Unofficial Arcanum Patch: Bug Reporting

dead Pelonious Schuyler is 20 years old

 

Oops, thought my post was duplicated and deleted it. Anyway, here it is again.

Is the latest version of UAP compatible with the mod WIP6.0 and the High Resolution Patch together? If so what order/installation options do I use?

 

I left Chukka (via disband) after vendigroth, but cannot find him at Bates. That really sucks because I made some side progress since then, and he's the only guy who can deal huge damage on my team. But I guess I can do without.

 

I installed the UAP patch successfully. Could not start the game after installation due to an error about dwmapi.dll missing.
I did install Arcanum on my old Windows XP SP3 PC that I use to run older games and as far as google told me dwmapi.dll is a file that Windows Vista started to have but not Windows XP.

 

Have you another pc with Vista or higher? Otherwise I don't know how the UAP can work on a XP computer since it seems to need this dll

 

Yes, but I try to use the old Windows XP PC for old games and the new one only for Internet and current games.
Did the UAP use that dll from the very start (and so immediately exclude XP) or only in later versions?

 

I don't know, possibly only in the latest versions, maybe it's use is called by the new resolution patch. Try an older patch.

 

If it is used by the hi res patch would it NOT be installed if I do not install the hi res patch and only the UAP patch - which then would make it work?

 

I don't know. Give it a try. Sorry for the little help I can give.

 

I just tried to install UAP again. This time I did not check to install everything like last time. HI-RES and all the beta stuff stayed unchecked - and the game starts fine

 

Awesome!!

 

In my current game I noticed that my Perception was lowered by 1

Spoiler

and the reason is that I were wearing the "Helmet of Strength".
Normal helmets have their PE penalty obviously mentioned in the helmets description, but the HoS does not

Spoiler

it mentions only AC+2 and DR+15 but not the usual PE-1 of normal helmets.

 

In my current game I read up some books in the Tarant Universites library. Then I got stuck in a corner of the room that I can´t leave.

Spoiler

It is as if there is an invisible wall between the candlestick right to my character (the dwarf with the red smoking jacket) and the wooden wall to his left. Before that I read books at the bookstand between the candlesticks and could move into the corner without a problem. Only leaving is not possible. Saving and reloading does not help.

Using Virgil´s cheat menu did let me teleport out of that corner.

I uploaded a savegame in case someone wants to take a look.

 

I hope Drog (the author of the UAP) will read these bug reports and fix them.

 

In my current game I confronted the Schuylers and with Magnus in the group had to fight them.

1) It was a very easy fight as there was only 1 spell in the whole fight and then all 3 charged my group to fight me with bare hands - having not even a dagger or staff for self-defence for a successfull 400 years old business seems wrong,
2) when the fight started I actually expected the dwarven zombie workers to charge into the back of my group. But they continued on their mindless business. When the Schuylers died, I expected the dwarven zombie workers to drop dead with the necromancers who animated them being killed, but they continued their mindless business. And when I decided to end their miserable existance Magnus (the guy who complains what has been done to his clan by raising them as zombies) complains to me why we are fighting such decent lads - so are those hardworking zombie dwarfs good and I should leave them be?

 

In Ashbury you get a quest to hunt down 3 wild pigs that destroy the corn fields.
Sounds easy and a good deed aiding the local farmers.

But every time I attack the next pig Magnus starts shouting how they are decent types and he won´t much longer attack them...

Good-Aligned wild pigs? Who destroy the harvest of the farmer?

At best they should be neutral as wild beasts that can be hunted.

 

Hey everyone! First time posting here. Is this a good place to contact Drog, or should I try Discord instead?


First of all, thanks for putting all the hard work into this project! As someone who previously worked on several major modding projects, I greatly appreciate both all the effort that went into UAP, as well as the amazing result.


I was wondering if there is any chance that the infamous late-game glitch that causes the corruption of Virgil's data and constant game crashes will ever get fixed. From what I’ve seen, this is currently the most critical and a rather common technical issue with Arcanum. Over the years, I've played through the game about three or four times, each time under a different operating system (WinXP, Win7, Win10) and on a different computer, and every single time I've experienced this same issue. The problem is present both in vanilla Arcanum and in UAP 2.0 (the latest version of the patch that I've played).


Please note that I last played the game about a year ago. I did some testing in the last couple days to remember the details, but my memory might still be a little murky, not to mention that the bug’s behavior is not always 100% consistent (though, its causes are). I also initially wanted to back up my explanation with some screenshots, but, unfortunately, for whatever reason, my current installation of Arcanum no longer saves screenshots when I try pressing F12, and I don't think I'll be able to get my old saves to work if I attempt to reinstall the game. I can, however, provide my saves, if they will be of any help.


Anyway, here is what happens, based on my experience:

1) Presumably, the bug starts to manifest itself after Virgil leaves the party, gets killed, and then resurrected as part of his companion quest.

1.5) At this point, Elder Joachim is supposed to make an appearance, but, for some reason, this has never happened in any of my playthroughs. I doubt, however, that this has anything to do with the bug in question, since I've seen several people who did actually manage to meet Joachim but still had the problem with memory corruption and crashes, and vice versa.

