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[Decker]

Shot a garrison with overloaded energy weapon, point blank at garrison center.

[Kyzrati]

Thanks for the report. Apparently it's some issue with the UI special effect associated with overloaded attacks (so it doesn't have to do with garrisons in particular, just FYI).

I'll take care of it!

[Kyzrati]

Okay, found it. Apparently it's possible under special circumstances for the effect to try to extract characters from the root console that are out of bounds in order to modify them. The bounding code looks right but it must not quite work for all resolutions/layouts, so I'll have to find out what those are and resolve.

I don't think I'll release a hot fix for this one since it's fairly rare, though. The fix will come with the next release.

Thanks again!

[Kyzrati]

Hm, despite knowing where it crashed, I can still find no explanation for the behavior. Turns out it's not a spacial out-of-bounds error, but something having to do with a temporary console that has no font set, but that is theoretically impossible :/.

I just sat around for a while firing tons of huge overloaded weapons everywhere and under various screen layouts and I cannot reproduce this, either. I guess I'll have to keep waiting and cross reference this with any similar reports in the future. Hate to leave a bug in there, though...

It seems to be extremely rare, in any case. I don't imagine you've ever had this happen before, eh?

[Decker]

D'oh! The crash occurred right after I got in -2. I could have uploaded a save but since you said you found the bug, I overwrote it.

You have the seed name though (Shotty Mayhem -- ironic huh ). If you have some way to iterate over the starting positions, you should see a garrison immediately upon entering the level. Shoot point blank at the 'G'. The gun I used was an Advanced Variable Charge Gun IIRC. There was one of my drones lingering around, and an explosion had occurred a few turns before, triggered by a programmer shooting at my drone (I think).

It's the first time I see this happen.

[Kyzrati]

No problem, it appears to be a one-time fluke in the UI, so a save wouldn't help here. Thanks for the extra details though, just in case!

As you say, with the seed (and your new directions) I can recreate the same spot in the same world to test if necessary. From what I've seen it's pretty inexplicable, so I'll just have to compare notes when it happens again... Overloaded weapons have been in there for the past year, but this is the first such report.

[Kyzrati]

Okay, so it turns out this was a bug after all.

The same trigger crashed my game from a couple weeks ago while I was streaming, and I couldn't track the cause then, either (very unusual stack trace and Windows error code). I'd put it away for a while to wait for more data, then just today Amphouse reported the same thing.

It's apparently been in there forever, but weapon overloading hasn't been used enough for it to show up much, and it doesn't happen all the time anyway, just under some strange circumstances I haven't been able to recreate. That said, I do believe I've figured out why it could theoretically occur, 99% sure here, and have refactored a bit of code to prevent it.

This goes down as one of the most convoluted bugs of the Alpha so far--took about 5 hours of sleuthing in all!

(So yeah, know that it's possible in Alpha 11 that firing an overloaded weapon could crash the game/UI due to a bug that should be fixed in Alpha 12.)