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Pact

A turn-based strategy roguelike. Make a pact with a demon for world changing powers and survive the consequences. · By porousnapkin

Crashes very often

A topic by mtarini created Mar 31, 2020 Views: 318 Replies: 13
Viewing posts 1 to 10

Interesting game!

Big fan of that little gem that is There Is Only Power, I jumped at the occasion to test this one out.

Unfortunately, I could not advance much, as the game crashes on me after a while ("Fatal Error"). I tried several matches (four, I think) and it just crashes sooner or later, well before the action gets hot.It never give me me the time to complete 2-3 missions before crashing, sometimes not even one.  Considering there is no save or checkpoint feature, this means I still don't know how the game looks like later on.  Too bad! 

It seems Unity served you better than Unreal: I don't remember There Is Only Power crashing that much, or, actually, at all.

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks for the heads up! I haven't gotten a crash in my playtests. Any chance you get a popup that mentions unreal when it crashes? If so, I'd love it if you could take a screenshot of it and send it here.

You're the first person to report a crash so I could really use your help in tracking it down! (Although I do have a few soft-locks recorded I want to get fixed, nothing crash related yet.)

There is Only Power was unfortunately pretty crash-prone early in its development as well, but with enough feedback I was able to fix  most of them up. Hoping to follow that trend here!

BTW: Saving is in the plans! I haven't prioritized because I figured at present the game was short enough it wouldn't help much. But it will probably help chasing down crashes since you could post crashing save files, so I'll try prioritizing it for next weeks patch (which will release around 4/10).

Developer

I did just find a crash when you transform a location that is temporarily exhausted, the game crashes 5 days later. If that's what you were experiencing, a fix will be coming out in the next few days!

(7 edits)

Yes, I do get a pop-up, but it's very unhelpful, it just says something like "Fatal Error" "the game has generated an error and will..." (the message doesn't end). I can make a screenshot but it won't help you much I think.  Shell I?

It doesn't seem to crash in response to any particular action of mine, which fits your explanation (that it happens 5 days after some action). I didn't find a pattern that triggers it, what I know is that I never get very far in the game, with my style of playing it. 

Which is this: I focus on money income (which ... ahah, let's say it's subtly hinted to be important), so what I end up doing most often is taking control of cities, planting mines and woodmills as often as I can, recharge exhausted mines and woodmill cards with teas, and upgrade them as often as I can too.

Some comment on the game, for what I've seen: the system looks very cool! The setup is *very* captivating, with this mysterious and ominous  focus on money and the titular pact.  But also, the game so far strikes me as too easy: everything you do is abundantly rewarded (even just walking), no enemy is ever remotely a threat, significant and permanent upgrades (income, allies, artifacts, spells) seems to be super easy to gain (like when you literally control a city after walking by a few times, or you just collect powerful artifacts on the ground, or your deity packs you with powerful spells in exchange of peanuts in coins). But maybe this is intended, and the challenge will rise later in the game.

EDIT:  specific answers:  no, it doesn't mention Unreal at all in the Error message, I commented about Unity vs Unreal just because ... the icons of the games give it away.   :-D    Also, maybe a saving option would not be necessary (barring crashes): I see the nice side of *not* having it. For sure, There Is Only Power worked very well without it. The Daily Challenge mechanism was a dope idea, BTW! Will you replicate that? It makes the well done procedural aspect of the game shine, and it was just brilliant. Oh, BTW, in There Is Only Power it didn't always work as advertised, and often it went back and forth between two scenarios in the same day (I know complete determinism is easier said than done).

Developer

I think it's likely the crash with the incoming fix based on your playstyle (at least I hope!). I'll ping this topic when the next patch is up with the crash fix and would love to hear if it fixes it for you. Should either be tomorrow or Thursday.

That error message does not sound very helpful, so no need to send it. It's supposed to drop a stack trace, but I may have set that up wrong. I'll look into it.

Glad you're enjoying the core systems! The balance is definitely off now. It has teetered between incredibly hard and incredibly easy, but it'll get there! More content in the future will help with difficulty, like enemies that can target your back line or remove block. I'll probably make the demon hunter parties spawn more quickly in the short term to apply a bit more pressure.

Developer

@mtarini I got a new build up which fixed two crashes I was able to track down and a soft lock. Hoping it fixes your issues. If you play it, please shoot me a message if it's still crashing the same way. It is up here: https://porousnapkin.itch.io/pact/devlog/134437/pact-009-qol-features-and-bug-fixes

I'm starting next week's build focused on the save system, so hopefully that will help with tracking down and recovering from crashes if any are still occurring.

Developer

@mtarini I got up the save and load build https://porousnapkin.itch.io/pact/devlog/136447/pact-0010-save-and-load
I fixed a few more crashes I was able to track down. Would love to hear if this cleared up your problems!

If you do get a crash or a bug, I'd love it if you could send me your save file and/or crash dump.
Save File Path: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Pact\Saved\SaveGame.json
Crash Dump Path: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Pact\Saved\Crashes\   <- send the whole folder

In most cases I found that after crashing I could load my save file and continue playing without issue, so this should help you get past your error. Please tell me if that changes!

(7 edits)

Great work! I played the new 0.0.10 version, and I've seen that it doesn't crash ... for much longer.

Eventually, it did crash (on my 2nd game -- I lost the first one quickly). I was quite late in the game: army of maybe six, mission to get 2000 reachable in maybe a few days, and lots of income producing installations. The automatically saved the state, maybe just before crashing. If I try to continue that saved game, it just crashes immediately after loading.  All crashes give the same error as before. I've sent you the savagame and the crash folder by email.

Great game BTW! Fun to play, so many thanks. In my first game, I got defeated, which is a first at Pact. Nice! I was a bit careless maybe. The second game, it was the one that crashed. 

Maybe what made it crash is the following. Because I think I understood that planting an installment (a bank, windmills or mine) "overwrites" the previous original location, which turns into a bank etc, and because I didn't want to lose original locations and their useful options, I started planting my installments one over the other instead. This way, I only lost the access to the options of my older installment, which (apart from upgrading of windmills twice) I was not interested in using. What was important for me as a player, is that I kept the income of "overwritten" installments, and that seemed to be the case. So not only I planted banks over banks repeatedly, but also different installment over each other, like windmills over banks. Maybe, when an exhausted bank recovered or something like it, and wasn't actually a bank any longer, this it made it crash.  Just a wild guess.

BTW, from the point of view of design of the rules, I wonder (1) if players should really be allowed to plant one installment over another, unrealistically stacking them up in the same place, and (2) if an installment should really be replacing the original options of a place, rather than just adding new options but keeping the old ones (It's not like the herborist of a city disappears just because you opened  a bank subsidiary next to it). 

Developer

Hahaha I totally know what caused your crash now! That's a clever strategy! Not working as intended unfortunately. When you remove the location it should remove the income. I think the income is very confused since it can't find its location anymore. Thanks for the extra info! Should definitely have that fixed by next patch.

Developer

BTW I like your idea about stacking giving additional options instead of replacing. Short term it won't work like that, but I'm going to think on if there's a cool way I can incorporate that idea into a future feature. Thanks!

Deleted post
Developer(+1)

I believe it is caused by combat passives on dying characters (like poison, stun, etc.). When a  lot of passives are in the game, it sometimes crashes at battle end or character death. I'm narrowing in on where the exact crash is but haven't quite got it yet. (I thought I'd fixed it in build 11, but it looks like it's still appearing).

Deleted post
Developer(+1)

Thanks for the report! Looking into this at the moment. I think I have a consistent reproduction of it so hopefully will have a fix out sometime soon (probably next week).