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Fan Mission: The Lieutenant 2: High Expectations by Frost_Salamander (2023/04/24)


Frost_Salamander

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Finished the mission, great work and very interesting to play with a ton of small details that I love seeing. But a few questions:

Spoiler
  • Did the method of killing Coates matter in the end? The briefing recommends something subtle like an accident, so given he spawned in the Church I decided to knock him out and stuck his head into the Baptismal font and waited a few seconds. It worked, but I also tried just shooting him in the head with an arrow. As far as the objectives were concerned both were considered valid, but one was more... obvious than the other. I didn't know if the game would take the method of assassination into account so I tried both and stuck with the drowning one. :)
  • I had an unfinished objective to "find out what happened to this Atkinson fellow". Near the end of the game I was able to locate his body, but this didn't tick the objective off. After finishing my playthrough, I decided to noclip around the map and found some areas I never noticed including a small room with an incriminating paper in a bin. Once I read that, the objective was marked off, but I kinda feel that if you found his body, even without that paper I still think that technically you have indeed found out what happened to him.

 

A word of warning, Agent Denton. This was a simulated experience; real LAMs will not be so forgiving.

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I just finished this myself and I must say, this was a great FM. I absolutely loved the buildings, the manor, the whole city you created here. Truly some great architecture and interesting places to explore, and I had a ton of fun prowling the streets and climbing every which way. Now I think I'm gonna go replay In Plain Sight. Thanks for all your hard work, it paid off!

Edited by Amadeus
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11 hours ago, Frost_Salamander said:

it sounds like he didn't spawn - I'm guessing this is a bug although nobody experienced it in beta.

Can you remember exactly how you entered the hotel?

  Reveal hidden contents

as for identifying him, he's wearing a red coat and red hat like it says in the briefing.

 

I was balcony hopping along the north side of the square and missed one, but landed instead on the ledge of one of the open arches above the hotel's front door.  That's how I got in.  I took a little damage, but since those arches have no windows or bars I assumed it was a legitimate means of entry.  There were two Coates' body guards in the hotel bar, but no Coates.  I only discovered later that you could enter the hotel from the river side.  I just returned now to the hotel to see if my subsequent entry into his mansion has triggered his appearence, but it has not. 

Edited by Marbrien
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8 hours ago, Xolvix said:

Finished the mission, great work and very interesting to play with a ton of small details that I love seeing. But a few questions:

  Reveal hidden contents
  • Did the method of killing Coates matter in the end? The briefing recommends something subtle like an accident, so given he spawned in the Church I decided to knock him out and stuck his head into the Baptismal font and waited a few seconds. It worked, but I also tried just shooting him in the head with an arrow. As far as the objectives were concerned both were considered valid, but one was more... obvious than the other. I didn't know if the game would take the method of assassination into account so I tried both and stuck with the drowning one. :)
  • I had an unfinished objective to "find out what happened to this Atkinson fellow". Near the end of the game I was able to locate his body, but this didn't tick the objective off. After finishing my playthrough, I decided to noclip around the map and found some areas I never noticed including a small room with an incriminating paper in a bin. Once I read that, the objective was marked off, but I kinda feel that if you found his body, even without that paper I still think that technically you have indeed found out what happened to him.

 

HI @Xolvix:
 

Spoiler
  • the method of assassination doesn't matter, no but I wanted to steer the player into being a bit more creative about it, hence removing the sword and broadheads. I only provided the arrows for the church because I thought it would be fun to shoot him from the rafters and provide an 'easy' method for players who wouldn't have the patience to deal with church marble floor.  Those arrows are only spawned if Coates is spawned in the church however so you can't use them in other scenarios. I would love to be able to have the player throw him from height as well, but TDM doesn't damage ragdolls if you drop them.
  • Regarding the Atkinson/Burns objective.  Yeah the objective could probably be worded better, but as you can probably guess the objective is really about the entire context, not just finding his body.  So you want answers as to who he was, why he was killed, who did it, etc.

