Problem with first/last row not scanned for PLCK cave

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artsoft
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Problem with first/last row not scanned for PLCK cave

Post by artsoft »

A player of cave "Cave 19" of the GDash cave set "caves/The_Bremer_Town_Musicus/Three_Boulder_Dash_Games_B.gds" has brought the following issue to my attention:

After collecting enough diamonds in this cave, the exit does not open. :(

A quick check reveals that this is because this cave set (stored in GDS binary file format) uses the PLCK game engine (first few bytes of the cave set file are "GDashPLC"), which (as the only engine of all GDash engines) unsets the flag "border_scan_first_and_last" (which is set for all other engines).

This means that the first and last row of the cave (with the exit element stored in the first row in this case) is never scanned, which means that the closed exit will never be changed to the open exit if the required number of diamonds was collected, effectively rendering this cave unsolvable.

So there is the suspicion that this cave set was maybe incorrectly converted from the original C64 game.

Has anybody else an idea what might have gone wrong here, or what else could be checked?

A quick fix seems to be converting this cave set to BDCFF format (which always sets this flag), but this may break other things in a subtle way...
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LogicDeLuxe
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Re: Problem with first/last row not scanned for PLCK cave

Post by LogicDeLuxe »

Probably one of those caves not thoroughly tested by the authors. It was most likely distributed with this bug at the time and never fixed. Unfortunately, with the masses of fan made caves combined with the inexperience we all started with, things like this happened every now and then. Some authors loosed interest in this game quickly and either wasn't aware of those bugs, or they didn't care.
artsoft
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Re: Problem with first/last row not scanned for PLCK cave

Post by artsoft »

Thanks, LogicDeLuxe, for your assessment regarding the potential cause for this cave being unsolvable!

I have just manually fixed this cave directly inside the GDS caveset file (using a hex editor, moving the outbox from the first row to a nearby titan wall in the second row, not too far away from the original outbox position), so the fix will be available with the next version of the GDash cave collection for R'n'D. (I will also add this fix as a pull request for the GDash repository.)
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