[V15.1 - Ground Combat] Loading a save made during Ground Combat causes big issues

[Buzzles]

Actually reporting this as new people keep posting about it and I can't see a recent thread about it.

Essentially, if you load a save made during Ground Combat (or the auto save made at the very start after GC has loaded) you'll find there's quite a few issues cropping up, probably the result of GC not initialising properly.

Off the top of my head:

• Most or all Aliens and NPC's are invisible. On all maps.
  Unrelated to issues with Terror Sites or the crashed Landing Ship missing sprites I've previously reported.
  
• If you do spot an alien via the small boxes on the right, you'll find even when you centre the screen via clicking on said box that the Red Aiming Cursor will not appear when you mouse over where the alien should be.
  
• Odd "tearing" of tiles down left of screen when making the screen scroll.
  
• Lots of CTD's, generally after ending first turn. Probably related to sprites not loading.
  

*Workaround*

1) Don't load save games made during ground combat and don't trust auto saves.

Simply make a manual save shortly before your Chinook gets to a crash site/terror site and if you do need to load, load that instead as it'll mean Ground Combat has to load normally once the Chinook gets to the site again.

2) Press Escape and Abort immediately.

This isn't fool proof, but has worked on occasion for me when I've been testing and/or accidentally loaded the wrong save. The game should continue normally and future Ground Combat's should work correctly. Should being a hopeful word.

Suspicions:

My programmer's Bug Hunting sense is twitching and I have a rather suspicious feeling it's tied into directly loading Ground Combat rather than first loading the Geoscape.

I'm guessing but I'd start poking around to see if loading is handled differently by either system, or if the Ground Combat code directly takes values from the Geoscape code when it loads, so is expecting certain variables to be initalised or contain proper data, but aren't as the Geoscape isn't loaded (or updated with the save information) first.

It does does seem there's an issue with initialising NPC's which can be spotted by aborting the mission and looking at the counts, as there's a 0 of everything including friendlies and escaped aliens.

Edited October 9, 2012 by Buzzles

[Chris]

Thanks. Forwarded to the appropriate coder.