Does your published arc suddenly "break"?

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I think I managed to "break" one of my arcs as well, when I added some custom enemies that pushed the file size up near the limit. Suddenly a triggered boss on the final mission, that had been spawning fine during testing and for about 20 plays, started refusing to spawn. The arc was still playable, but people would fail it and tell me the ending sucked. So I had to take him out.

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This correlates with my arcs too. My final boss is a triggered objective (spawns after you destroy three obelisks), and would spawn very consistently in the back room of the last map during a week of playtesting with me and other people. Publish it up, and then reports start filtering in of people being unable to find the last boss... I was able to duplicate this once, and spent over an hour scouring the map for ANY clue of where the boss was, but no dice.

What sucks here is that this is a game-level fault, not a design fault. ;( Spawned objectives that are required for completing the mission can halt arc progress if they don't spawn correctly, and all it does is make the writer look bad.

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Yeah, these are the issues that have been driving me nuts. The worst part about the whole meow farming fiasco IMHO is that it took the devs' attention away from problems like this.

So, has anyone noticed arcs no longer working after this morning's maintenance?

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And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

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I think I managed to "break" one of my arcs as well, when I added some custom enemies that pushed the file size up near the limit. Suddenly a triggered boss on the final mission, that had been spawning fine during testing and for about 20 plays, started refusing to spawn. The arc was still playable, but people would fail it and tell me the ending sucked. So I had to take him out.

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This correlates with my arcs too. My final boss is a triggered objective (spawns after you destroy three obelisks), and would spawn very consistently in the back room of the last map during a week of playtesting with me and other people. Publish it up, and then reports start filtering in of people being unable to find the last boss... I was able to duplicate this once, and spent over an hour scouring the map for ANY clue of where the boss was, but no dice.

What sucks here is that this is a game-level fault, not a design fault. ;( Spawned objectives that are required for completing the mission can halt arc progress if they don't spawn correctly, and all it does is make the writer look bad.

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It makes you look even worse when the first person to get a failure to spawn is reviewing your arc on the forums, fails, and (justifiably) mentions that the ending is a real downer.

I have had triggered objectives fail to spawn twice while playing other people's arcs. Both arcs used custom enemies heavily, so they may very well have been near the file size limit, and both times the objective that failed to spawn was the final one.

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Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

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Also: A very math-oriented forumite (Arcanaville) has kindly reviewed my arc, and suspects that some of the errors may be occurring on the final boss's text fields, where I dropped in Chinese (Traditional) characters for effect. I left them in place for now, but if it breaks again I'll upload a version with the characters removed. I figured they were "valid" since they could copy/paste fine and display correctly in the mission (whereas some other "alternate" text, like my first choice of Hindi, would not), but if it continues to fail, maybe it's not as valid as I thought...

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I have Japanese characters in one of my arcs, and it has not broken in this fashion.

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That blue thing running around saying "Cookies are sometimes food" is Praetorian Cookie Monster!
Shoot on sight, please.

Whenever I play an arc where something isn't spawning, ESPECIALLY if I'm reviewing it, I always log out and back in and give it another shot to see if it'll fix the problem.

Turg, is the final boss a conditional spawn based on a conditional spawn? Like say, are the obelisks conditional? Because with one of my arcs, I would have one boss spawn after you rescue a hostage, and then after you beat that boss, another boss would appear. I had complaints about the second conditional boss not spawning. I made it so both bosses spawned at the same time, both when you rescue the hostage, it cleared the problem right up.

My own personal experience with this issue has led me to believe it has to do with the number of boss spawn points in the mission. You say that you have to destroy 3 obelisks, right? I assume these are all set to back. Does the boss spawn in back as well? If so, check the number of back spawns you can have. Normally what will happen is that if you have more spawns in an area than it allows, it'll just shunt it off to another area, say you're allowed 4 back spawns, and you have 5 bosses set to spawn in back, 4 will spawn in the back and one will spawn somewhere else.

