Beta Testing for Mega Compilation

[bask185]

Raed does not crash but edwin is. Raed is nice to make missions with, but it kinda sux to create maps with.

 

So only 8 spots for me, I will try me best

Edited May 27, 2017 by bask185

[Lightning Hunter]

5 hours ago, bask185 said:

Raed does not crash but edwin is. Raed is nice to make missions with, but it kinda sux to create maps with.

 

So only 8 spots for me, I will try me best

I think RAED is the only way to make a cave themed map if you are going to do one.  I haven't tested edwin...  I don't even know if it has been updated properly. 

You have 8 spots for now, although I can always increase the number of slots if needed. 

[IchoTolot]

I've played through the Flame Dancers Set 2 missions on hard now and even recorded my playthrough. I really liked the missions just as the 1st set!

I've noticed some errors: Sometimes custom buildings are invisible and after revisiting some missions I've encountered a situation where Destroyers have submarine dive abilities and my Flame Tanks could go invisible like the Nod Stealth Tanks. That only happened once though. Restarting or reloading the mission can fix this.

Otherwise I had much fun with these missions and in the future I might record some more of these, but now I want to record some Mental Omega first.

Link to the first video (I will upload one video per day usually): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDP6_9Xbuc&list=PLKR1N9oJTTlL2DZTj0l1DGHM_vWhbXAc8&index=1

Yes I even failed in the 1st episode , but no worries I had no bigger problems beating all the missions. Here the timer got me stuck in a bad situation.

[Messiah]

On 12.7.2017 at 9:45 AM, IchoTolot said:

I've played through the Flame Dancers Set 2 missions on hard now and even recorded my playthrough. I really liked the missions just as the 1st set!

I've noticed some errors: Sometimes custom buildings are invisible and after revisiting some missions I've encountered a situation where Destroyers have submarine dive abilities and my Flame Tanks could go invisible like the Nod Stealth Tanks. That only happened once though. Restarting or reloading the mission can fix this.

Otherwise I had much fun with these missions and in the future I might record some more of these, but now I want to record some Mental Omega first.

Link to the first video (I will upload one video per day usually): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDP6_9Xbuc&list=PLKR1N9oJTTlL2DZTj0l1DGHM_vWhbXAc8&index=1

Yes I even failed in the 1st episode , but no worries I had no bigger problems beating all the missions. Here the timer got me stuck in a bad situation.

where the hell did you find this?! I'm looking for set 2 since a while, there is no site to download it.

[Lightning Hunter]

It's in the Mega Compilation, Messiah! As for the individual download link, Nyergud's gave it to me originally and even helped me extract the content - since it was a DOS executable (I think).

I need to go ahead and just release this compilation officially. I think it has been in beta testing long enough, and I've had everything ready to go for some time now.

Edited July 23, 2017 by Lightning Hunter

[IchoTolot]

21 hours ago, Lightning Hunter said:

It's in the Mega Compilation, Messiah! As for the individual download link, Nyergud's gave it to me originally and even helped me extract the content - since it was a DOS executable (I think).

I need to go ahead and just release this compilation officially. I think it has been in beta testing long enough, and I've had everything ready to go for some time now.

I noticed some other missions don't have functional "mission accomplished" triggers. If you reached the objectives it just keeps on going.

"-Added 11 brand new missions by Bask185! They are at the very top of the list. "  I think these may all having that problem. At least the first 2 of them I took a look at.

I don't know if this project is also there to fix faults in these missions and not just pack them all together, if so I would advice checking and fixing the mission end triggers again and the other errors I found in Set 2 of the Flame Dancers campaign before going out of beta.

[FunkyFr3sh]

hi @IchoTolot , welcome to the forums

I watched all your flame dancer videos, was a lot fun!

 

Some bugs of set 2 need to get fixed for sure, like the invisible building (the one you found instantly somehow lol), that bug is related to the porting Lightning Hunter did and not the missions themselves. Also the bug where parts of the terrain were invisible (bug of the desert theater) needs to get fixed.

