Alden Bates' Weblog

I've found an odd and annoying bug in the UT 2004 level Junkyard Escape. The level is a parody of a British show in which people built stuff out of junk they find in a junkyard. The attacking team has to fix their vehicle and escape from the junkyard while the defending team has to stop them.

The first objective is to retrieve the "power core" shown at right and return it to the vehicle in order to fix it. What I've found is that if the person carrying the power core doesn't make it back to the vehicle, the bots lose track of what they're supposed to be doing and just head for a random position and stand there.

In Example Shot 1, the attacking team has started congregating at a point just a couple of metres from the power core they're supposed to be picking up. In Example Shot 2, the attacking team has decided to regroup in front of the checkpoint, which is no where near the power core. In Example Shot 3, they're bunched up in front of the building housing the vehicle... those clouds of smoke in the latter two shots are from sniper rifles.

The sequence of events are as follows:

1. Someone picks up the power core. The announcer feels the need to mention this three times.
2. The person carrying the core dies on the way back to the vehicle. You will notice in this shot that there are now two power cores - one which has been dropped and one which is still strapped to the bot's back. At this point, if there isn't a human on the team, the attacking bots can get no further...
3. Sometimes if you're lucky, someone grabs the real power core and continues on to the vehicle.
4. or sometimes the original person makes it back to the vehicle, but the game forgets to take the power core off them.

I dunno if that's a bug they introduced in a patch or what, because I don't remember this happening before...

Also another odd bug: when playing back a demo (it doesn't do it while playing the actual game), my character isn't wearing the power core on his back and appears to be wearing it like armour(!)

Edit: There's a line in the readme for the last patch which I'm now wondering if it's related:
- Fixed (for assault) the energy core always showing on the HUD even if it not the current objective (thanks AngelMapper)

I couldn't find anywhere on Atari's site to report the bug though...

Edit: This is, in fact, fixed in the 3369 patch. Yay!