Might and Magic 6, 7, 8 merge based on mm8 engine. [upd. 05.11.2023]

[Templayer]

NPCs from gyms used to have faces last summer, and now https://1fichier.com/?rgcpow0ahmaaj4ncdtfq

I'm using rodril's latest version, not even the stable branch of your repo; what I see is a hireling with the face of the level 15 necromancer from Ravenshore.

This was reported at Discord already, actually.

https://gitlab.com/templayer/mmmerge/issues/155

I will add it to the GitLab Issue and Bug Tracker.

[SpectralDragon]

I really REALLY hope all this rising tidal wave of bugs aren't too overwhelming for you, since there are also items and all. ^^; Like what's that, God's Plague of Locusts?

[Templayer]

Finally discovered wtf is up with leather skill regressing - savegame at https://1fichier.com/?9qaust46tg1ing1f5no2

\begin{rant}
To triage I had to take the snapshot saves from my stupid script (btw, in the JScript version replace "getDay" with "getDate" - or don't) and since it was stupidly late in the evening I wrote a small abomination to binary search those, copying them to a scapegoat (save019.dod), running the merge, checking etc etc; the script is so butt ugly that if anybody asks it was actually written by a monkey pounding on a keyboard and it works by an amazing coincidence.

Good news is that this crap, even restarting MM8.exe whenever the script replaced save019.dod (it was too late to think of running the game in a window or whatever), took a more than reasonable amount of time:
$ time ./bsearch_mm678.pl timeline/save007.dod/*.dod
...
real 2m12.397s
user 2m16.404s
sys 0m10.081s

Now, if you're a computer person, one *could* reuse^Wabuse git-bisect (*) by basically writing a silly script that creates a dummy empty repo, adds all the snapshots as if they were single commits, and then... you got it.
When I thought of that I kept complaining aloud at how disgusting it is (I believe 763 is the relevant xkcd for this); if you're still reading, you must be Templayer, so please try the savegame, verify that the culprit is learning blasters in the control center under the oracle (and NOT in mm7), and do your magic with the info.
I ended up with those who had leather regressed to novice (same skill level, just no longer expert/master/gm) AND even dragons learning leather+blaster - except of course they can't use it, but they have the skill somehow.
Anyway imho the proper way to deal with this things is writing a tool that dumps human readable info to stdout, ie something eg like:
$ magic *.dod
save012.dod: Arius Axe 13 GM
etc etc
I honestly thought I was going to rant for much, much longer, but I'll show some restraint(!) and stop here.


(*) or better, its fossil equivalent, since installing fossil, even on windows, is orders of magnitude easier than any other vcs I know:
1. download fossil.exe;
2. move it to a directory in %PATH% or even just in the merge/save directory;
3. you were done with step two!
\end{rant}

Let me officially welcome you to the team. Excellent work!

Like per usual, savegame has been rehosted into GitLab. Added to the BugTracker as well. I haven't checked the savegame yet, I might later, if cthscr doesn't do that part of the work for me, or Andrey - I will keep it open in a tab among all the other tabs that I am keeping.

Skill Loss (mostly Leather Armor)

EDIT: Also making a repository for snapshots seems excessive, but it is a solution.

Personally... I just always save into a new slot and when it gets full, I just backup (with LZMA2 compression or whatever it is called) the save folder and start overwriting from the first slot down. I now have about 100 bluray discs with storage content for my stuff and my videos (those are nowadays compressed in h265).

Also - expect a video with my FrankenPC this week, it is currently being rendered.
I've created a monster.

[Templayer]

I really REALLY hope all this rising tidal wave of bugs aren't too overwhelming for you, since there are also items and all. ^^; Like what's that, God's Plague of Locusts?

Nah, those bugs were always there, just now they are surfacing.

And cthscr is doing a good job at squashing them, while Andrey does data collecting, Issue management and general maintenance (i.e. my job. Bless him! )

We should probably only bother Rodril with the worst glitches that we are unable to fix ourselves easily, like the "64" bug that requires low-level assembly fixing that cthscr doesn't really want to do and I cannot because I am most certainly not genius-enough for that. xD

[SpectralDragon]

Nah, those bugs were always there, just now they are surfacing.

