Talk:Known Bugs (Apocalypse)

Big aliens issue

I have noticed that Megaspawns and Psymorphs, despite their enormous size, are not that easily spotted by XCOM agents whenever they are behind structures that are partially covering their body. Therefore I have the suspect that such aliens become visible only if a specific "square" of their body is in the visual range of the agents. Can someone confirm this ?

I've had a Megaspawn hide right in front of my agents because his top half wasn't visible, even though his feet should have been in plain sight 2 squares ahead of them, so yes, this is definitely a thing. Binkyuk (talk) 07:34, 23 June 2015 (EDT)

Thank you. I have started writing two lines on this topic. Hmmm... it would be interesting to investigate which is the rule to establish the visibility of the aliens and why it fails so badly with Megaspawns and Psymorphs.

About Agents on more vehicles

If you start a mission and your agents are not all of them assigned to the same vehicle (e.g. they are spanned into two or more ships), the equipment and the alien corpses are lost, regardless that the vehicles are provided with cargo holders and alien containment. Can someone confirm this ?

Learning AI bug

So, the Learning AI doesn't work on the Steam/GoG version. This is due to it requiring a physical CD to read off rather than a mounted .iso file.

This also means, that if you mount the .iso with Windows or any other virtual drive, it'll still behave the same and the Learning AI will not function, even though the Learning AI files will keep updating.

Can anyone confirm if burning the included .iso file from the digital distributions of the game onto a CD and using that to play will allow the Learning AI to function again?

At Game_versions_and_builds_(Apocalypse) it's also mentioned that only the UK release (I guess V1.0?) and the V1.03 US Versions actually support the Learning AI.

Is there more information available on that? Which Versions do and do not support, other localizations of the game (German, Italian, French, etc.) ?

I just wonder if that statement is just there, because only those 2 particular versions were tested or because it really is only those 2 supporting the Learning AI.

Other than that, I'd suggest adding the Learning AI bug / Please Insert CD bug to this list.

The creater of OpenApoc explains the error like this:

"The problem is DOSBox emulating a CD-ROM which has the data on one track, but multiple parts of the disc. This is also the reason why users may occasionally get the 'please insert CD' prompt whilst playing Apoc under DOSBox with an ISO image.

This is the only way to get the game to read the data from the tracks in their original physical location on the disc.

The moment you use a virtual CD or an ISO image it breaks the three learning AI files... They update, but have no effect on decision making

The files are... BRAIN.DAT, EXPERIEN.DAT and WEAPEXP.DAT

It's the loss of where the physical data sectors are stored on the disc that breaks the AI it appears

So no matter what you do, unless you have a physical disc it'll never work with emulation

The game will play, the base AI will work... But it will never vary tactical decisions according to how the player does things..."

(quoted from a YouTube comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo5wYHqtQQo )

So, to get the Learning AI working on DOSBox, you need an actual physical CD for the game to read off of, while at the same time this also prevents the "Please insert CD" bug that occasionally occurs.

However, I don't know if you need the original CD or if it also is enough to burn the .iso file from the digital distributions (Steam/GoG) onto a CD and just use that then. Bard (talk) 07:30, 18 November 2019 (CET)

New Bug Found

Details on my page EsTeR (talk)

Whining

Some of the entries on this page are not software bugs but just people complaining about game features people think are annoying or weird. This applies to: "UFO Incursion Battle Music", "No night missions", "Item Limit", "Human Tech Level 5", "Cannot Choose Men in Base Defence".

None of these is a software bug; the game is doing what it's told (even Tech Level 5 is correctly deploying what it's told to i.e. one Plasma Gun and zero Plasma Pods - that's just a weird thing to tell it to do). The Item Limit definitely isn't something the developers were unaware of; the game refusing to deploy all soldiers is an intended behaviour, to prevent X-COM's items from being consigned to oblivion due to being in excess of the limit. There would be no point in having noncombat personnel around in the Battlescape if you could pick your units - nobody would ever pick them, because they're useless. A lack of night missions isn't a bug, it's just a lack of a feature. And there's no reason to think the action music is unintended behaviour either. Magic9mushroom (talk) 06:31, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Complaining is probably one of the easiest things to do. I think all the non-bug issues can be shifted here to the comments page or a sub-page and have them culled from the main article. I am slightly surprised the 65535 widget bug, probably one of the older known bugs, hasn't had a mention. NKF (talk) 07:17, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

I agree all these things should be culled. Regarding the Plasma Pods - the original game also has an equipment loadout error (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Alien_Weapon_Loadouts), but it's listed only on that page, not under "bugs", since it - as you say - is not in fact a bug (it's a design oversight). I'd also remove "Cannot Rotate the View" - it's a design limitation, not a bug. Darkpast (talk) 07:57, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

The Item Limit definitely needs to be noted somewhere, as it's quite commonly encountered in the lategame (when you have the Bio-Trans to allow 20+ soldiers, and are carrying a bucketload of Toxigun ammo in order to get through the long Alien Building missions) and has dramatic effects. I'm just not sure where; everything else we're discussing here has other obvious places to mention it (such as Tech Levels, which already does have the Plasma Gun thing), but this one's a bit of a stumper. Magic9mushroom (talk) 10:27, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

DEPLOYMENT FAILED

I just had a really weird occurrence when a Transporter dropped some aliens into my base. When "deploying units", the game came up with a message saying "DEPLOYMENT FAILED" saying there was no space to spawn units, then said that since no player-controlled units existed it was running in observer mode. When the Battlescape came up, the entire base was made of concrete, which made it pretty obvious why there was no space to spawn units.

Didn't think to grab screencaps. Magic9mushroom (talk) 08:40, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Yep, the base map doesn't have enough spawn spots for enemy placement. I sometimes get that when 30+ lab and 20+agents AND having edited the alien drop of ships to 32 aliens of various sorts AND three basic security stations AND having just the gravlift and no vehicle repair bays. EsTeR (talk)