 

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1 hour ago, Marbrien said:

I was balcony hopping along the north side of the square and missed one, but landed instead on the ledge of one of the open arches above the hotel's front door.  That's how I got in.  I took a little damage, but since those arches have no windows or bars I assumed it was a legitimate means of entry.  There were two Coates' body guards in the hotel bar, but no Coates.  I only discovered later that you could enter the hotel from the river side.  I just returned now to the hotel to see if my subsequent entry into his mansion has triggered his appearence, but it has not. 

yeah that's perfectly legitimate.  I'm afraid it's a bug, and I don't know why it happened.  The spawn script will only run once, so it was triggered and won't run again.  The only thing I could suggest is a restart 😞 .

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Rather than a complete restart, I loaded a save from before my entry into the hotel.  This time I entered the hotel, again before going to the mansion or church, but did so via the river side instead.  Having knocked everyone out in the hotel, I then went directly to the church.  Coates was there, with Griffin and the 2 body guards.  So the bug seems to be linked with the hotel entry method is some way. 

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16 minutes ago, Marbrien said:

Rather than a complete restart, I loaded a save from before my entry into the hotel.  This time I entered the hotel, again before going to the mansion or church, but did so via the river side instead.  Having knocked everyone out in the hotel, I then went directly to the church.  Coates was there, with Griffin and the 2 body guards.  So the bug seems to be linked with the hotel entry method is some way. 

Could you try re-entering the hotel again the first way, from that same save and see if it happens again?

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8 minutes ago, Marbrien said:

OK, did all that, entered the hotel via the lower arch, opened the shutter onto the square, went to the old town then via the canal into the church, and this time he was there.

Ok happy to hear it worked this time and thanks for doing all that.

So yeah, I don't really have an explanation unfortunately 🤷‍♂️.  If you still have the save game, maybe DM it to me and I can try to reproduce on my end.

Edited by Frost_Salamander
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That's weird, it looks I'm consistently getting a segfault about 1.5 seconds into the mission (DM 2.11 @ linux x64 + nVidia, no addons or mods used).

Will investigate further, just thought to ask if anybody else is seeing this.

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18 minutes ago, irisx said:

That's weird, it looks I'm consistently getting a segfault about 1.5 seconds into the mission (DM 2.11 @ linux x64 + nVidia, no addons or mods used).

Will investigate further, just thought to ask if anybody else is seeing this.

A couple of us have seen crashes.  I think @VanishedOne was seeing similar to you on Linux.  I don't know what's causing it, or how to debug them 🤷‍♂️.  I've made crash dumps available here for anyone that knows what to do with them: 

 

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On 4/29/2023 at 1:51 AM, irisx said:

That's weird, it looks I'm consistently getting a segfault about 1.5 seconds into the mission (DM 2.11 @ linux x64 + nVidia, no addons or mods used).

Will investigate further, just thought to ask if anybody else is seeing this.

I also confirm. Same on my linux x64 and DM 2.11... about 1.5 sec and segfault

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1 hour ago, DavyJones said:

I also confirm. Same on my linux x64 and DM 2.11... about 1.5 sec and segfault

Hmm ok.  Sorry about this I'm at a bit of a loss.  @nbohr1more any suggestions as to what we can do to troubleshoot this?  It looks like we have a fairly reproducible crash on Linux with at least 2 users.

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10 minutes ago, Frost_Salamander said:

Hmm ok.  Sorry about this I'm at a bit of a loss.  @nbohr1more any suggestions as to what we can do to troubleshoot this?  It looks like we have a fairly reproducible crash on Linux with at least 2 users.

TDM probably needs to be run under gdb and BT ( backtrace ) to gain the most detail, but we might be able to start with increasing the darkmod log verbosity:

https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Reporting_Problem

Just to be sure, please try deleting the mission and re-downloading it using the in-game downloader. If anyone Linux users are donwloading from Github they may be encountering the same problem I saw where the paths became the filenames. Likewise the original in-game version had two erroneous files so we need to make sure the latest version is installed and that version is via the in-game downloader.

