GRIM: Blocker - Disappearing Manny and Chepito Year 3

[Grimfan33]

Build: Nov 4, 2011, 22:30:19
OS: Windows XP Professional

YEAR 3
In the first section where you are underwater by the ship wreak, as you go walking around the ship with the Chepito only Glottis returns…Manny and Chepito disappear. Glottis looks up, and you hear the sound of Manny and Chepito walking, but they never show up.

Here is a video of what is supposed to happen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zTHfH-3S1Y&feature=related
As you can see, after Manny asks Chepito if they can "tag along", they all walk around in a big circle, with all three of them returning to the ship wreck.

Unfortunately, in this save, you'll see that Manny and Chepito disappeared...and only Glottis is there:
http://www.smallfiles.org/download/93/grim05.gsv.html

This makes the game uncompletable, since you need to go around at least once with Chepito before you're given the option to "use" him for the light that takes you to the Pearl.

I also uploaded the save I had just prior to the glitch occurring, just before to Manny, Glottis and Chepito go around where Manny and Chepito disappear...it's here:
http://www.smallfiles.org/download/94/grim02.gsv.html

After some time, I was able to get Manny and Chepito to appear managed to make it to the pearl after randomly messing with options and restarting Residual a number of times and reloading the grim02.gsv posted above...I don't know exactly what I did or if it was blind luck.

One thing I did notice when they finally did appear properly is that in my options menu, 3D Acceleration was set to "Off" and it was set to something called "TinyGL". The Sound Effect volume was also all the way down (I've been having a glitch where whenever I restart residual, it starts up with the Sound Effects volume all the way down) and in that instance I didn't turn it up again until after they had appeared after the walk-around.

I saved when got to Pearl with the Octopus, quit out of Residual, restarted Residual, loaded an older save from the beginning of Year 3 when Manny is still on the ship and 3D Acceleration was enabled in settings and I turned up the Sound Effect volume, I then hit F1 to bring up load screen again…where I reloaded the save at Pearl I had done, and everything was ok with 3D Acceleration enabled and the Sound Effects on in that save.

[giucam]

I can't reproduce... Does it happen everytime?

[Grimfan33]

to giucam: Thanks for the response, in the grim05 save I posted is Manny and Chepito actually there where you load it up on your machine?

It happened everytime yesterday until I was finally able to get past it. This is odd, now that I've made it past it, I tried to reproduce the glitch today by loading an earlier save and playing up to that point, and the glitch no longer happens....here's the thing, Residual now automatically disables 3D Acceleration when I get to the underwater point (after the cutscene with the ship going down) and defaults it to "TinyGL", I can't re-enable 3D Acceleration in the options menu at that point, but if I save and restart Residual and load up the save, 3D Acceleration comes back....it's no longer a problem since I've made it past the point, but not sure what happened for others that may find an issue with it.

If it helps, my graphics card on the machine I'm playing Grim Fandango on is an Nvidia Geforce 7800GT, I just checked and my driver is the WHQL 280.26 that was released August 9th 2011.

[somaen]

Does the heading in your window change to "Software Renderer" too? (AFAIK, the settings in that menu aren't implemented, the only way to change renderer is through the .ini-file)

[Grimfan33]

to somaen: I tried reproducing the glitch again using the same method I did the day before, and heres what happened.

The first three times I tried to reproduce it in windowed mode so I could keep track of what Residual was doing in the status window....no glitch happened, the scene played out as it should...in addition, 3D acceleration was no longer disabled during the scene as it was yesterday, but remained enabled the whole time as it should.

The fourth try I was able to sorta reproduce the glitch...Manny and Chepito disappeared again with only Glottis walking back into scene after the walkaround....but then out of no where Manny and Chepito suddenly appeared, as in their character models suddenly popped onscreen. I took this screen grab from that occurrence hoping that the information in the Residual status window might provide some info on what happened:
http://www.smallfiles.org/download/96/grim.jpg.html

[Grimfan33]

a quick addendum and update.

I reproduced the glitch again during a run through Year 3 again with the Nov 11, 2011 1:30:23 build, and I also reproduced into in windows mode this time. It seems to happen the first time I would arrive at that spot and attempt a walk-around with Chepito with a new Residual build and with 3D Acceleration turned on.

I found out that though I couldn’t enable or disable 3D Acceleration on-the-fly through the options menu, if I clicked on the option, then restarted residual, the change would take effect.

Manny and Chepito would disappear the first time arriving at that scene with 3D Acceleration turned on.…but when I quit out and reloaded that scene and did the walk-around in Software Rendering mode they would appear normally and the scene would happen normally as it should.

In addition, after the scene played out normally through software rendering mode, it seemed possible to reload the save and the scene would play out correctly and normally in 3D acceleration mode going forward, but only after it had been done first in Software rending mode.

[somaen]

Is this an issue in 0.1.0pre? I didn't have any such problems when doing a playthrough using OpenGL-renderer now.

[giucam]

Given the age of this bug report I'm closing it.
It's possible it was caused by wrong userdata objects loading in lua, which was fixed by f79577c.