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Bug Hunt! Mission 1: Simultaneous UFO Engagements


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Here's the situation - I've seen two isolated reports of a very similar bug, and it's so rare and difficult to replicate that I'd like to enlist people's help in replicating it. Thus, I'm calling for a bug hunt, where we can all collaborate in finding it.

Here's the issue: Engaging two UFOs at the same time seems to be trying to execute BOTH engagements simultaneously, leading to some truly weird errors. The first report had an air combat and a ground combat occurring at the same time, and the second report had two air combats happening at the same time.

Now, since we can't quite precisely time an intercept of a UFO due to their movements, this is very hard to do intentionally, but it shouldn't be impossible.

Here's the ultimate goal: We want to obtain a saved game where everything's set up for this to happen. Ideally you can load that game, let it run, and the bug will occur.

This will be problematic in the current build, as saves with a crashed UFO will cause a CTD. We may only be able to replicate the simultaneous air combats for now, but perhaps someone can catch a landed UFO on the ground (I don't know if landed UFOs cause a CTD in saves or not).

I have some ideas to increase your chances of causing the bug. They are merely suggestions, take them or leave them as you like.

1. Try turning the game speed to maximum once you have your interceptors set. It's possible that if the interception takes place in the same 'chunk' of time that the bug occurs, so it makes sense to try to make those chunks of time as big as possible.

2. Try having your interceptors tail ufos instead of intercepting them, slow game speed to the slowest, have both interceptors return to base, wait 20 seconds, then have them re-intercept and turn game speed to maximum.

3. If you have a reliable method to get this to happen, try to cause it with different combinations of ground combats and air combats. I'd be curious to see if two ground combats can happen simultaneously.

4. Try seeing if you can get two separate interceptors to cause separate combats against the same UFO.

5. Spend the early game building additional bases with 1-2 radar and 1 hangar all over the world, which will increase the number of UFOs you can see and attempt to intercept at the same time.

Good hunting!

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I was offline yesterday, and actually happens twice. I got a screenshot of it once. I'll check and see if any of the saves were prior to the event, but I will check later.

Double Engage.jpg

After you finish one engagement, the game will CTD.

The first time it happened, one of the two let me choose to engage, without having an engagement already, and then went into double mode. The second time, they were both automatic engagements. Therefore, I think you are correct in assuming that it's a timing issue.

Double Engage.jpg

577e7c98a8bfe_DoubleEngage.jpg.77b4537df

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I didn't know to look for this until it happened to me. Situation was:

1 x Fighter on the screen

2x F-17 and 1x MiG-32 despatched to intercept above.

3x fighters appeared mid-intercept and tracked my interceptors.

Game speed 2x or 3x

All three groups overlapped simultaneously after another second or so.

Symptoms:

Two intercept music tracks played simultaneously, slightly off-synch.

Intercept display flickered occasionally.

Geoscape was visible during flickers when panning intercept screen.

Geoscape's "show radar ranges" checkbox visible and responsive to clicks. Changing state caused radar range areas to briefly get drawn over intercept graphics.

Interceptors were not visible.

Enemy fighters were briefly visible during some flickers.

3x enemy fighter group did not appear able to track my interceptors, but took damage from interceptor fire.

Shooting down two visible fighters

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I believe this has occurred for me as well a couple times, at first I thought it was game just glitching out because after a while of weirdness it CTD. So in future I will try to separate my intercept send-outs by a bit to try and get them not to engage at same time. You'd think this issue be easy to fix.

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This is very easy to replicate, send 2 squadrons of the same type of plane at the same target, they will reach the target at the same time and you'll get 2 engagement pop ups and then you'll get 2 air combats overlay on top of each other.

Thanks Spinal - that sounds like a great plan. I'll try it out, hopefully today, and if it works I'll mark this as repeatable.

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Yep! Works great. I sent two squadrons to intercept the same UFO, turned the game speed up to maximum, and got two intercept windows (where I hit 'engage' on both). At first it didn't look like there were two combats going on, but I hit retreat and when the first one ended the second one was going on behind it.

I'm calling this one replicatable. Bug hunt over, well done Spinal.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just had a CTD, when the game tried to load a ground combat and an air combat situation at the same time... Should there not be an option, where you can choose which engagement to take if they are perfectly simultaneous? And when an engagement happens, everything else in the game should be paused until that engagement is over (since there is no multiplayer, the universe can adjust to you in a single player game)?

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  • 3 weeks later...

I mostly have this when setting the game to full speed, but am starting to see how this might occur. I have 3 bases, with 5 wings of each 2 fighters. Often I have these 5 wings chasing UFO's at the same time.

Setting the game to full speed makes the exact moment where they intercept less "sensitive", the time granularity decreases on this speed.

So I guess this is another tactic for replicating the issue: Build many bases, send out a lot of simultaneous wings, and set the game to full-speed. You can give wings closer to an UFO then others a small detour to a patrol location on the map.

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Should there not be an option, where you can choose which engagement to take if they are perfectly simultaneous??

I would be shocked if there were ever 2 engagements at the very same second.

We can and do fast forward the game so the hours are flashing by and it may appear that both aircraft arrive at the same time but I imagin the chances of a helicopter traveling x miles at x MPH would arrive at the same time as a plane would travel x miles at x MPH.

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