Wiggling antennae

[Philippeatbay]

I was up way too late last night playing the Battle of Britain scenario.

The Germans launched their first air attacks across the North Sea, and I put a couple of squadrons of Spitfires in place to oppose them.

After I began attacking one of the bomber squadrons something weird happened.

All my other attacks were fine, but when I fired on one particular squadron there were no combat sounds.

And after I had reduced it (or thought I had reduced it) to zero strength, it didn't crash and was still on the map. I guess it was the Nazi Zombie squadron.

seeing the bombers on the map I kept trying to attack it, but nothing happened.

The next turn the squadron died on its own, but it was odd seeing the combat effect spread into another turn.

I wasn't thinking too clearly (not that I ever do) so I didn't save the game right away. But it was late and not too long after I went to bed.

So here's the output log and what I think are some autosaves from around the time of the zombie event:

https://app.box.com/s/9p60d64f1rpgjk9aj8auk1ba2u0iifqa

[Philippeatbay]

I finished playing the Battle of Britain scenario and I have a bit more to report.

The glitch happened again a bit later in the scenario, so this was not an isolated instance.

I'm a bit of a computer primitive so anything I say should be taken with a grain of salt, but the bug almost seems like it is related to the map, because it seems to happen in the same area.

In this case the bugged area was aproximately a dozen hexes ENE of the northernmost British airfield. That would put it about five or six hexes out into the North Sea (i.e. north of Norfolk and northeast of the Wash).

I also played a regular Order of Battle: Pacific scenario last night, and I'm sorry to say that I noticed what appeared to be a variation on the bug in the scenario I was playing there as well. Unfortunately I didn't make any saves, but I'll keep an eye out for it in the future.

What happened in Order of Battle Pacific (and I'm playing from a Steam installation in both this and the Battle of Britain scenario) was that I was playing the second scenario in the Japanese campaign. It was very close to the end of the scenario so I was all the way at the bottom of the map.

I was cutting off the roads leading into the last American stronghold in the south center of the map. In the far southeast corner there was a bunker and a town that I needed to control. I swung a tank unit south of the town and attacked it from two sides. The infantry garrison eventually decided it had had enough and abandoned the town, retreating to the southwest. I attacked it in the open and it retreated off the road towards the southeast (next to the woods south of the town). I started maneuvering my troops to clear out the bunker, and then decided it might be a good idea to finish off the fleeing garrison so they couldn't regain their courage and make trouble. So I ordered the infantry unit that was adjacent to it to attack. And then...nothing. I tried with several units, but it was like the defender wasn't even there. Nothing could attack it. I advanced the turn thinking that maybe I had destroyed it without noticing and that it would vanish at the begining of the next turn, but next turn the 'ghost' was still there. Not moving, but not registering as being there so I couldn't attack it.

This is slightly different from the original bug that I reported, but I think it's related.

It also seems to be showing up later in a scenario, so a quick run-through of the first couple of turns won't detect it. Off the top of my head I would say that the two times I've noticed this happening I was at least about twenty-odd turns into the scenario. However, if the bug is map-related, it may simply have taken until a later point in the game to reach an affected area. If it's combat related it will be a bear to find because it's probably buried in the code.

I don't know if it's exclusive to Steam (I have the non-Steam version but it isn't installed) but this is definately a bug. As I said earlier it's not game breaking, but it's very annoying and lessens the immersion.

And next time I see it, I think I'm going to call it the frozen ghost bug.

As we used to say in Combat Mission, please fix or do sumfink!

[Philippeatbay]

Two turns into the Morning Sun Xuzhou scenario I acquired a ghost of the on-map combat info screen after launching an attack.

The screen stays in the same part of the screen, and moves around when you scroll the map.

[Philippeatbay]

Whatever caused it, it wasn't visible when I loaded the save. So it was just something that got stuck in video memory (which is very different from what was going on with the frozen ghost bug).

[edited because I just noticed that I typed "was visible" instead of "wasn't visible"].

[mhladnik]

I have encountered both of these as well.

[bjarmson]

There are a lot of ghost units in the game. Sometimes moving through them gets rid of them, though I once had one that I shared the same hex with attack me, killed it after I moved away. There is also the plane duplication problem, which can affect both carriers and hangers. It's a particular problem with carriers because of their smaller space limitations. Be nice to get these things fixed.

[Philippeatbay]

This ghost really is a ghost.

An over-extended Japanese tank unit that has been eliminated.





Fun game and nice visuals, but an awful lot of artefacts.

[adherbal]

Most (all?) of this should be fixed in the next update (coming with US Marines).

I have not seen the "ghost prognosis" icon before though. If this happen again, please post an output log - might be an error in there.

[jdarocha]

I have had the same situation on OOB-Pacific. I had 4 units of P51 Mustangs completely disappear from the map though they were still there; and I had a Kingfisher Recon plan submerge itself underwater like a submarine (looks like it is underwater and only the outline of the plane is there). This all started with the 2.2.5 update. BTW I am not running a steam version.