Elite / Frontier FE2 - weird hyperspace cloud bug.

MacArthur

M
I think someone is following me :eek:;)



Big whoop, a hyperspace cloud right? Except it's coming from a sector outside the galaxy and is due to arrive right now, always, the arrival time ticks up with the game time and nothing ever arrives. This cloud appears behind my own arrival cloud remnant everytime I make a jump. I think I found the savegame where it first appears and I've since played about a million space bucks so don't really want to roll back. This would be merely mysterious and entertaining except I just started doing assassinations again and this cloud seems to make my targets disappear from the game instead of arriving on schedule. Not good, I prefer to do the dirty work far away from prying sensors.

I've found a savegame editor for amiga FE2 made by a smart fellow called girv. Anyone ever used it? It has some documentation and even source code but frankly I don't fancy my chances of reaching into the galaxy like an excession and plucking out a hyperspace anomaly from my savefile. Don't really expect a solution, just thought I'd tell a tale of a strange thing I once saw in deep space. Anyone encounter this bug before?
 

MacArthur

M
Yep that's the one from girv.net. I will have a go at it when I'm in the mood, which might be never. I imagine that reverse engineering save formats and hacking your saves is a great game in itself but it's not one I know how to play. I can use a hex editor but I don't really know what I'm doing.

I mostly like to play games as they were intended, though there is an amusing save file in one of the packages on that site. Eagle, class 7 hyperdrive, large plasma, 30 cabins, hundreds of shields and all the money in the world. I took out my frustration on some unwitting travellers by jumping the max distance until the drive broke, almost made it to the edge of the galaxy.

"Where are we, I've waited a month, take me to the nearest city"
"Well ok, nearest city is . . . . . oooooh"
 

Styggron

S
LOL

I'm comfortable with Hex editors. I used to do a lot of 8/16 bit assembler.......... those were the days..............I don't want to look at it anymore :)

With FE2 I am building up my cash on the milkruns at present (Amiga version). :)
 

MacArthur

M
I think we lost them.

Easily solved in the end, no hex editing required. One forced misjump was all it took to shake my extra galactic stalker.

I did notice one thing while reading a bit about the technical details of the game. More than you ever wanted to know about it is here -

http://www.jongware.com/galaxy1.html

I think the sector that the cloud was coming from was probably [-5912,-5412] with the end of the number chopped off by the screen edge. This is in fact the real sector [0,0] with in game coordinates adjusted to make the Sol system appear in sector [0,0]. The cloud origin system name of "enenen" also sounds like the name algorithm having a stutter. There are systems in the game with this name but not there or anywhere near the core systems.
 
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