BIZARRE bug...

[Ben Galanti]

This is a repost from the main forum, I realized that I should have posted it here...

Yesterday, after work, I came home and fired up a quick battle on CM. I've playing a lot of quick battles in the last week, and have loved it. When I started playing though, some very strange things started happening.

I would place my forces, and give orders for the first turn with no problems. When I played the movie of the turn though, some strange things started happening. If I hit play, then pause, then play again, the timer would jump straight to the end of the turn (60 seconds). Then, it got even stranger. I could hit the button to set the timer to zero, and the fast forward (in 2 or 10 second intervals) while paused, but as soon as I hit play, the timer would jump to 60 seconds. The thing is, even though the timer would jump to 60 seconds, the units would stay were they were. So, if I fast forwarded from zero to 34 seconds, then hit play, the timer would read 60 seconds, but the units would be where they were at 34 seconds! If I hit done then, I could start the next turn after only 34 seconds of time had elapsed. Now, this was handy if a tank got whacked at 45 seconds...

Now, since CM doesn't dynamically update kill stats (kill statistics are registerd for the whole turn at once), the unit that killed the tank at 45 seconds would still show a tank kill, even if I used the bug to start the next turn before the tank was killed! This lead to some extremely bizarre occurances. Once, I was playing with it trying to get a mortar out of LOS of a tank. Several times the tank would fire, and the crew would abandon the mortar, so I would stop the turn before the crew abandonned, and try again. After playing with it for a while, I just let the mortar get knocked out (after using this bug for 2 or 3 turns) when it did, 3 crews appeared! Two of them were shown as eliminated, yet one had only 1 casualty and 5 good men, the other no casualties. the third crew acted normally... Here's a shot of all three...

laf.cioe.com/~galanti/eliminated.jpg

Some other oddities. After playing through a whole battle like this, I got the following AAR:

laf.cioe.com/~galanti/negativekia.jpg

I'm not sure if thie is battlefield procreation or what, but -1 KIA seems a little odd....

Now, all of this was with the full CM. I'm also finishing up a PBEM game with the gold demo. I got a turn last night, fired up the demo, and the exact same thing was happening in the gold demo! Even stranger, severel units that had been eliminated many turns before, while still marked eliminated, showed standing soldiers, instead of bodies. A kind of Night of the Living Dead thing...

laf.cioe.com/~galanti/livingdead.jpg

Now, I suspect it's something with my machine, since both the gold demo and the full version are showing the same thing. But I had installed nothing new, and made no changes at all to my system in the last week, and CM has worked great. I trashed the prefs file, but both the demo and the game still did the same thing... I haven't done a full reinstall yet, incase Charles was interested in tracking this down, but it's really odd....

Ben

[Darstand]

More bugs...

The british tank destroyer Archer is backwards. It starts set-up backwards. When ordered to move, fast, or hunt. It goes backwards. In reverse it goes forward. Must be a Polish tank

[Fionn]

Dar,

That's not a bug.. The brits built that thing with the gun pointing over the BACK of the hull.

What you're seeing is 100% correct. The only problem was that you didn't know the design history of the vehicle .

[Ben Galanti]

just a quick followup... I usually keep my computer going for weeks on end, today I restarted it to see if it would clear up this problem, and it did... So, it's not necessairly a CM coding mistake, but it was still very odd...