BUG: unremovable multipurpose room - any ideas how to remove / edit global-objects.bin ?

[Twilight]

Hi guys,

enjoying this great game so far! And after alpha testing NS2 back in the day, im also happily submitting minor quirks with the F8 tool.

Now i stumbled about something thats a showstopper for me:

While building my base a little bit upwards through scaffolding with foundation plates, i just placed a multipurpose room for testing on the topmost corner plate. Sadly i was distracted elsewhere, so i saved my game. As multipurpose rooms where in contrast to some other placeable structures like the moonpool overall harmless and easy to deal with, i didn't think much about it. They were always easily destructable.

But after continueing the next day, i was amazed to see that that room is *dead*. I cant connect stuff to it, i cant get inside of it, and more over, i cant destroy it with 'Q' because the builder tool does not offer me any options regarding this room. the builder tool simply did not react to it.

After trying some more building around it, like constructing a foundation directly underneath it from the side, i got the builder tool to respond again: but i cannot remove it via 'q', because it now says to remove attached stuff. But there is none, and the room sits on top of the platform. Even worse, i cant deconstruct any lower platforms underneath this room, so my base building is pretty much over..

Here are some screens. Note that at the beginning, the foundations to the left existed. The multipurpose room was easily placeable on the foundation corner of the left plate, with parts of it not on the foundation ( like they always do):

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=757811906
Every foundation to the right was placed afterwards trying to 'fix' the issue. They are all unremovable now too, as they got apparently dependent of the topmost room. There was nothing underneath them.

directly underneath it was a x-corridor, which i could remove to my amazement. It is not on the screens.

Seen from the other direction:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=757812010


Any ideas to fix this? Is there a way to hardcore remove it from the global-objects-bin? Seems the hierarchy if buildign dependencies got messed up and has a loop, or so.

I run on the stable branch.

Regards,
Twi

[Twilight]

yes, slot0000 corresponds to your first savegame folder

The /CellsCache and /CompiledOctreesCache folders are not important

IIRC the base data is stored in the global-objects.bin in your savegame folder.

I just took a look at my notes from back then..

The MP Rooms should be the 3 bytes 10 83 01.

The Hex editor i use is HxD.

Next week i might have more time again to look at this stuff - it's been a while

[Twilight]

It should be in an area where a lot of "10 00 10 00 10 00 10 00 10 00 10 00 10 00 10 00" lines appear the first time when scrollingfrom the start of the savegame.

In between are sprinkles of 10 83 01. I found 12 of them in my file, and i happend to have 12 MP Rooms. Basically i mapped every occurence in the savegame to quantities of base building items to find the codes.

[Twilight]

Forget the 5s.. i was wrong with that number.. The 10 05s seem to be something different. I really have to look at the encoding again.

18 01s are connected to MP Rooms. According to my notes i replaced some of those because they were related in the file to the 10 83 01s.

So, occurences of 18 01s seem to be MP Rooms.

I guess i have to find my old savegame again to cross check this.

[Kokobeng]

i dont know what i did but when i removed the 83 in middle of the 10 83 01, everything i had built was removed

[Reaper]

If you don't mind me asking, how are you able to reproduce the glitch? What's the method?

[Kokobeng]

You have to place a tunnel room, or whatever, and then a mp room right above.

Then you just place the pipe going straight up in between them and the mp room loses its floor textures and becomes permanent if you put a ladder in the upgoing pipe before the mp room. It will in other words become absolutely impossible to remove as the ladder will be attached to the mp room no matter if you remove the ladder or not because it is not really meant to be possible and they have not made anything removing the ladder from being attached in the files. Even though it isnt in game physical world.

[Kokobeng]

sorry for scuffed comment, im just very tired. Tell me if you didnt understand and i will edit it tomorrow instead.

[Kokobeng]

here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyR1X__DYE8

[Orum]

Wow, I just had this happen to me today, only to find this bug has been around for almost three years?! I've got almost 100 hours in my current game (no, I don't rush to the end, I like to build), and I do not want to restart.

Twilight, can you post a more detailed guide on the save editing so I can fix it?

[Twilight]

Well, it's been a while since i did it and its very complex reverse engineering.

But basically i started out with an empty savegame and adding stuff one by one to figure out how the savegame behaves.

[ZXC]

Its still unclear how you did it @Twilight, but thanks for sharing. I stopped trying after i found the ''10 83 01 '' in HxD. From that point its too complicated

[Twilight]

Sadly it's been a while for me since i investigated a solution and finally did it.
It's really like a reverse engineering of some code. As every savegame is different, i cannot give a quick solution for everybody, only how i approached it.

It's a pity that they never fixed the issue - i reported it several times via the ingame reporting
tool during testing. Maybe they never noticed it.

[Qwert]

For everyone who found this issue via google, or is subscribed, I think I figured out how to fix it:

Back up your save, obv.
For simplicity, delete every functional MP room so you only have the bugged one left.

Open up a creative world and place a MP room.
Open the creative file in a hex editor.
Look for the repeating 10 00 pattern mentioned above.
There should be two visible characters in the ascii decode: ƒ and €

Look at the hex there, the ƒ is 83, and you should see the 10 00 pattern offset from the rest of the file. At the end of this offset pattern is a byte with value 81. The € is 80, ending in 82.

Find the same patterns in your real save file, and replace the patterns in the real save with the ones in the creative file.

From my experiments, these blocks store the connection data to add the connecting bits, remove the floor/ceiling for stacked rooms, etc. (If you delete both manually by overwriting with 10 00, you get a fun MP room with 5/6 tunnels open to the water, missing floor and ceiling textures, and random holes in the floor when inside.)

[Twilight]

I think i used the free HxD Hex editor for that... there you have directly the byte numbers like '83' instead of substitue letters.

But otherwise, you got the gist of it. It's in principle a needle in a haystack search. I also started out with small savegames to learn the byte structure for simple bases and codes for room parts.

You have to be careful with multiple bases though. Each base gets their own 3-dimensional array with the room numbers. But usually the big byte blobs ( they look similar in structure in the file) mirror their base size: a big blob for the bigg base, a smaller for.. the smaller, etc. I just searched for the byte entry values from the protobuf serialization to each one.

[NewYears1978]

[Redacted my ramblings]

I am trying to solve the same bug but I have Alien containments that are invisible.

I thought I determind that the value for them was 10 80 01 but when I 00 out 80 01 it erases my whole base.

Aren't the 10s separators? Like 10 80 01 10 so 80 01 should be the item? thus I would 00 out the 80 01?

Or am I understanding that wrong?