2) From that point onward, Virgil becomes susceptible to a bug that causes him to glitch whenever he wanders off too far from the main character (in my experience, "too far" in this case means "beyond the boundaries of the screen if it was centered on the main character"). Once he is glitched, his sprite disappears from the screen and you can no longer interact with him by clicking his portrait. Additionally, in some cases, his portrait gets replaced with a random sprite and his name gets replaced with a random string of text from the game’s data (i.e. another character's name, name of an inventory item, "Chest", etc.).

3) After that, the game is a ticking time bomb that is guaranteed to crash in one way or another. At this point, one of two things can happen if you try leaving the location:

4a) The game crashes upon trying to load the new location.

4b) Virgil's sprite reappears, but he still remains glitched: you still cannot interact with him by clicking his portrait and all artifacts caused by the bug (i.e. wrong portrait sprite or name string) persist. Additionally, the game will sometimes display a yellow circle under one of your party members, as if you are hovering the mouse over them, even when you are not. In other cases, the yellow circle will appear in an empty spot near the entrance that you came in whenever you hover the mouse over Virgil's portrait (as if Virgil still stands there and didn't move since you entered the location). Any attempt to interact with a companion that has this glitched circle under them will lead to a crash.

5) Even if you manage to avoid clicking your companions, the game still crashes the next time you try to leave the location.


I've found a couple of ways to avoid the corruption and the subsequent crashes, but none of them is a real solution:

a) Dismissing Virgil from the party altogether. Virgil will still disappear from the game once the distance between you and him exceeds roughly a half of the screen's size, but at least the game won't crash.

b) Casting Hasten on Virgil and always making sure that he keeps up with your main character. This is a pain in the ass to pull off and is not something new players can figure out on their own. The spell is not essential, but it does make this whole affair somewhat bearable.


Additionally, there is also a similar bug that occurs if you bring Magnus to Loghaire Thunder Stone after discovering the Iron Clan. However, in Magnus's case, the only way of preventing glitches and crashes is to avoid triggering the dialogue between the two characters altogether.


Here are some links to previous discussions of this bug by other people:

https://terra-arcanum.com/forums/threads/game-became-unplayable-since-i-resurrected-virgil.18284/

https://www.reddit.com/r/arcanum/comments/9brgx8/virgil_disappeared_saves_are_glitched/

I've also come across a video documenting the bug in question:




Interestingly, in the first link, Drog dismisses this bug as save corruption, however, in my experience, it doesn't appear to happen randomly or have anything to do with saves. Even though the behavior of the bug itself is inconsistent, there are very specific circumstances that always cause it to occur, no matter how often you save the game, or whether you save it at all. Then again, it is entirely possible that there is also another similar bug that does have something to do with save corruption as described by Drog.


The weirdest thing about this bug for me is that, despite me playing the game on different PCs running on different OS, both with and without patches, the bug still occurs in 100% of my playthroughs, while some other people never encounter it at all. This tells me that there must be something specific I always do that others don't. My best guess is that it might have something to do with the fact that I've always played Arcanum on non-English versions of Windows, but who knows if it has anything to do with it. Perhaps, someone else could help confirm/refute this guess if they have/haven't encountered this issue while playing on an English/non-English version of Windows?

EDIT: Thanks to ConjurerDragon, I've managed to fix my screenshot problem, so here are some pictures to illustrate my report:

Spoiler

Before Virgil disappears:


My main character runs away, leaving Virgil to stand in the same spot. Virgil's sprite disappears:


(there may be deviations in the bug's behavior after that point, but sooner or later it always results in a crash)

Virgil reappears once I leave the location, however there is now a yellow circle under his feet, as if I'm hovering the mouse over his sprite or portrait:


If I try hovering the mouse over Virgil's portrait, a second circle appears in an empty spot near the entrance I came from:


After I reenter the ruins, Virgil's portrait immediately glitches out the moment I try initiating a dialogue with Raven:


After that, I tried hovering the mouse over Virgil's glitched portrait, and the game crashed.

 

The latest version is 2.02
https://terra-arcanum.com/drog/uap.html

You should always be using the latest version of the patch to prevent reporting bugs that have already been fixed.

But are you using the english version of Arcanum? The unofficial patch is supposed only to work for the english versions.

Do you have programs constantly running in the background that could disturb Arcanum?

 

As I said in my previous post, the last time I played Arcanum was roughly a year ago, so UAP 2.0 was the latest version at the time. And I did read the patch notes before posting here to check if the issue has been fixed in newer versions.

Yep, English version from GOG.com.

Nope, I don't think I had anything running in the background aside from Avast. But then again, I definitely wasn't using Avast (or any other antivirus for that matter) when I first played Arcanum all those years ago, yet I still encountered the same issue with the disappearing Virgil.

 

You do not need the ingame function with F12 or so or an external program to create screenshots.
Simply press [ALT] + [DRUCK] (the latter would be Print? on english keyboards and you create a softcopy of the game screen and then
open the Arcanum forum post and rightclick / insert to get:

Spoiler

The screenshot is from my current game. I enter the Draught in Ashbury, talk with the people having the usual random games / conversations.
The guy in the extreme left attacked, being from the Molochean hand, and died. Everything stayed normal.
I continued to talk with everyone until I came to the half-orc villager in the top right of the tavern. He turned molochean agent, too. He died, too.
However after his death an Asbury guard rushed in from the outside and started fighting me...

So, is there an alignment error here? Should the Ashbury guard rush to the aid of the half-orc villager after that attacked me and got killed?