 

There was also a mission where you only destroyed a naval yard and won right after that (you were supposed to destroy the constuction yard too). That one isn't related to the port, it's a bug in a old mission made 20 years ago.. Would be nice to fix that one too though

 

Anyways, thanks for testing and reporting back

 

@Lightning Hunter

You got some more work to do before you release it! A missing SHP and a broken desert theater are waiting for you

[IchoTolot]

1 hour ago, FunkyFr3sh said:

There was also a mission where you only destroyed a naval yard and won right after that (you were supposed to destroy the constuction yard too). That one isn't related to the port, it's a bug in a old mission made 20 years ago.. Would be nice to fix that one too though

I think I also needed to destroy the other 5 naval yards located in this mission. Seems like I sneaked myself the victory through an error there

I will test some more missions in the future, but now as I already mentioned Mental Omega on Mental is waiting! I really love these custom missions and I am happy to have something new to play through/test  

After testing thousands of custom Lemming levels and creating hundreds myself I am getting quite good at level testing, seeing faults and pointing out level parts that are a bit let's say "supoptinal". Hinting at a certain mission comming up that felt very dragged out for me (cough killing the griffin cough)   Not to brag, but I think I am mentioned in most of the credits of 2015 and onward custom Lemming level packs. I simply love chewing through these puzzles and of course also playing new C&C missions!

I'm glad that I could be of help in this forum as well and contribute to keeping these old games alive.

[Lightning Hunter]

5 hours ago, FunkyFr3sh said:

hi @IchoTolot , welcome to the forums

I watched all your flame dancer videos, was a lot fun!

 

Some bugs of set 2 need to get fixed for sure, like the invisible building (the one you found instantly somehow lol), that bug is related to the porting Lightning Hunter did and not the missions themselves. Also the bug where parts of the terrain were invisible (bug of the desert theater) needs to get fixed.

 

There was also a mission where you only destroyed a naval yard and won right after that (you were supposed to destroy the constuction yard too). That one isn't related to the port, it's a bug in a old mission made 20 years ago.. Would be nice to fix that one too though

 

Anyways, thanks for testing and reporting back

 

@Lightning Hunter

You got some more work to do before you release it! A missing SHP and a broken desert theater are waiting for you

Which buildings were invisible?  I'm not sure what is causing it.  I need more specifics before fixing this bug!

As for the Desert Theater, is this a bug with the theater itself, or just the one mission?  Which mission is having the problem?

[IchoTolot]

8 hours ago, Lightning Hunter said:

Which buildings were invisible?  I'm not sure what is causing it.  I need more specifics before fixing this bug!

As for the Desert Theater, is this a bug with the theater itself, or just the one mission?  Which mission is having the problem?

Nearly all custom buildings. And they are not invisible everytime. At the start/loading of the mission it seems to be determined if they are invisible or not.

An exception are the advanced guard towers and relay stations (in the missions with the TV transmissions), they were visible everytime.

I had for example cases of invisible Nod Temples, Ore Stations (in the mission with the fast growing ore), Nod Light cannons (not sure about the exact name :P) and terrorist mosques. The buildings are still visible on the radar map -- that's why I was able to notice them -- also units are still shooting at them, but they only seem to take splash damage from tanks like the SSM launchers or flamers. In the last mission tons of gdi units were trying to destroy these invisible Nod Light cannons, but without success because of a lack of splash damage.

The mission with the demo track attack in -- I think -- Jerusalem is where I had the case of 2 tiles of invisible (black) terrain.

Everything can be seen in my playthrough if you want to see it yourself.

[Nyerguds]

I hope that isn't the same issue as the C&C1 icons... apparently the game has real trouble with switching theaters after loading sidebar icons (which are theater-sensitive in C&C1) from custom mix files. Maybe RA has similar problems? with such addon graphics? :-\

[Lightning Hunter]

I am back after a much needed break from Red Alert, and have begun investigating the issues brought up by IchoTolot (sorry for the long delay). The first thing I noticed right off the bat is that the invisible building bug does not occur while using RA95_SP.exe that comes with the compilation, but I did encounter it while using RA95.exe.  IchoTolot, I am going to take a guess that you ignored my instructions and used RA95.exe instead of RA95_SP.exe? If so, that might explain the problem.

As for the bugs you brought up with the invisible flame tank and destroyer diving, I am guessing this is a bug with the original missions themselves and not my conversions. I ported all the code directly over, so there should not be any differences there.

Edit: I think the black tiles you are referring to is in mission 7 (I found them next to a river bridge). For some reason, these black tiles do not appear in Raed.exe, but they do appear in-game. The bug was fixed by simply opening the mission, re-applying the tiles, and saving the mission. I wonder if any other missions have this problem? Only time will tell, since I am not able to go through and play every single desert mission in-game.

Edited November 21, 2017 by Lightning Hunter

[IchoTolot]

On 21.11.2017 at 2:09 AM, Lightning Hunter said:

IchoTolot, I am going to take a guess that you ignored my instructions and used RA95.exe instead of RA95_SP.exe? If so, that might explain the problem.

As for the bugs you brought up with the invisible flame tank and destroyer diving, I am guessing this is a bug with the original missions themselves and not my conversions. I ported all the code directly over, so there should not be any differences there.

