Bug: Bug Thread: The Shortlist

[Edi]

Bug Thread: Discussion
In-Game Typos
Manual Typos
Dom3 Progress Page at Illwinter

The Shrapnel Games staff have asked me to tackle the task of clearing up the bug thread and managing bug reporting here on the forum and I decided to take it up. Therefore, there are going to be some changes to the way we are doing those things from now on.

This thread here is going to be serving as a shortlist of known bugs. The bugs are going to be categorized according to what they affect, the severity and possible other things. This thread is also going to stay locked and the only people posting here will be me, the devs and possibly other moderators. That way the bug list is not going to get cluttered up as the original bug thread did. The basis for this thread is going to be a distillation of the issues currently buried in the old bug thread. It will be posted in sections as soon as I manage to comb through it, collect unresolved issues and organize them to a coherent list.

The original bug thread will still serve in much the same capacity as it did previously, i.e. you can use it to report new bugs and discuss them. That way if something that is not actually a bug is reported as such, it can simply be commented to be Working As Designed (WAD) and forgotten. The discussion thread and the typo threads are going to be unstickied to give more room for general topics on the first forum page. The relevant threads are linked above.

If you have games or files that require more thorough analysis, send them to Illwinter along with a thorough, detailed description of the problem. You should send them to the i-n-f-o(at)i-l-l-w-i-n-t-e-r(dot)c-o-m address. Just remove the dashes and format the address correctly.

If the issue you are reporting is more than a minor detail and especially if it is something major like the bugs related to the Gatestone and gating spells that transport armies, please DO post a separate thread for discussing that problem in more detail. Linking such a separate thread from the shortlist is much easier than trying to find a possibly large number of posts from the mass in the discussion thread.

Note that even the discussion thread is subject to far more aggressive moderation than it used to be up until this point. Posts that report WAD things as bugs because the personal preferences of the forumer reporting it will be split to a feature requests thread, or if splitting is too unwieldy due to forum moderation mechanics, quoted to the feature request thread and then deleted from the discussion thread.

Some guidelines on how to report bugs:

• Unit bugs: ALWAYS include the monster number (you can see this by viewing the unit and pressing shift+i and it will also tell you weapon and armor numbers of the unit) and name and then specify the problem with that particular unit. This is especially important because there are several units with the same name and several units with functionally much the same things but perhaps only one of them has some minor issue (e.g. a typo). If you do not provide the ID number, chances are nobody else is going to bother looking it up either and thus it is not likely to get fixed.
• Weapon bugs: ALWAYS include weapon number, name and an accurate, detailed description of the problem.
• Armor: See weapon bugs
• Magic Items: ALWAYS include magic item number (select item for viewing and Shift-I will give you item number, or look it up in the Dom3 DB) and an accurate description of the problem.
• Magic sites: ALWAYS include site number, name and a detailed description of the problem. If you do not know the site number, please look it up in the Dom3 DB (link in my sig)
• Forts, poptypes: As above, include ID number and accurate description of the problem
• Typos: Please report in-game typos in the In-Game Typos thread. When you report a typo, specify exactly where it appears (monster number, item number etc). Provide a correction for the typo. Preferably, write out the entire description with the spelling errors, displaced commas etc corrected, because that will allow the devs to concentrate on fixing more important things and just copy-paste the corrected description into the code. REMEMBER: If something is not spelled according to American English spelling, it is not necessarily a typo, because UK English spelling is somewhat different on many counts. If you are not sure, consult a dictionary first.

BUG REPORT SHORTLIST SYNTAX:

The following syntax will be used to express what category bugs belong to and how the short code each bug will get is formed:

Category:

• Units: U [monster nbr]-[entry nbr] (each issue to be listed separately, may have varying severity)
• Weapons: W [weapon nbr]-[entry nbr] (see above)
• Armor: A [Armor nbr]
• Magic items: I [item nbr]-[entry nbr] (see above)
• Magic sites: MS [site nbr]
• Spells: SP [spell name][entry nbr] (if there is more than one entry for a given spell and more than one problem with different severity)
• Forts/Poptypes: FT [fort nbr] or POP [poptype nbr]
• Behavior: BHV [optional codes][summary]
• Mercenaries: MERC [entry nbr]
• Combat issues: CBT-[clarification]-[optional entry nbr]

Other issues might need to get more individual codes or can't perhaps be straightforwardly categorized. We can wing those as they come along.

Severity/status/other:
Major
Significant
Normal/Average/Not yet classified to another category
Minor
Trivial
Fixed
Dev Comments
Edi's Comments

Severity and status will be primarily determined by Illwinter. Anyone else's assessments are secondary and only guesstimates unless the issue is well known. Typos are always either minor (missing descriptions, significant description errors) or trivial (e.g. other vs otehr or similar).

That should be just about all of it for now. Of course, anything and everything said above is subject to revision by the administrative staff or the developers if they think something should be done differently. The following post will contain the list of bugs as soon as I can compile it.