Primary Bug Report [1.0.12] Reproducible resource issue with Virtuals not counting

[spacefiddle]

Hey bughunters and tester folks, I think I have finally gotten some consistent behaviour to come out of all the resource weirdness. Check this out:

TL;DR The resource system is not currently seeing any of the Building Mats components as being in the Building Mats category - it looks like a category can "break" and come up as zero to the 4-Category view, despite components being present in Virtual.



The plots depowering, caravan links going down, etc. are all innocent bystanders of this effect. The main thing that seems to be going on is that Building Materials, at least in "4 Categories" mode, keep zeroing out: I don't think this is just a display bug. The weird HUD glitch that keeps showing me the breakdown randomly without my hitting any buttons may have been a help here.

I went to each and every settlement I have, and consoled in a ton of mats, across all 4 categories - and donated them directly to the settlements (after building more storage). And each time I did so, the next time the workshops updated, it shows Building Materials as zero - despite the actual virtual resources being seen by the system in the breakdown. And in every case, on workshop update, plots that use this category for operating costs were all shut down, at each and every settlement. (And those shutdowns are what leads to all the other symptoms.) Something is causing the update to think no Building Mats are available from Virtual. (I also left a ton of everything in every "normal" workbench, tho I have been told that the system can't pull from that unless you are present. Either way, it definitely is not using the local workbench as a fallback if the Virtuals come up empty.)

I am able to reproduce this behaviour on every game day. Fill the City Planner's desk with donations, wait for it to be processed, see the totals all fill, wait a bit longer, leave the area - and on next workshop update, the whole place goes offline again and the standard 4-Category display shows zero for building mats. Even tho some other part of the system obviously sees the individual components. (so maybe it doesn't see them in the Building Mats category?)

In every case I am able to pay all costs manually, boot everything in the head, and get it going again - until the next update.

The second thing that's happening is the weird negative spiral I see happening, in this case with Organics - Cloth and Ceramic are showing negative totals, which are subtracting from the overall category total. It's like, even tho it's supposed to be using categories, and presumably anything from that category will do - it keeps trying to hit the same resources that it's already out of, and just decrementing it further down the hole.

But I think that's secondary to the main issue, which is the system not seeing any of the Building Mats components as being in the Building Mats category.

All that said, can someone familiar with what's actually going on under the hood sanity check this idea for me? Now that I know much of the Papyrus logging is spurious, @msalaba @yaugieLC an expert's eyeball on this theory would be appreciated. But I think i'm on to something :D

 

[murarst]

Hi. Awesome. I'm very curious what this is going to surface.
Just for good measure: @Cyberslas

 

[msalaba]

an expert's eyeball

In no way would I consider myself an expert. :P You probably have more of a grasp on the game systems and Papyrus than I do... All I can say for sure is the issue is most likely in the ResourceManager Quest and attached script. The code is very complex and I only have a vague idea of how some Functions work.

That said, I can trace the code through the daily update and see if I can make sense of it.

I haven't played on "categories" since around v1.0.0a. Its strange that only building materials seem to be affected.

 

[spacefiddle]

Its strange that only building materials seem to be affected.

I think it's just that Building Materials happen to be what's affected this time, right now... (what do you play on, full components?). Like just now at errr i think Taffington, Organics started showing the same thing - the main view showed I had zero resources in the Organics category, but if I let it glitch to the full view, I can see i have plenty of organic components in Virtual storage (and I know i do anyway 'coz i just donated a crapton lol).

I think it's not Building Mats per se that has an error, but some function or process is returning zero (or an invalid result, causing it to become NONE) instead of the correct value, which then blanks out whatever it was acting on at the time. Possibly some of that logspam i was seeing about failing to find resource categories, and all the invalid returns getting set to NONE, might have some relevance after all.

Maybe.

(The negative resources are starting to edge closer to Crazy Town as well.... the Network reports a global total of -6600 steel and -5000 or so wood.... -1800 cloth.... i don't understand what's gobbling them up, every time i console more mats in to the problem areas it just goes into a black hole...)

-- edited main post to be more accurate in that this instance of weirdness is building mats but building mats may not be the source of the issue

 

[1000101]

This looks like the same issue that I reported here but nobody at the time could come up with any viable theories as the cause.