can use it and....

...your infantry appears in the new "roof" level, floating in mid air. I haven't tried if they can fire from this position, but this is bad enough already.

I tried the scenario from both sides, previewed the map in the editor and even changed the year of the battle to see if buildings differ from year to year, but it all looked the same.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

@rocketman is quite right, the houses on this map are properly borked! 

@IanL  I think this may be one for you?

Edited November 7, 2021 by Sgt.Squarehead

[Artkin]

I've seen this error in unmodded CMBS. 

[MikeyD]

Houses are 'baked in' to maps. If a map had been put together early in the Beta process subsequent changes to the building code won't fix it. You've got to go in to the map, delete the offending building, then replace it with another building. This caused us endless headaches in CMFI, I recall. If you've got a QB folder with more that 700 maps its difficult to guarantee every single one of the buildings on the maps will be problem-free.

[Artkin]

I've noticed if you have a ton of maps in your documents then your game will crash very often. Happens in just about every title.

[rocketman]

38 minutes ago, MikeyD said:

Houses are 'baked in' to maps. If a map had been put together early in the Beta process subsequent changes to the building code won't fix it. You've got to go in to the map, delete the offending building, then replace it with another building. This caused us endless headaches in CMFI, I recall. If you've got a QB folder with more that 700 maps its difficult to guarantee every single one of the buildings on the maps will be problem-free.

Good to know. And probably no way to fix it other than updating maps. The upside is that all new maps will work.

[Bufo]

There are several QB maps across the titles with this issue. (Just saying)

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Worth listing (and/or correcting them)?

Fixing them is the work of a few seconds once you know where the problem lies.....But for QB maps, I guess they all need to be fixed the same (ie: everyone needs to be using an identical 'official' version)?

Edited November 11, 2021 by Sgt.Squarehead

[rocketman]

For those who play QBs a lot, map preview should be default because of this. I would hate going through the process of purchasing units and then getting stuck with this. For other reasons I don't see why one would play without previewing the map anyway, but each to his own.

[MikeyD]

I went and looked at that map. It seemed every time I swapped out one building another one presented a problem that wasn't there before. I eventually wound up swapping out 75% of the buildings on the map. That tells me two things. 1) old maps with embedded 'legacy' building models present hidden problems that one look at the map can miss, which complicates hunting down and fixing the problems. 2) Swapping out buildings and resaving does fix the problem.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

1 hour ago, MikeyD said:

That tells me two things. 1) old maps with embedded 'legacy' building models present hidden problems that one look at the map can miss, which complicates hunting down and fixing the problems. 2) Swapping out buildings and resaving does fix the problem.

That's interesting.

@MOS:96B2P & I had wondered if it were possible for some latent 'weirdness' to be baked into maps ported directly from CM:SF1 to CM:SF2 (I forget the paticular 'weirdness' in question).....Your comment suggests it might.

Edited November 15, 2021 by Sgt.Squarehead