Possible corruption in Tech Hub Mission 4 on Staging

[ghramsey]

This is a vague report. I'm not 100% sure what is really going on.

I've edited Tech Hub to speedup tranist cars, add an extra alien in M3, M4 and M10.
I moved the access tuner upgrade chip and locked the data archive room.
And I closed several Vent Traversal Markers inside the tunnels where extra aliens spawn and get stuck during Mission 10.

All of the above works finem but I have a bug. In Mission 4 the transit car is supposed to be arriving as
we enter the transit station. For some reason after the above changes something breaks that scripting.

In initially edited all of the transit cars from C# . When this issue first appeared I thought that was the cause.
It's not. I edited manually on Staging. All delays on the transit cars set to 0.1 and same on the composite instances.
Saved all of the changes and when I get to that part of mission 4 the transit car is not on arrival and the button is
locked out with a restore power message. A work around this potential soft lock is to pass through shopping or
engineering to sci hub. But the problem is this doesn't fix the issue. The transit car condition is saved and the car
is locked on the sci hub transit side too.

I backed up my work and substituted vanilla unaltered tech hub folder. I passed from Tech Comms to get a clean entry.
The car is on arrival and works normally. I subbed back the other files and it is broken again. So the issue is not following
a save file I don't think. Since there's no autosave on the entry to Tech Hub from Tech Comms that's probably a good thing.

I scrapped the entire tech hub file work and began anew using Master branch.
After that the entire issue has ceased. So I'm drawing a conclusion that something incorrect is
being introduced while editing from staging. It might not be but I have nothing else to go by.

I'm attaching the commands. pak editing from Staging.
GitHub refuses to allow posting of PAK file type so I'm fudging it by naming it as a ZIP.
Remove .ZIP extension. It's a normal Commands.PaK.

TechHub-COMMANDS.PAK.zip

[ghramsey]

I figured out a little more, but still cannot lock in on this issue's cause.

I changed back to staging because I'd edited other files using that.
I made a save on tech hub with staging ; changed the added alien.
Saved and again the transit car won't arrive.

I think I'm going to have to experiment more. I'm starting to suspect
that it's editing the xenomorph entity to be present which is a cause here.
I have no idea why that would be or if it's complete coincidence or not.

[ghramsey]

I've done more investigations on this.
I manually created another new file using staging.
Closed a bunch of Vent Traversal Markers in M14.
I used my C# script to edit the transit cars. Played to end of M4 ; broken transit car.

I re-created manually the same transit car and vent traversal Marker changes on Master.
Subbed those files for the ones from Staging. Car worked normally. I went back to Staging and made a
nothing change and saved. The car broke again.

Here's both working and non-working commands.pak files. Let me know if you need more than just the PAK files.
Same trick as earlier.

GitHub won't allow upload of PAK. I renamed both with ZIP to get around that.

Broken Staging -COMMANDS.PAK.ZIP
Master-Branch COMMANDS.PAK.ZIP

[MattFiler]

this is super helpful, thanks!

[MattFiler]

I've loaded up your master branch COMMANDS.PAK and saved it out with the new script editor with no changes applied and could not reproduce the transit car issue, it arrived for me on both the master and staging re-save versions of the PAK - am I misunderstanding the problem? Does the issue only arise after adding the extra alien in the staging editor? If so, where did you add him to?

[ghramsey]

Well crap! I'm sorry about that. I have the same thing here now; I cannot reproduce the issue as I did before.
It's possible your recent updates tilted the balance and fixed whatever was causing the break. IDK.

Looking at both files I marked 'broken', posted above. I didn't change the alien count at all.
So it's not related to changing the alien stuff.

I did still change the delays on the transit cars and this began with that change.

Here's my notes on the changes I've made. It's my own shorthand psedocode
and I'm glad I have it when I don't remember what I changed
Tech_Hub.txt

With resepct to the changes on the 'suicide barrier' composite and instances.
Those are 'tested' changes taken from Kitty Isolation Redux. The delays were working there I didn't alter them.
Same with the SAT V1 animation position. I used the same coordinates from Kitty Isolation Redux.

I'd used C# to target those 'suicide barrier' composites and instances for a mass edit of the 8 files with transit cars.

Only this one transit car has had an issue though.
Since the issue still happened from a manually created file too that's ruled out C# as a cause for this instant issue.

The only other big change I made was the VentTraversalMarker proxies, but those are only in the story script for Mission 10.
I don't see how they would affect Mission 4.

[MattFiler]

This is really detailed and helpful, thanks. I'll see if I can repro the issue using those steps but if not I think I'll mark this as closed and hope that other recent changes have fixed whatever was causing the issue! There's also the chance that it's a bit of a race condition and doesn't happen every time you play the level 🤔

[ghramsey]

I'm sorry you have to go to all this work for this bug.

I've been wokring on the theory it doesn't follow the save only the PAK.
What if it's both save file and / or interaction of going to /from Tech Comms that's at fault?

My testing involves ending Mission 4_TechComms to Mission 4_TechHub and the car is busted.
I've also been using the same save file which starts me right at the end of Tech Comms.

I've attached my modified TechComms and the save file which begins right before the exit of M4.
It will endlessly load (crash) if the TechComms file are not used though because of the altered save position.

TechCommsWORLD.zip
remote.zip

[ghramsey]

I cannot reproduce this issue on the .36 staging or now .39.
I built a new tech hub and played it from M1 through.
I even cloned the backstage alien. What I have not done is all the many vent traversal marker proxies.
Though those are specifically on M14 (Mission 10). I'll add those parts and see if anything changes.
But as of now, I think this one might be fixed / solved by your backend fixes.

Cancel that. Grrrr. The issue recurred when I made the proxies on the Mission 14.2 story script (Mission 10).
So some how all of that is inter-related. I think you'd suspected some flowgraph related things were afoot.
But I also restored tech comms from the old edit. But hot-swapping the edit for vanilla does not fix the tram.
Though I will test this going forward.

OK. Also, going forward, I need to keep staged versions of this tech_hub folder which to -date I have not done.

This is a completely new file (I verfied my files and used a new folder), and I began a new game so it's a new save.
I will also begin anew using the new staging update. Since this was begin tonight on the prior one.

[ghramsey]

I'm not sure if I've hit on something but I'll post my thoughts here in case it is a lead.
I'm using Master branch and looking at the startup functions for Tech Hub M07_Pt02.
Following that StartMission(float) through there's a LogicOnce that triggers a SetPlayerInventory(LogicGate).
On the LogicGate there's an on_allowed Alias which both Powers On and Calls the transit.
This Alias is unique to that transit car for SCI Hub though.
In Staging I cannot locate this Alias off of that logicgate at all.
There are no Alias listed so it's organized differently I guess.

Where ever the break is happening it's related to this Logic Gate though.

And as you've experienced it's not happening every time.
I watched someone play this mod and for them the issue didn't occur.