Downtown Frozen

Mister_Ennui · Post by **Mister_Ennui** » Sat Jan 27, 2007 6:03 pm

Has anyone else experienced this?

All the people on the streets of downtown LA have become rooted to the spot; they don't wander around the streets and alleys anymore. This only seems to have happened since I installed the unofficial patch 3.3.

Cheers.

Anaximander · Post by **Anaximander** » Sat Jan 27, 2007 7:46 pm

I have seen this happen, but only after I tampered with the map file and messed something up.

Start a new game and see if the problem persists. If it does, you may need to reinstall and repatch.

Or if you can live with NPC's being frozen in the downtown map, just ignore it.

Mister_Ennui · Post by **Mister_Ennui** » Sun Jan 28, 2007 3:33 am

I've reinstalled and repatched, but the problem continues. However I am using an earlier save (I copied the save folder before uninstalling and copied it back in after reinstallation). Strangely the problem still appears if I reload a save from before the problem first appeared.

Guess i'll start an entirely new game and see if that makes a difference (can't quite see how it would though).

Mister_Ennui · Post by **Mister_Ennui** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 5:47 pm

I've sorted it now by reinstalling the game with the 3.2 unofficial patch (as opposed to the 3.3 one).

Has anyone else had similar problems with 3.3?

Cheers.

Mister_Ennui · Post by **Mister_Ennui** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 6:48 pm

I tried, on the offchance, reinstalling unofficial patch 3.3 over 3.2 and the same thing is occurring (Downtown npcs frozen, but not elsewhere). What a pain in the arse.

Is it just me experiencing this?

Anaximander · Post by **Anaximander** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 11:20 pm

You're the only one I've seen report this bu in version 3.3. It is indicitive of a map error, but I've been through the game 4 times now with 3.3 installed and had no such problem.

Mister_Ennui · Post by **Mister_Ennui** » Sun Feb 04, 2007 7:15 am

Solved it.

Thanks Anaximander for pointing me in the right direction. It was, as you said, something to do with the map files.

I patched up to 3.2 and copied out la_hub_1.ain, la_hub_1.loc and la_hub_1.bsp. I then patched to 3.3 and copied the three files back in and everyone in Downtown was on the move again.

Cheers.

Jhereg · Post by **Jhereg** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 11:43 pm

Mister_Ennui wrote:Thanks Anaximander for pointing me in the right direction. It was, as you said, something to do with the map files.

I patched up to 3.2 and copied out la_hub_1.ain, la_hub_1.loc and la_hub_1.bsp. I then patched to 3.3 and copied the three files back in and everyone in Downtown was on the move again.

Cheers.

Ermmm. I truly hate to bump the thread, and I awfully hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but...

All of the NPCs downtown are frozen in place. They have been so now for several sojournes out of the down-town venue. I'm about to go for the warrens, and they're still frozen in place. They still move - their hands and arms periodicallly move about. They just never move anywhere within the arena. They're frozen in place.

The trick? I'm not anywhere near 3.x anything. Vanilla 1.2 official patch, as anybody will tell you.

I haven't played with the game files in over a year, and in that time, I replaced my computer entirely - full re-install on a virgin machine. All of the packed files are still packed from the original install. I haven't listened to any of the game's sound files in nearly two years (since that nasty incident with Windows Media Player).

In short, I'm as close to virgin perfection as you can be. Yet all of the downtown NPCs are frozen in place.

Does anybody have the vaguest clue why? Animaxander, you said something about the map files? Where are they, and what do they mean? Are they in the compressed files? How do I get to them? What do I change?

Or am I simply in the land of re-install?

All advices are appreciated. Thank you.

Anaximander · Post by **Anaximander** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 7:11 pm

The map files are .bsp files. With the vanilla game, untampered with in any way, they are all stored inside the .vpk files in your Vampire directory. The .vpk files store data in a compressed format. You can download Tufster's VPK tool and extract all of the game's data from them, but as the files are extracted they will overwrite anything already in your Vampire dictory, so you'll have to reapply patch 1.2 and start a new game afterward.

Once extracted, map files are stored in the Vampire\maps directory. There is also a Vampire\maps\graphs directory containing two files for every map. These two files contain all node graph data for their corresponding map. If anything on the map changes, the node graphs are automatically updated the next time the map loads, and you get a couple of error messages on the screen that say:

Node graph out of date. Updating....
AI Disabled...

All creature AI is temporarily disabled while the node graphs update, but it should come back on once the update is complete.

Turfster's VPK tool allows you to view the .bsp map files in a textual format, but as you can imagine there is a lot of data in the map files. Reading them can be very tedious unless you know exactly what you're looking for.

There's also a shareware program called BSPEdit that you can download, but either I haven't realized it's full potential yet, or it's just not very user friendly.

Since you're running the umodded version 1.2 of the game, it's hard to imagine anything that might have caused corruption in your map files - unless it was a bad install. You could try extracting the .vpk's - I'm sorry, I don't remember exactly which one contains the downtown map - and replace the la_hub_1.bsp file and it's corresponding .loc and .ain files in the graphs folder.

Jhereg · Post by **Jhereg** » Sun Mar 18, 2007 11:58 am

Jhereg wrote:Ermmm. I truly hate to bump the thread, and I awfully hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but...

All of the NPCs downtown are frozen in place. They have been so now for several sojournes out of the down-town venue. I'm about to go for the warrens, and they're still frozen in place. They still move - their hands and arms periodicallly move about. They just never move anywhere within the arena. They're frozen in place.

Okay, I tried all the ritual things, and not only did the problem persist, it seemed to make the redezvous with Beckett impossible.

So I abandoned the game, and started a new one. New problems started to surface almost immediately. So I think I'm in the Hell of re-install, and am doing that right now. Apparrently, the game eats its own brain over a period of time. Even without actual interferance, it seems to just generally degrade with time. I'll keep you posted on my progress with the newly installed game.

Iguanac64 · Post by **Iguanac64** » Tue Apr 24, 2007 10:30 am

Yep...the rendezvous with Beckett get's screwed by this bug...I just go via the sewers to skip him. Vanilla VtM:B is fine, but once I start patching Downtown locks up...I just worked around it.

Wesp5 · Post by **Wesp5** » Wed Apr 25, 2007 1:02 am

Iguanac64 wrote:Yep...the rendezvous with Beckett get's screwed by this bug...I just go via the sewers to skip him. Vanilla VtM:B is fine, but once I start patching Downtown locks up...I just worked around it.

I don't know about vanilla Bloodlines but bugs as these are common when using saved games made with an earlier version of the game with an updated version. This applies to all unofficial patches and maybe to 1.0/1.1/1.2 too.

Jhereg · Post by **Jhereg** » Wed Apr 25, 2007 7:20 pm

Wesp5 wrote:I don't know about vanilla Bloodlines but bugs as these are common when using saved games made with an earlier version of the game with an updated version. This applies to all unofficial patches and maybe to 1.0/1.1/1.2 too.

You're right, it does, but when I got this machine, I installed VTMB from the original CD, patched it immediately (before playing any game) and it's been like that ever since. 1.25 years, to be precise. That isn't it.

Still grateful for any clues, though.