 

 

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Well, it all very weird!
first attempt: I launch DM under gdb (dgb ./thedarkmod.x64) and... its works like a charm ;)
I leave start tunnels, quicksave and relaunch without gdb - all good

second attempt: I launch all the same under gdb and now it fail but backtrace say nothing helpful:

Quote

 

The ambient 'snd_tunnels' (underground_forelone_loop_z) for location 'location_tunnels' is now playing.

Thread 10 "Frontend" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 0x7fffb817c6c0 (LWP 619200)]
0x00000000005c3b0a in ?? ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0x00000000005c3b0a in ?? ()
#1  0x0000000000a3e190 in ?? ()
#2  0x0000000000aa31c2 in ?? ()
#3  0x0000000000b718de in ?? ()
#4  0x0000000000b72e5b in ?? ()
#5  0x0000000000b8792a in ?? ()
#6  0x0000000000a9ed89 in ?? ()
#7  0x0000000000aac6a6 in ?? ()
#8  0x00000000005ea209 in ?? ()
#9  0x000000000050eee1 in ?? ()
#10 0x0000000000510757 in ?? ()
#11 0x0000000000510b19 in ?? ()
#12 0x00007ffff7c03bb5 in start_thread (arg=<optimized out>) at pthread_create.c:444
#13 0x00007ffff7c85d90 in clone3 () at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/x86_64/clone3.S:81
(gdb) Quit
(gdb) q
A debugging session is active.

Inferior 1 [process 619185] will be killed.

Quit anyway? (y or n) y

 

But! I notice that on the first attempt game show me text message (suppose my current location in term of this mission) and I found this in log:

Quote

----- idImageManager::EndLevelLoad -----
WARNING:Couldn't load image: font
[map entity: func_static_29]
[model: models/map_specific/symbols/H.ase]
[decl: font in <implicit file>]
[image: font]
0 purged from previous
194 kept from previous
2679 new loaded
all images loaded in   9.7 seconds

So I believe that this issue fire when game try to show this first start message

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2 minutes ago, DavyJones said:

But! I notice that on the first attempt game show me text message (suppose my current location in term of this mission) and I found this in log:

So I believe that this issue fire when game try to show this first start message

That warning is just because I'm using a custom model (the letters on the buildings in the square) and the material declared in the model itself ('font') doesn't actually exist and it's replaced with a new material using a skin.  AFAIK it shouldn't cause a crash. That's not to say something in the map isn't causing it though - just no idea what.

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1 minute ago, bobber1 said:

May I ask a simple question? How the devil do I get in to see Lennard? I hear someone yelling "I can help you" so I assume it is him no?

That yelling you hear might be a guard running to help another guard who has spotted you.  Either that or it's just the random 'city' noises in the background (although I have no idea what they say 😂).

Anyways, a hint:

Spoiler

you need to get in via the rooftops.  Look for ways to get up there.

outright spoiler:

Spoiler

There are a few ways to get up, but the easiest is to jump up on the awning in the corner of the street just south of where Lennard's gate is.  From there you can climb up the supports and enter the lodge.  Go through the lodge and out the door on the other side, and from there onto the roof and you will see a gap in the rooftops with a pipe you can climb down.

 

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28 minutes ago, manzanita-crow said:

I'm afraid

  Reveal hidden contents

he didn't spawn for me either. I entered the hotel first

 

OK.  I think I'm going to create a new release to fix this, using a different mechanism. I can only imagine this is a TDM bug, as it seems to work 99% of the time.

@manzanita-crow If you have a save before you entered the hotel you can try again, that worked for @Marbrien.

Just double checking, but:

Spoiler

how did you enter the hotel?

 

Edited by Frost_Salamander
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