HOWEVER, and this is just my theory based on what I've seen, is that when you have a conditional spawn set to spawn in an area that has all of its spaces taken up, the spot where it would normally be shunted off to has been taken up by some other spawn, even a regular minion and LT spawn. I've noticed in my villainous arc that I have right now, I have a conditional boss set to spawn at front. It always spawns in the first room, and when you go into that room at first it's curiously enemy free. The most I ever see in there is like 1 LT.

What I'm thinking is happening is that the code reads that a boss will spawn there, so it removes one of the regular enemy spawn points and places the spawn point for the objective there. But, if it's set to spawn in an area that's already taken up by other set objectives, the set objectives take precedence, but it still tries to spawn it in the same area as one of those objectives instead of reserving another one for itself.

God, I hope any of that long rambling makes sense.

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Hmm, maybe that was part of the problem with my triggered guy? He was on an outdoor map, so there is no front, middle or back. Maybe he just got confused.

Neither of the other arcs I've played where the final boss failed to spawn had a lot of objectives at the point where he was supposed to be. The first one was a single-mission arc, so I restarted it, because effort had obviously been put into it and it was fun so I didn't mind doing it again, he worked fine the second time.

The other arc was my husband's, so I know for a fact that nothing was set to spawn at the back except the boss. It was on a unique map with only one spawn point in the back room, and when he failed to spawn there was nothing there.

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Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

KD: My arc is still loading correctly after the server reset. What's interesting is that it first seems to have broken this past Saturday afternoon... I don't think there was a reset beyond the Fri morning maintenance, yeah?

Ulli: Yeah, the editor takes the characters, and allows you to display them properly in the preview and in the mish itself...

LaserJ: The last mish is set up like this. There are two "first level" objectives: Free 3 hostages (which has a conditional ambush attached to it), and destroy 3 objects (which spawns the end boss, Bru'kh). The hostages and objects are all padded at the "Front", with the boss spawn at the "back". This is using the "City of Mu" COT map, which is of middling size, but should be able to accommodate these spawns without overlap. I HAVE noticed that the hostages will spawn all over the place, location setting be damned. The obelisks DO appear to focus their spawning towards the front of the map however.

On the one time the no-spawn bug happened to me, I make sure to kill everything on the map, front to back, and check my NPC text for any location-triggered clues on where the boss might be. Nothing; it's like he didn't spawn to the map at all, unless he spawned "outside" and fell all the way down. (It's hard to miss this boss, he's noisy and visually busy.)

I've got a tweaked file that I'll upload the next time this breaks, see if it ameliorates it. What's "nice" is that if it breaks for one person, it seems to break consistently after that, so hopefully that will give me a clue as to a date-time.

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<QR> Happens to me all the time, typically when a map gets altered. These are the worst because, in almost all cases, there will be no errors present, but the arc won't publish. I have to examine each story in the arc methodically until I find the issue.

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That sounds like the same problem that caused the Crey clone lab to be removed. Sometimes things would spawn in unreachable locations, so people could not finish the mission. Which is why it was pulled until that gets fixed.

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Justice Blues, Tech/Tank, Inv/SS
----------------------
Fighting The Future Trilogy
----------------------

I've noticed the bosses not spawning problem a lot on outdoor maps, especially ones with battles. (Though battles take up rescue slots.) Frankly, I try to avoid conditional boss spawn trees wherever possible, as the more you stack up, the more they tend to break, I personally avoid outdoor maps like the plague since I have pretty much zero control over where things spawn, and I use conditional spawns on small maps with extreme caution.

I do have a question, even though there wasn't anything else set to back, did you have something else that uses a boss spawn point set to any, like a patrol, destroy object, or ambush? If my theory is correct (which in all likelihood it probably isn't) that 'any' spawn is taking priority in the code over your conditional spawn, and if it starts in that 1 back spot, then when the boss tries to spawn it can't, since it either doesn't have code to reassign it to a random spot or that code it broken.

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LaserJ: The last mish is set up like this. There are two "first level" objectives: Free 3 hostages (which has a conditional ambush attached to it), and destroy 3 objects (which spawns the end boss, Bru'kh). The hostages and objects are all padded at the "Front", with the boss spawn at the "back". This is using the "City of Mu" COT map, which is of middling size, but should be able to accommodate these spawns without overlap. I HAVE noticed that the hostages will spawn all over the place, location setting be damned. The obelisks DO appear to focus their spawning towards the front of the map however.