Edit: I think the black tiles you are referring to is in mission 7 (I found them next to a river bridge). For some reason, these black tiles do not appear in Raed.exe, but they do appear in-game. The bug was fixed by simply opening the mission, re-applying the tiles, and saving the mission. I wonder if any other missions have this problem? Only time will tell, since I am not able to go through and play every single desert mission in-game.

You guessed wrong! Followed all instructions back then and I always use the RA95_SP.exe for the pack. Seems like there are still quite a few bugs from the old days to fix

I am on a new pc now and set the compilation beta up again and I will do some more recordings in the next time, as my Mental Omega playthrough on Mental difficulty is slowly coming to an end in the next weeks. Shameless advertisement link to a recent upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2w9H7ZVkbY

The game still seems to run just fine on my new machine (Win 10 now) and the only very small annoyance I noticed is a small black area under the right sidebar menu, as if it is the only thing that's not completely streched out over the max height, but well it doesn't really matter. At least it seems to work fine otherwise, unlike C&C95 Gold not starting and not responding at all anymore even after trying out a ton of configurations.

Edit: Fixed the small black area with playing around with resolutions some more, yay ! =)

When testing some recording set-ups I noticed some false starting screen locations for some missions (you start somewhere in the dark) and also a case of a missing end trigger for  "mission accomplished" (mission does not end properly). Will especially look out for those in my recordings so you can fix these missions to have proper starts and endings.

Edited November 22, 2017 by IchoTolot

[Lightning Hunter]

I cannot reproduce the invisible building bug using RA95_SP.exe.  You will have to tell me which map specifically this happens in (and preferably what you are doing when it happens), since I don't have time to play through all the missions right now.

1 hour ago, IchoTolot said:

 

When testing some recording set-ups I noticed some false starting screen locations for some missions (you start somewhere in the dark) and also a case of a missing end trigger for  "mission accomplished" (mission does not end properly). Will especially look out for those in my recordings so you can fix these missions to have proper starts and endings.

 

 

Icho, can you please do me a favor and name specific maps? there are 400+ levels in this compilation, and I cannot go on a wild goose hunt looking for the problems. Just make a mental note of which mission you are playing, otherwise I am looking for a needle in a haystack.

As for the screen starting in the wrong location, this has nothing to do with my compilation (as far as I know). I have also seen it while testing certain maps, and it usually has to do with the author who simply didn't set up a proper screen start location. With over 400 missions, I cannot go through and fix all the bad missions (although I will eliminate any missions that are really bad from the compilation altogether). You need to tell me which missions don't end, otherwise I cannot investigate.

Also, I want to point out that I have never once created a mission, and I am still learning how triggers even work. As such, I will not be able to fix all issues you bring up, if I decide to fix any at all. All my work was spent on making sure all the missions play as they originally did (good or bad). If a mission is really bad, I will simply remove it from the compilation.

Edited November 22, 2017 by Lightning Hunter

[IchoTolot]

Maps where I had a case of invisible buildings: Flame Dancers Set 2 Missions: 6 (nod temple), 10 (ore signal buildings), 12 + 12b (mosques),  13 (obelisks/light spheres).

EDIT: I checked again and this still happens on my new setup with the RA95_SP.exe

They all were invisible on simply starting the mission. Restarting and reloading can fix the problem.

As I said about the start and ending issues:  I "Will especially look out for those in my recordings so you can fix these missions to have proper starts and endings."

I just came acroos a few cases when randomly testing a few maps to see if every thing works. When I play and record myself through a batch properly I can/will record and report you those cases in detail. I am fully aware that you cannot simply play through all missions and search for the needles.

A few caees I actually remember from my random tests: Bask 185 Allied Mission 1 --- ending missing (I think this can be true for all of his/her missions). RA Reloaded Allied M22 The Ultimatum -- wrong starting location (this even leads to an easy loss of your tanya + stavros here).

8 hours ago, Lightning Hunter said:

Also, I want to point out that I have never once created a mission, and I am still learning how triggers even work. As such, I will not be able to fix all issues you bring up, if I decide to fix any at all. All my work was spent on making sure all the missions play as they originally did (good or bad). If a mission is really bad, I will simply remove it from the compilation.

Sry, did not know that. I assumed fixing some triggers and stuff like screen starts would be a fast and easy fix -- still it would be sad if anotherwise good mission is ruined just because of these. Removing the bottom of the barrel with this huge total mission number is a good decision.

