Faction system, heavily bugged
 

This annoying problem continues since last year.

Any time you do ANY changes to factions or insert a any faction ENTIRE system instantly breaks - and you stop geting faction for ANY npc you killed

This most likely has to do something with order of entries in all 3 faction tables. Something is broken in the way how faction relations are read.

For exmaple if you take perfectly working system and say insert another faction which qeynos guards should now attack- the whole system breaks
The guards (in most cases) will still attack the mobs but you get no faction hits when you attack them. In some cases all npc with aggro set (guards) stop attacking all together

This problem has been bothering me sisnce last year, its hard to replicate and imposible to fix once it appears. I had to wipe all faction tables and remake them from scratch and now its back again.

All I did is added another faction for qeynos guards to attack and whole thing broke. And as I said its not the first time this happens

could devs please give this attention?

I have never seen a problem with it. Maybe you did something wrong.

Can this be duplicated with PEQ DB via CVS? If so, what exact queries are you running that break it?

If you can come up with that info, I don't think it should be too hard to narrow down.

Lol. Just lol.

well lets starts with simple exmaple.

take default peq db

add a new faction entry to faction_list (any values may as well be all zeroes expect faction ID number of course)
add this faction to npc_faction
now go to npc_faction_entries and add this faction as enemy of Qeynos Guards

now load server and go kill say a gnoll in blackburrow

in my case: ALL npcs in the world stop giving faction when they die


Trev... I gona hit you with a rusty mace! This thing has been annoying me for a year and a half now.

As long as I keep adding faction one by one - all works fine
Everytime I add a new faction which needs to be in relation with faction which was added somewhere in the begining all npcs stop giving faction hits.

basicly my npc_faction_entries looks like this (for exmaple)

some faction A relation to B some value adjustments
some faction A relation to C some value adjustments
some faction A relation to D some value adjustments
some faction B relation to B some value adjustments
some faction B relation to C some value adjustments
some faction B relation to D some value adjustments

if I keep adding B or start addign new factions - all works fine
if i try to stick in some more A in case where some other factions have been added after A - the whole thing breaks

ok apparently if I kill qeynos guards themselves they stil give faction hits... but gnolls no longer do.. and i swear to god i did not touch the gnolls at all...

...back to experimenting...

rising the faction bugs issue again. This time tested and tried and 99% sure

Here is whats happening (wipign out all faction table for starters)

The problem exists in handling the "npc_faction_entries" table

Imagine that 2 other tables set up properly. Now lets go to "npc_faction_entries" and ptu soem entries.

Let say:
# -secuence of entry row number (this # of course does nto exist in Db but this ORDER in which faction values are entered)
1 Faction A relation to Faction B
2 Faction A relation to Faction C
3 Faction A relation to Faction D
4 Faction A relation to Faction E
5 Faction A relation to Faction F

run the server- all is fine, now lets add soem more

6 Faction B relation to Faction G
7 Faction B relation to Faction H
8 Faction B relation to Faction I
9 Faction B relation to Faction J
10 Faction B relation to Faction K


run the server- all is fine.

NOW - we sudnely realised we FORGOT to add one more hign to Faction A:

11 Faction A relation to Faction Z

STOP! now lest run the server..what do we see? relation B to G - NO LONGER WORKS!
How come?
I will tell you how come. The server SOMEHOW sorts and reads this faction tables on What is first Faction is (in this case A) - and SORT evtyhgin based on this A value FIRST. which means the list of enteries looks like this:
1,2,3,4,5, 11 , 7,8,9,10

WAIT! Where is 6? Youy rigth- 6 is out! Yeah its still in the DB, but when when server runs it reads entry 11 in its place! teh 6 entries effectvly skipped, and then server reads entry 7 and so on.

The more "forgotten" faction entries you add that woudl become "sorted in order" - the more screw up faction table become


I am 99% confident this is where my problems comign from.
I have wiped and remade my faction tables from teh SCRATCH 3 times now. Once I get to a certain poitn like : "wait I need to put large snakes on separate faction and make Qeynos Guards attack them" - and fine- Q Guards now attack the snakes - BUT then the GNOLLS who were rigth behind Qeynos Guards on entry list - stop giving factions hits


I sugest to take a DEEP look into how this table is read - there is a defebtly screw up somewhere in sorting or ordering or something like that

I wonder if this is related to how we index the AA tables?

well i don't how how anything was coded - but from where it seems to me - this is some sort of indexing problem i guess :confused:

Here's a link to the post I was thinking of:

Thoughts on Fixing the Prereq AA issue

I am bumping this again in hopes that our devs could closer look at that tricky indexing thing in faction lists.

Please read report of my step by step experiments above

thanks! :cool:

Does anyone know if this issue is still current?

In answer to the request that seems to have gone walkabout:

I am certainly seeing some oddness here.

The initial factions I added seem to all be working fine. But one later that are not giving any hits. Mobs on the same faction still seem to be assisting one another however.

Unfortunately, because my initial tests to make sure faction was working were passed, I have not been checking it after ever datebase change, so i have no idea when this error started occurring. Which is why I am looking if this (or anything else for that matter) is a known issue.

sometime ago some one mentioned that this bug MAY come from the fact that there was a LIMIT on how many
faction-to-faction interaction you have set up, and they stop working after like 5 or 6.

Perhaps this is why original PEQ DB uses sub-faction. For example qeynos guards in qeynos and qeynos guards in
west karana use different sub-faction assigned to them, while both sub-factions are tied to the same main faction
"Qeynos Guards".
This is approach makes setting multiple f-to-f combos very painful, but unfortunately necessary.

This was a while ago, so maybe this limit was lifted, but I don't know.

Ah, that would make sense. I will test accordingly.

Yeah, basically what I have done is take all the Qeynos Guards and remove the sub factions and give them all the same faction hits no matter what zone they are in. Which to be fair, is working fine - its ever faction after that in the list that seems broken.

well, on the plus side, if there is a limit it is unlikely to be as low as six. I have been looking through the PEQ database, an several factions have 9 npc_faction_enteries, while the Hamburglers have 15 and Gand_Truelink has 18. On the other hand, there never seem to be more than five or six interactions that actually give faction adjustments, so after I have finished rebuilding my faction tables I will try and see if that alters anything.