[Fix posted to Baldur's Gate Chronicles on May 9, 1999] Here's the text I posted from the RPG newsgroup - slightly edited from what I gave to Silverdawn at BGChronicles (which he sent all of you). It covers repeating movies and unrecognized completed subquests as well as the NPC spawning problem (all of these are likely from the same bug, fixed in the .exe patch sent to Silverdawn). I should emphasize that this bug should be fairly rare (the reason for this will be more clear after you read the explanation), but because it only affects those people who have played the game the most (i.e. our most devoted fans), we were really eager to get a fix out ASAP... ------------------------ Note: Some people at the Tales official message board have mentioned finding a worrisome bug where NPC's would spawn in over and over, or movies would repeat over and over, or subquests would not be recognized as being complete, which had never been encountered before in QA testing. We got some save games from these people which allowed us to identify and fix the bug in question over the weekend here at BioWare. Note - the fix for this bug is posted now at www.bgchronicles.com, and will be posted on the www.interplay.com/bgtales site and the www.bioware.com site early next week - explanation of the bug, and how we found/fixed it is below. Fortunately this bug is fairly rare and will only affect a few people, but we wanted to get the fix out for this bug ASAP. So far we've only QA'd it at BioWare, but I am confident (based on testing we did today with some save games that were sent to me) that it will fix spawning bug problems (i.e. it fixed the problems with save games I was sent - no one needs to restart the expansion, just reload the save they encountered the problem with and everything should be fine). This fix may fix a repeating movies problem as well - they are the same bug (explanation below). If you're getting weird problems like the game not recognizing you'be completed a subquest, this would be worthwhile trying as well. Check the explanation below to understand why these outwardly different appearing bugs may all be from the same source... I'd recommend that people keep a backup of the BGMain2.exe that this .exe replaces, in case they need to put it back. But this .exe seems to work, based on the feedback we've gotten from people on the message board. The cause of the bug is running out of global variable memory - the limit was set (arbitrarily, during development of Baldur's Gate) at 512 global variables, and we didn't realize that this would pose a problem until we checked a few of the save games that I received yesterday from three people I emailed off of the message board. The problem is that every time you set a new global variable (kill a unique scripted NPC, finish a subplot etc.) this global useage increases. When we ran their save games, we encountered the same problems that they did - i.e. some NPC's would spawn in repeatedly - and we found that they had used all available global variables - thus, these people had obviously done a lot of stuff in BG (nearly everything), plus everything in TOTSC. I myself had a save game from BG (the last one which I still had to look at), in which I did about 95% of the game, and with which I carried on in TOTSC, and the globals in my game had reached 468, with about 20-30 more left to be set in the remaining two levels of the TOTSC I hadn't yet done in that save game. Hence I would finish the game with about 500 globals set, just under the threshold for alerting us there was a potential problem. As I likely had one of the most complete single game saves of anyone at BioWare or Interplay, this bug was never seen in QA testing...until now, when some of the people who have played the game even more than I did sent us these saves. Fortunately, we know now the problem, and have fixed it in the exe by increasing the global variable memory limit - and the save games with this problem that we were sent work, all of them. It's unfortunate that the people most likely affected are our biggest fans... (that's why we were so eager to get this to them ASAP) - this fix should solve their problems, hopefully! ray ------------- dr ray muzyka cfo and joint-ceo, BioWare Corp. producer, Baldur's Gate executive producer, Tales of the Sword Coast -------------