Edited November 23, 2017 by IchoTolot

[FunkyFr3sh]

10 hours ago, IchoTolot said:

At least it seems to work fine otherwise, unlike C&C95 Gold not starting and not responding at all anymore even after trying out a ton of configurations.

It's a known problem atm, try to rename your game executable C&C95.exe to C&C95_123.exe and see if that works. Waiting for Nyerguds currently to get this sorted out.

The config program enables some compatibility modes that break the game, you can get an updated version of it here:

http://downloads.cncnet.org/addons/td-config.7z

 

Looking forward to your new RA1 videos btw (I don't like to watch the RA2 and MO ones...)

[IchoTolot]

The updated config program + the renaming to C&C95_123.exe fixed the problem and the game starts now! Thank you very much!

Edited November 23, 2017 by IchoTolot

[Lightning Hunter]

I was finally able to reproduce the invisible building bug on mission 10 of Flame Dancers set 2. Honestly, I have no idea what is causing this bug, and I don't know how I could possibly fix it. The theater is the default temperate, so that doesn't have anything to do with it. Because the buildings appear some of the time, that rules out issues with the conversion itself.  I would need some help from someone else to determine why this is happening.  Maybe Funky or Nyerguds can shed some light on this issue?

Edit:  I don't know if this issue has to do with the fact that these buildings replace civilian buildings or not... Where are the civilian buildings even contained? I could not find them in main.mix.

Edit #2: I also noticed these structures are invisible in raed.exe, but I can still click on them (and it shows a technology center when I do)...

Edit #3: What is [V20] in rules.ini? Is this a civilian structure or something else?  It is not labeled and I don't know where to find a list that tells me.

Edited November 23, 2017 by Lightning Hunter

[Lightning Hunter]

I take it nobody can help me with the invisible units?

[IchoTolot]

Alright, I've started to plow through more missions! I begin with the top of the list and the missions from Bask185. I've encountered a crash opon a chinhook leaving the map (Allied 2 from Bask 185) and 2 problems with not properly finishing missions so far (Allied 2 and 3 from Bask 185). I did some research in my video of that and I am mostly sure it has something to do with an evacuation chinhook not ending the mission properly. Also I think you can easily ruin your mission by manually controlling the evacuation chinhook, but I am not quite sure. More of that and also the crash log when the video of the corresponding mission has been uploaded.

For now here is the link to the video of the first mission:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esfdh2kMlHw

I've had a case in the past of this mission not ending properly and I think it had something to do of me moving the evacuation chinhook before putting tanya in it. It still flew of the map, but no victory sign for me back then.

[IchoTolot]

Here is the promised crash file to the 2nd mission. It seems to have something to do with the chinhook leaving the area as mentioned.

ra95crash.zip

[Lightning Hunter]

I will point Bask185 to this thread, since he would have to be the one to fix this issue.

[Poppi]

On 7/24/2017 at 4:41 PM, IchoTolot said:

I think I also needed to destroy the other 5 naval yards located in this mission. Seems like I sneaked myself the victory through an error there

I will test some more missions in the future, but now as I already mentioned Mental Omega on Mental is waiting! I really love these custom missions and I am happy to have something new to play through/test  

After testing thousands of custom Lemming levels and creating hundreds myself I am getting quite good at level testing, seeing faults and pointing out level parts that are a bit let's say "supoptinal". Hinting at a certain mission comming up that felt very dragged out for me (cough killing the griffin cough)   Not to brag, but I think I am mentioned in most of the credits of 2015 and onward custom Lemming level packs. I simply love chewing through these puzzles and of course also playing new C&C missions!

I'm glad that I could be of help in this forum as well and contribute to keeping these old games alive.

For that same mission it seems the mission end triggers for any of the objective buildings. I destroyed the construction yard first and had the same result. 

 

Also thank you Icho I would have never beat the flamedancer prototype and final set 1 mission without your videos. I thought I was bad at red alert due to me being like 5 years old when I first played but apprently I just suck lol.

[FunkyFr3sh]

14 hours ago, IchoTolot said:

Here is the promised crash file to the 2nd mission. It seems to have something to do with the chinhook leaving the area as mentioned.

ra95crash.zip

Crashing while displaying a in-game message, maybe the message is missing from the map file?

[IchoTolot]

Quote

For that same mission it seems the mission end triggers for any of the objective buildings. I destroyed the construction yard first and had the same result. 

Also thank you Icho I would have never beat the flamedancer prototype and final set 1 mission without your videos.

Thanks! Also it's very interesting that simply destroying the conyard also works. Seems like "OR" was used when determing the mission objectives rather than "AND".

Today's mission video features yet another not finishing mission most likely related to the last chinhook evacuation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9fgi-_CniA