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Event got corrupt?

Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2020 6:29 pm
by Devotion
Hi there,

I'm new to the CSC, but since I'm a little addicted now I've spent like 48 hours last week (holidays yay..) fooling around with it.
Now I got the issue that Leah still got all the menu items I gave her (Story-->Characters-->Leah), but they didn't fire anymore.
I went through my latest changes and put some periodically events that might create the problem to never, but nothing worked.

Then I started throwing away ALL event triggers (in a duplicated story) of 2 Leah and Derek (they share a story) and then I could talk to Leah again.
Duplicated my story again, now I only threw away Dereks event triggers, problem was back.
Then I duplicated my original again, started throwing Leah's event triggers away, one by one, untill I found the event trigger that caused the problem.
I put it to 'Never', problem remained.
I renamed it: problem remained.
It was not used by other event triggers.
I added a new event trigger, just to try to trigger the CSC to rebuild the Leah character, not working.

I started throwing away all the events in the event trigger one by one (and restarting game after every remove), but still the problem existed.
Then I duplicated my original again, threw away the entire event trigger and manually recreated it from my original.
And then Leah started working again. It is exactly the same, same name, same events, same criteria, but probably underneath a different event trigger id and that's how the problem got fixed.

I am a C#.Net developer in my daily job, now this sounds to me like a 'clean solution and rebuild entire solution' to me.
Duplicating a story doesn't generate new id's apparently, it just copies the corrupt situation.
I'm not a unity developer, but is there an equivalent of completly cleaning the solution? Exporting the story apparently doesn't fully rebuild all.


I hope above makes any sense.

Wishlist ;)
In the light of this problem: a copy event trigger option wuld be great.
Since I have multiple characters doing the same actions (like strip, dress, dance, walk to a certain location etc.) and now I have to create those event triggers on every character. For me as a beginning CSC that means when I make a mistake in such an event, I have to copy the changes to such an event trigger to every characters event trigger.

More to say: it would be great if generics got implemented where you could use input variables.
So eg. I want a character to dress something like this would be possible.
Call EventTrigger_StripCharacter(string playername)

Or the object character would come along with the character event trigger firing the event.
So charactername.event_triggered gives 'event_triggered' the character object.
So character.stripcharacter could be something like
<character> clothing bottom off
<character> clothing top off
etc.


Probably not the first requesting these sort of changes.
And if it is already there, point me to it ;)

I would expect global event triggers here
Image

Re: Event got corrupt?

Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2020 5:18 am
by Devotion
I had the same issue with an item interaction of Leah.
She didn't react on the Fifty dollars when all criteria were in place, checked them with 'list values Leah' and 'list quest Frank' (Frank holds the quest in progress).

I dropped the item interaction trigger and recreated it and it worked again.

Is Leah unstable or am I doing something wrong?

Re: Event got corrupt?

Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2020 2:23 pm
by Devotion
Here is a workaround that seems to fix these corrupt events.

I tend to use DisplayMessage for debugging purposes to see if a certain event got hit.
I got the Fifty Dollar problem again, and when I added the displaymessage to the event, it started working again.

Meanwhile, this gives me a bad feeling how to know all my event are still triggered without testing the entire walkthrough over and over again.

Edit: for now all my problems seem to be with Leah.

Re: Event got corrupt?

Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2020 5:51 pm
by Devotion
I'm starting to lose hope now.

I wanted to do a full run of my story so far.
Then I noticed an early quest that was working fine did ' Start' at least it showed the image.
But when I came to the End trigger, it didn't finish anymore.
So I did the list quest Frank in console and the quest said ID "27135331-2145-4a80-962a-e3011fa928ff" 'Not obtained'

I removed the original quest and recreated it.
I replaced all the old quest start and end triggers with the new one. Exported, tested again.. not working.
(BTW: when deleting a quest, the trigger jump to the first one alphabetically, that could really mess up my story. I'd prefer a ' Quest not found ' error instead)

I renamed the quest, just to make sure the key wasn't bound to the name,.. not working.

Then I opened my exported Frank.character.
It's still holding the old ID:
"27135331-2145-4a80-962a-e3011fa928ff"
While the new key is:
03e1ccf1-556b-403e-b1ec-0a40dec28eb2

I repeated the whole proces, creating a new one, with a new name directly.

Of course, I could edit the JSON file and import the story to CSC again, but I'm starting to worry if something is wrong with my setup now.
It clearly -randomly- ignores to write changes to the JSON file on export.

It sounds like something happening in this post:
https://forum.eekllc.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1074

I did have Frank targetting a player. I recreated the event.
The problem here is a dialog that starts the quest holds the old id reference.
Deleting the event and adding it again, doesn't change a bit.

Any workarounds except changing the JSON manually?

Sorry for posting 3 different problems in one topic, but for me they're all the same: things that were working break randomly and changes don't update in JSON correctly.

Edit: the thing that worked was throwing away the response and recreating it, but again.. the problem is you only notice these broken references by testing the story by playing it. Since some quests are followups deeper in my story that's frustrating, even though I use savegames on certain points to test scenario's.

Edit 2: apparantly saved games (or game sessions?) cache the reference too. I had to restart houseparty and start a new game to have it working again. I hope the next version of CSC has some way to search broken references. Tempting to make on on the JSON files. The Quests are in the file with their ID's,so if a dialog or event trigger uses a non existing it would be possible to get them. ;)

Re: Event got corrupt?

Posted: Sat Jan 04, 2020 9:35 pm
by eekdon
Just need a bit to read through this. Don't worry, you're not alone ;)

Re: Event got corrupt?

Posted: Sat Jan 04, 2020 10:18 pm
by eekdon
Do you have an exported story example you could share? And to be clear, we're talking about item interactions not firing? How exactly did this all start? Before trying to duplicating stories, etc.

Re: Event got corrupt?

Posted: Thu Jan 09, 2020 5:16 pm
by Devotion
I'll try to replicate this situation, but I think it has something to do with this topic:
https://forum.eekllc.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1074

When you mess it up like that without noticing and then try to fix things by dropping quest and re-adding, it doesn't update the referenced ID's when you alter the dialog's and such to see the new quest.Instead of solving the real problem, you're causing more.

I do have a backup of the situation that has the Leah not talking scenario described in the first post. I'll retest if the problem is in there first.
I had this in there:
Image

The workaround you describe in that post:
"If you need to make a new ReachTarget event trigger, start off by selecting a Character, then swap the Option/type over to MoveTarget. That error in the CSC exists now to alert users of a data mismatch in case they make a mistake, but the presence of the error itself shouldn't affect the story once exported."

works fine now. I mainly use it on MoveTargets that direct to items.

But for people like me who start fooling around and when they bump into trouble start reading.. it got me frustrated when everything appears to be fine and it doesn't work.

Keep up the good work, fun to play with.

Re: Event got corrupt?

Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 12:05 am
by eekdon
Yeah...we don't change quests in the stories that are out in retail; I wouldn't have noticed any annoyances there. It's been awhile since I had the time to really play around in the CSC for the sake of seeing another perspective or for fun. It sounds like you figured it all out, correct me if I'm wrong. Sorry it was confusing at first; we're still working on the tool and hopefully once we're closed to exiting Early Access I can get some semblance of real documentation up...other than amateurishly concocted tutorials of course :P

I back-up often. Between Unity being...not perfect, total size/scope of all the included stories, "data visibility issues" (akin to what you have probably experienced) and ongoing back-end development, etc., I've got 349 backups of the 0.16.x story files locally and remotely stored. It's a disease at this point. Send help.

Otherwise, glad you're enjoying it :)