Graphics question

Probably something I just noticed because I have a Prussian battery walking up a road into the teeth of 3 French batteries all deployed and waiting for them but even though I have the "show all dead bodies" checked and the Terrain detail is on max, every time a gun is destroyed it stays there for a couple of seconds and then disappears.

Is that normal? A glitch? Or is there a setting I should attend to?

Good question. I often see this and wonder what the game is doing at that point.

It's probably a consequence of the AI code hiding units with 0 men. It is often the case that if a gun has 0 men, (after being charged by inf. or cav.), it will often stay on the battlefield in limbered mode. The AI will still consider it a valid target, and battery commanders will try to issue it orders if it is visible. Hiding them removes the problem. Guns that change appropriately, i.e. broken, are collateral damage of the hiding.

Is there a way to keep the destroyed gun sprites on the battlefield? They are very cool.

It would be cool but the explanation makes sense... although I wonder why the dead bodies don't have the same effect?

The gun sprite I think is the only sprite in the unit. Remember its at battalion level. In an infantry battalion surrenders its sprites vanish. Same with the "battalion level" gun sprite I presume.

Good answer, amazingly, correct.

I am not just a pretty face.

Hi chaps.
I was under the impression the dead bodies layer was entirely detached from units' presentation once a figure got killed (by UpdateShoot/UpdateMelee/etc.).
Am I remembering wrong?
Did you get a chance to look at a dead bodies dump?
Seems guns(+crew) sprites fail being added to that system at some point?
Have you see if it's relevant who the killer is (I mean, to which unit class it belongs)?
It's comforting anyway to learn the game can't really dispose of our glorious daughters.
Had lost any hope to find mine still warm and serviceable, whenever that may be....
Take care.
Nicolò

This is not about dead bodies but the flag sprite of the unit. In an infantry or cavalry unit the flag sprite (one figure) vanishes when the unit surrenders. In an artillery unit the entire gun team and limber is the flag sprite, so it vanishes when the unit is captured or destroyed. As to the dead gun graphic Kevin would have to answer about that. It would be nice to see more of them if it were possible to control that.

Thanks Digby.
A bit clearer now, although I'm almost sure under normal conditions the artillery units draw 2 sprites, not 1.
I also tried to frontally charge the French grand battery on vanilla WL with some poor allied arty units...
So far the only one that got all men killed (the GUI counter showing 0), had the destroyed gun sprite shown correctly (I suppose through the dead body presentation system) - after some generic infantryman - while the carriage flew away.
What Kevin meant to say is there's some code trying to "catch" those edge situations by deactivating/hiding the artillery unit altogether?
And this is likely going to happen before our unit getting its chance to lay down the broken gun sprite like it seemed to occur in my test?
Thanks again for your patience guys.

So I captured this screen shot.  The situation was that a Prussian battery came down the road into the LOS of 3 French batteries which blew the Prussian guns apart one by one in short order.  As you can see from the photo there is an impact crater and a dead infantryman with a musket. When the guns were first destroyed there was a smashed cannon there for about 5 seconds which was then replaced with what you see. It does seem as if someone made a decision to generate a dead soldier and a crater instead of a smashed gun. Why? You'd have to ask the designer!

Was that a sandbox game? We used to have the rather silly event of batteries leading AI columns down roads to their doom time after time so Kevin changed the code to fix that. I haven't seen that behaviour from the AI in a very long time. Do you have the latest version of the mod?

I am using 1.31.

They were not leading. Prior to them coming up a cavalry regiment had advanced down the road ( it's an RM map ) towards the bridge and gotten blasted by the same batteries, thought better of it and moved out of range/LOS to lick their wounds.

From what I can see on the movement map the infantry is strung out on the road. I assumed it was because in giving the useroad order the artillery and cavalry were simply closer to the road at the start and just got there first. I can see the other batteries from that division on the road mixed in with the infantry.

I am running into an interesting problem. The game is crashing while loading graphics.

The log looks like this:

10:00:00 ----------------loading: GFX_FR_Cdr_01-1_Walk
10:00:00 ----------------loading: GFX_FR_Cdr_01-2_Stand
10:00:00 ----------------loading: GFX_FR_Cdr_01-3_Run
10:00:00 ----------------loading: GFX_FR_Cdr_01-4_Death
10:00:00 ----------------loading: GFX_French_Unit
10:00:00 ----------------loading: GFX_FlagFlair


I tried looking for GFX_FlagFlair file but couldn't find it. When I say "crashed" it isn't CTDing. It is just locking up. I have to log out and log back in to restart.

I suspect an OOB error somewhere.

I'd guess that it's the next graphic being loaded that is causing the crash. It crashes before anything can be written to the log file. Are there any error messages closer to the top of the file?

There were some scenario.csv errors listed - mainly numbering problems in the one or two of the batteries. Also it claimed that some of the officers were not named in the battlescript - even though they were. That I thought might have been a Netserv issue. I cleaned out the file and will let it reload.

I fixed them and haven't gotten around to trying it out again.

Was that a sandbox game? We used to have the rather silly event of batteries leading AI columns down roads to their doom time after time so Kevin changed the code to fix that.

You'll be pleased to know that when the second division came up, the infantry led the way. The deployed into line at long artillery range and the French guns which were under AI control did not even fire at them. They waited until the Prussian artillery came up and started to deploy. Meanwhile a single regiment of Hussars came up, apparently tried to probe down the road towards the bridge, ate a few cannonballs and said "screw this."

At that point the Prussian infantry did advance like good little walking muskets and got savaged by canister as they tried to figure out what to do about the getting over the river.

That second division started further back and was in Kelheim itself to begin. I guess that the infantry was closer to the road than the rest or found it easier to move on the town streets?

Excellent. Glad to see you have things working with reasonable behavior now.

And it was a stupid OOB error on the graphics loading issue. In copying and pasting into the OOB file I failed to notice that a couple of Prussian divisions were actually assigned to a second "Army." That seems to have solved the problem.

So, going back to the graphics issue on the wrecked guns, here's a screenshot from my current game.



I'm using the same Austro-French OOB as before but this time when a gun is knocked out a wrecked gun icon is clearly visible.  The photo is truncated a bit, there is actually a second wreck off to the right.

The only thing that is different is that this is the German Chattanooga map which, I assume, began its life as an ACW map.  Can the map make a difference?

No, the map won't make a difference. I'm not sure what the difference is. Maybe it has something to do with the timing of when the game engine draws the dead gun and when the AI orders the gun to rout.

So I'm not crazy for being confused?

You may still be crazy, but the picture is not proof of that.