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Just as a test try making both the obelisks and the boss spawn off of rescuing the hostages. In every case where this has happened to my arcs and other peoples' arcs where the problem occurred and the objective not spawning was set to go off when another conditional objective was completed, doing this has fixed the problem. I realize that you'd have to rework the mission to have it make sense, but it's better than having a mission that bugs out.

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I've noticed the bosses not spawning problem a lot on outdoor maps, especially ones with battles. (Though battles take up rescue slots.) Frankly, I try to avoid conditional boss spawn trees wherever possible, as the more you stack up, the more they tend to break, I personally avoid outdoor maps like the plague since I have pretty much zero control over where things spawn, and I use conditional spawns on small maps with extreme caution.

I do have a question, even though there wasn't anything else set to back, did you have something else that uses a boss spawn point set to any, like a patrol, destroy object, or ambush? If my theory is correct (which in all likelihood it probably isn't) that 'any' spawn is taking priority in the code over your conditional spawn, and if it starts in that 1 back spot, then when the boss tries to spawn it can't, since it either doesn't have code to reassign it to a random spot or that code it broken.

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I honestly have no idea whether there was anything set to "any" in my husband's mission. There may very well have been, he did have a few ambushes.

My outdoor one does have quite a few patrols. Some of them are triggered, but they are quite likely to spawn before the boss, in fact two of the people who couldn't find the boss had triggered them. So they might have been stealing his spot.

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Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

If my "stealing their spot" theory is correct, then that could explain why stacking conditional spawns on top of conditional spawns bug out more often than just plain conditional spawns. It could be that the first conditional spawn took the spot of the second one.

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I'm thinking more and more you might be right. One of my other arcs used to have two destructible objects, both triggered, both set to "back," with the second triggering off the first, and the number of objectives on the map maxed out. Sometimes the second one wouldn't spawn.

I have had no complaints about my other missions with triggered spawns, and as it turns out none of them have more than one that could take up the same spawn point. (Well except a couple of ambushes and patrols that trigger as the boss's health gets low, but nobody's going to complain about NOT being ambushed by Malta . The point is, the required one spawns first.)

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Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

Yeah, after making quite a few arcs in MA, (Two fully completed and published arcs that later got unpublished in favor of new missions just because I wanted new missions, the 3 published, 1 fully made and sitting on my hard drive, and another half made, plus numerous tests arcs made just to check out the difficulty of custom enemies and mess around with objectives and such) I've run into this problem enough that I believe I'm starting to make sense of what causes it, or at least, a couple ways to fix it.

Hopefully a developer will look at this thread and see something that will help the programmers track down what exactly is causing this. Or, even better, hopefully they've already figured it out and a fix is on its way.

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Additional issue that may or may not be related to the problem under discussion here:

While playing the republished arc of mine that broke earlier tonight, the team leader received a message of "internal error" when accepting one of the missions. This could be a client-side issue, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were somehow connected to the issue discussed here. That mission has a lot of objectives, but the map can hold them. Oddly, despite the "error" message, she was able to accept the mission and read the send-off text. The entire team was able to enter the mission with no problems, and the mission itself populated entirely as it should have, with no problems.

Maybe I'm wrong, and this is a completely different bug.

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"Bombarding the CoH/V fora with verbosity since January, 2006"

Djinniman, level 50 inv/fire tanker, on Victory
-and 40 others on various servers

A CoH Comic: Kid Eros in "One Light"

Okay, here's the list of conditions for the last mish:

1. Map = City of Mu unique map.
2. Release Captive: 3 spawns, placement at front
3. Destructible Object: Obelisk, 4 spawns, placement on middle (floor spawn)
4. Spawned Boss: Bru'kh, placement at Back, triggered by Obelisk completion
5. Spawned ambush, placement in middle, triggered by captive completion
6. Custom mob patrol, 3 spawns, placement at middle

The map details:

