Potion to Cure the Blind missing

I finished up the quest with Sir Garrick by getting his training and then killing him. I looted the Potion to Cure the Blind from him so that I could restore the Dodge Master's sight later on, but after having made some gameplay progress, the potion has vanished. I'm almost certain I stashed it in a companion's inventory, and said companion must have ended up drinking or dropping it, since I'm certain I didn't sell it to anyone.

In any case, I don't have the potion now that I'm in Stillwater where I actually need to use it, and I can't solve the quest as a result. Is there a way to obtain another potion, either in the game itself or by modifying a save file? Are there any trainers, for instance, that will allow me to add items to my inventory? I don't have a prior file to reload, and even if I did it would mean losing ten hours or more of game progress. Any help would be appreciated!

 

What version of the game are you playing? The unpatched version had this common problem where the potion would just turn invisible and vanish.

 

I'm running the GOG.com version (1.0.7.4) with the latest release of the Unofficial Arcanum Patch.

 

Another random bug: I made it to Half-Ogre Island, but there's no ship captain there to take me back to the mainland. Even with the unofficial patch this game is pretty damn buggy.

EDIT: Never mind that one at least, the captain reappeared after I wandered around the world map a bit.

 

Nothing at all? No trainers or ways of spawning items into the game world? Shame. I've seen this bug documented elsewhere before but no solutions, I guess I'll have to wait for a second play-through to finish the quest.

 

Your inventory was full, Garrick either didn't give you the potion or you dropped it right away and someone picked it up.

Try killing random people in Dernholm in case someone picked it up.

 

Technically, the cure the blind potion is just a relabeled health potion, so it's possible that one of your followers drank it or you even accidentally drank it yourself (if you put a normal health potion in a quick slot, the cure the blind potion will also be called). Yes, this is annoying, and I regret that I never fixed it. And no, you can't 'spawn' a unique quest item, because it's a part of the map, just like you can't 'spawn' another Virgil.

As for the the HG island captain problem. This is related to the high resolution patch. The vicinity checks in scripts are still 800x400 (I went to great lengths to keep them this way), even though you can now see much more of the game field. The solution is that you just have to get closer to objects (in this case the spawn point of the captain on the ship) for them to appear. Why did I do it this way? Letting the checks extend to the full screen would bring about two problems, one small, one big. The small one is that the game only goes through 127 (IIRC) objects before cancelling the vicinity check (that is, the scripts checks would fail and quests would get bugged), this of course could be extended, but it's all over the engine, and doing it in ASM would be extremely tedious (especially considering how much of the game I already had to rewrite in ASM to make this damn patch). And the bigger problem is that the events would be triggering potentially too far away, e.g. imagine plot important NPCs initiating dialog with you half across the map. Yeah, yeah, a few more replays of the game in a crazy high resolution and a re-write of all problematic scripts would fix the problem, but you know what, fuck you, objects popping in and out is a way more balanced solution. I'm not fuckin' touching this shitty game again. The fully commented source code for the high resolution patch is out there, feel free to improve it if you don't fuckin' like it.

 

Whoa Drog calm down! No one is asking you to further improve upon the game, your patch is already a great service to the community and it's more than anyone else has bothered to do. It's good that you posted up the specfic problem so a future modder could take up the mantle if he wanted to, but still your attitude is very fierce! The guy was only asking some simple questions, he wasn't bitching or whining so your response was a bit over-blown.

 

All I can say is, sorry if I've offended, Drog. Don't think that I don't appreciate your fixes... however, I honestly have no idea which bugs are still in the game and why, and I certainly wouldn't have anticipated that something like having a character spawn in or not is affected by the screen resolution of all things. Didn't at all mean to degrade the work you've done.

 

The game logic should be the same, objects should spawn at the same distance from the player as before, except you can now see them 'pop in' due to the higher resolution. You probably just checked the ship from afar and figured the captain was gone for good. The game was originally developed for the effective resolution of 800x400 (NOT 800x600, 200 pixels of vertical space were taken up by the interface and weren't rendered), which was really claustrophobic.

If you still find this jarring, then play in a lower resolution, I recommend 1280x720 for 16:9 and 1280x800 for 16:10.

The 'fuck you' part was not aimed at you specifically. I was already attacked before on the subject of the vicinity checks, so I just put it there in case some moron comes ranting about it again. The source code is out there - improve it, if you fuckin' can. Most people have no idea how complex the high resolution patch is, it was an enormous effort, I had to trace lots of shit in a disassembler and rewrite pretty much every element of the interface. It took me months.

 

Drog Alt, the effort you put into this obscure game is truly a service to the rest of us. Without digging into the code and your modifications and improvements, I'm just going to assume your work was brilliant.

Your raging outbursts are still more brilliant.