And cthscr is doing a good job at squashing them, while Andrey does data collecting, Issue management and general maintenance (i.e. my job. Bless him! )

We should probably only bother Rodril with the worst glitches that we are unable to fix ourselves easily, like the "64" bug that requires low-level assembly fixing that cthscr doesn't really want to do and I cannot because I am most certainly not genius-enough for that. xD

Guess that's what we get when the coronavirus (I know, not an actual "bug", but still) hops into the game world as well. ^^; which for bloody Ancient's sake better NEVER touch any of us, be it you, Rodril, cthscr, me, GrayFace or any other person active here and on Discord. We ain't like Tolkien (died before he could complete some of his notable work) or NWC/3DO (defunct before properly completing MM9) after all.

[andrey]

I really REALLY hope all this rising tidal wave of bugs aren't too overwhelming for you, since there are also items and all. ^^; Like what's that, God's Plague of Locusts?

Just old bugs being moved from tracker to GitLab. And there are many many more left in the tracker :-Z

And cthscr is doing a good job at squashing them, while Andrey does data collecting, Issue management and general maintenance (i.e. my job. Bless him! )

Thanks :-)

[Templayer]

Also someone called Grammarsalad joined the GitLab project for Merge. Is that eilacomeva?

[Templayer]

Reimplement animated loading screens from MM6

[eilacomeva]

I know, I know, guilty as charged... it's just that I suffer from another-accountitis, I should settle on a password manager or something.

Ditto, honestly, thus no GitLab account for me too. Don't wish to take the jobs away from people and all. ^^;

Some new bugs reported on Discord, collected by GDSpectra, have been added to the Bug Tracker and as GitLab Issues.

Cleric losing a head (yeap... )

NPC Hirelings at Training Centers in Enroth have no portraits

Speaking of those, I sent ya the savegame Sibernethy provided me. He runs the latest (October) patch of MMMerge.

As for the monster, NPC and player character limit, I'd suggest raising each of them to 9999

Everything looks normal to me in save005.dod, both the faces as I walk around and their bodies/heads when looking at inventories; same in my save019.dod, I see an absolutely normal NPC in the gym in Mist.
What is it supposed to show instead?

[eilacomeva]

NPCs from gyms used to have faces last summer, and now https://1fichier.com/?rgcpow0ahmaaj4ncdtfq

I'm using rodril's latest version, not even the stable branch of your repo; what I see is a hireling with the face of the level 15 necromancer from Ravenshore.

This was reported at Discord already, actually.

https://gitlab.com/templayer/mmmerge/issues/155

I will add it to the GitLab Issue and Bug Tracker.

D'oh! Once again, when I take the time to recreate a situation to have a savegame the details stay in my head and don't make it to the keyboard
Anyway what I see in my savegame is that everything is normal, do you have a savegame with an NPC with no face?

[eilacomeva]

Finally discovered wtf is up with leather skill regressing - savegame at https://1fichier.com/?9qaust46tg1ing1f5no2

\begin{rant}
To triage I had to take the snapshot saves from my stupid script (btw, in the JScript version replace "getDay" with "getDate" - or don't) and since it was stupidly late in the evening I wrote a small abomination to binary search those, copying them to a scapegoat (save019.dod), running the merge, checking etc etc; the script is so butt ugly that if anybody asks it was actually written by a monkey pounding on a keyboard and it works by an amazing coincidence.

Good news is that this crap, even restarting MM8.exe whenever the script replaced save019.dod (it was too late to think of running the game in a window or whatever), took a more than reasonable amount of time:
$ time ./bsearch_mm678.pl timeline/save007.dod/*.dod
...
real 2m12.397s
user 2m16.404s
sys 0m10.081s

Now, if you're a computer person, one *could* reuse^Wabuse git-bisect (*) by basically writing a silly script that creates a dummy empty repo, adds all the snapshots as if they were single commits, and then... you got it.
When I thought of that I kept complaining aloud at how disgusting it is (I believe 763 is the relevant xkcd for this); if you're still reading, you must be Templayer, so please try the savegame, verify that the culprit is learning blasters in the control center under the oracle (and NOT in mm7), and do your magic with the info.
I ended up with those who had leather regressed to novice (same skill level, just no longer expert/master/gm) AND even dragons learning leather+blaster - except of course they can't use it, but they have the skill somehow.
Anyway imho the proper way to deal with this things is writing a tool that dumps human readable info to stdout, ie something eg like:
$ magic *.dod
save012.dod: Arius Axe 13 GM
etc etc
I honestly thought I was going to rant for much, much longer, but I'll show some restraint(!) and stop here.