- 3 allowed any detail type. (1 Middle, 2 Back)
- 19 allowed ambush, boss, patrol or destroy object details. (2 Front, 15 Middle, 2 Back)
- 8 allowed rescue, escort. ally, or defend object details. (1 Front, 7 Middle)
- 30 allowed wall collection items. (5 Front, 20 Middle, 5 Back)
- 31 allowed floor collection items. (5 Front, 21 Middle, 5 Back)

So, first question here is, when they say the # of X instances allowed in front/mid/back, do they mean separate conditions, or do they mean the quanitites of those conditions? For instance, I have one condition of a captive, with a quantity of 3, set to Front. Acc'd to the rules for this map, it says "1 front". Since I could place it, I'm ASSUMING it means one "front" condition, vs one "front" quantity. ...make sense?

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It means 1 spawn location labeled "front" that can hold rescues. You're overflowing that, so presumably the map will spawn them "middle" instead. That's the only overflow I see.

Note that overflowing doesn't cause missions to fail validation, they just get bumped "somewhere else" according to rules not specified anywhere that I've seen.

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And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

So, the obelisks aren't set to spawn on a condition?

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So, the obelisks aren't set to spawn on a condition?

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No, they're there on the onset. Completing the obelisks triggers the boss spawn; completing the captives triggers an ambush.

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So, the obelisks aren't set to spawn on a condition?

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No, they're there on the onset. Completing the obelisks triggers the boss spawn; completing the captives triggers an ambush.

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I'll give the mission a run through and see if the problem happens to me.

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I ran through it and the boss spawned just fine. I destroyed all the obelisks first, perhaps that made a difference. Try testing it and rescuing all the captives first, then destroying all the obelisks and see if the boss still spawns. Beyond that, I have no idea what could be messing it up.

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Hmm, well, I can tell you why my MA arc (#176837) broke after I published it, since the symptoms were the same (arc wouldn't load, no error message, etc.). The default text for the Kheldian ally I put in it was too long for the allotted space for the description, but that didn't show up as an error when I published the arc. I'm not sure if that was because the text limit was reset since then or if the MA feature used to simply ignore limits for default text and now doesn't, but I got no warning -- it just suddenly wasn't playable.

Oh, it's playable now, or at least the last time I checked. I went in and reduced the default text manually. It would have been nice to get an error message telling me I had a problem with an arc when I logged into the game so I could fix it right away, since I have no idea how long it was unplayable. And I can understand wanting to keep filesizes smaller, but text seems like a strange place to cut -- wouldn't graphics take up more space?

I don't have a spawning boss in mine, although I did have the burning forest. The arc still ran even with the forest removed, though -- it just plopped everything onto the Arachnos AP map, which is at the top of the Unique Outdoor maps, I think. I've since changed that to a regular forest, and altered my mish text to remove references to trees on fire. Pity -- I preferred that map.

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One forum name, two members: Molly Hackett & Heliphyneau.

AE arcs:
27327 - Enter the Homunculi
176837 - Homunculi 2: Tectonic Boogaloo -- UPDATED

Update:

Well, I was on Test with this arc and was able to duplicate the bug again. Sent up a petition, and got a GM 30 mins later to check the map out with me (was idling in the mish at work). Here's what we found:

1. The boss never spawned (so it wasn't like he spawned and was off map somewhere).
2. QA seems to think it's the map I'm using (Vaults of Mu), but they don't have anything conclusive as of yet.
3. They also suggested I try to trim back my spawns "just a little" to see if it makes a difference. (Harkens back to LJ's spawn count theory.)

I'll be tweaking the mish on Test tomorrow from work based on their recommendation to see if it's duplicable or not. (Will prolly drop the patrol completely and see if that does anything.)

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The default text for the Kheldian ally I put in it was too long for the allotted space for the description, but that didn't show up as an error when I published the arc. I'm not sure if that was because the text limit was reset since then or if the MA feature used to simply ignore limits for default text and now doesn't, but I got no warning -- it just suddenly wasn't playable.

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I've heard that if you have a double-space somewhere in your text the system converts it to some sort of code that's like five letters long - and that this problem has caused similar grief to a bunch of folks.

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