(*) or better, its fossil equivalent, since installing fossil, even on windows, is orders of magnitude easier than any other vcs I know:
1. download fossil.exe;
2. move it to a directory in %PATH% or even just in the merge/save directory;
3. you were done with step two!
\end{rant}

Let me officially welcome you to the team. Excellent work!

Like per usual, savegame has been rehosted into GitLab. Added to the BugTracker as well. I haven't checked the savegame yet, I might later, if cthscr doesn't do that part of the work for me, or Andrey - I will keep it open in a tab among all the other tabs that I am keeping.

Skill Loss (mostly Leather Armor)

EDIT: Also making a repository for snapshots seems excessive, but it is a solution.

Personally... I just always save into a new slot and when it gets full, I just backup (with LZMA2 compression or whatever it is called) the save folder and start overwriting from the first slot down. I now have about 100 bluray discs with storage content for my stuff and my videos (those are nowadays compressed in h265).

Also - expect a video with my FrankenPC this week, it is currently being rendered.
I've created a monster.

Urgh... I tried to have a script collect 140MB worth of saves to a temporary fossil repo, it did shrink down 10x but creation took ~2 minutes due to compression; if I ever need to bisect savegames again, I'll write a script to just copy files to save013.dod or whatever and play in a window or run the script from a tty (I don't have multiple monitors).
TBH the repo abomination occurred to me because I felt silly writing something that just does binary search, but since the repo overhead is big I guess that's what I'll do.

Can you tell us what the video is about or is it a surprise?

[eilacomeva]

Also someone called Grammarsalad joined the GitLab project for Merge. Is that eilacomeva?

No, but I like to think that you thought so because of all the typos in the tracker...

[Templayer]

NPCs from gyms used to have faces last summer, and now https://1fichier.com/?rgcpow0ahmaaj4ncdtfq

I'm using rodril's latest version, not even the stable branch of your repo; what I see is a hireling with the face of the level 15 necromancer from Ravenshore.

This was reported at Discord already, actually.

https://gitlab.com/templayer/mmmerge/issues/155

I will add it to the GitLab Issue and Bug Tracker.

D'oh! Once again, when I take the time to recreate a situation to have a savegame the details stay in my head and don't make it to the keyboard
Anyway what I see in my savegame is that everything is normal, do you have a savegame with an NPC with no face?

https://gitlab.com/templayer/mmmerge/issues/155

Since you do not have a gitlab account, you haven't been notified - both a savegame and a video of this was provided.

[Templayer]

Can you tell us what the video is about or is it a surprise?

Showing off my monstrous gaming rig. (that is inside a rather small case. My GTX Titan X GPU goes over the mainboard... and between my harddrives. )

[Templayer]

Also someone called Grammarsalad joined the GitLab project for Merge. Is that eilacomeva?

No, but I like to think that you thought so because of all the typos in the tracker...

Don't remind me.

[eilacomeva]

...
https://gitlab.com/templayer/mmmerge/issues/155

Since you do not have a gitlab account, you haven't been notified - both a savegame and a video of this was provided.

As Templayer would say, don't remind me
Anyway, I've seen the video, but the savegame doesn't have it - when I went to White Cap there was an NPC called Gwendolyn and her face was absolutely normal; exited the game, retried and there's nobody; re-retried, two NPCs in Free Haven & White Cap (I thought the faceless NPC was in the adventurer's inn), both with their faces looking alright.

Mea culpa: I didn't realize at first that the team is the same as in the video... even so everything looks fine on my end, can you make a savegame right where it happens or is it only in the experimental branch?

[eilacomeva]

Can you tell us what the video is about or is it a surprise?

Showing off my monstrous gaming rig. (that is inside a rather small case. My GTX Titan X GPU goes over the mainboard... and between my harddrives. )

It goes where? You monster! ;p
(I almost wish I didn't check how expensive it is...)

[majaczek]

the file for GM racial skills is gone

EDIT: instead there are experts

[Templayer]

My FrankenPC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O-qEvGoYzA

The moment I released the video of a best possible gaming rig for Windows XP, I just found out that recently it became possible to use Ryzens with XP. ARRRGH!!
https://www.win-raid.com/t4035f45-Windo ... l#msg80487

Welp, I know what to upgrade next, then. The motherboard.

[cthscr]

Possible Reputation fix: Scripts/Global/Reputation.lua (micro diff for those who are interested).