Negative Game Time

[DrakeTheDragon]

Erm, quick question, if anybody has an idea... but what by The Nine could cause your GameHour global to become stuck at "-1.#IND"?

 

It happened after fast-traveling a longer distance, whereas previously my game would just have crashed at one point on the middle of the track.

But now I arrived at Dive Rock, it's completely pitch black, no light at all to be seen, thus the screen is only black, and the GameHour variable is stuck at this value.

Neither sleeping nor waiting nor stumbling around in darkness or another fast-travel even makes it advance a single second.

 

The human-readable game time that can be seen when looking at the map also doesn't look much better. There's a long tail of numbers behind the minutes.

 

I must say that's perhaps the most intriguing problem I ever faced so far. And looking back on 10+ years of modding this game, I think this means something. :teehee:

[montky]

hi there;

I likewise game it up with Oblivion (Fallout and TES are sister universes in a lot of ways.)

I've had a few issues with Oblivion's Time-keeping back in the day, and in recent replays.

 

there are two possibilities theories I'd conjecture for avenues to explore;

 

 

I tried to make a spell called "Omega 13" back in the day, based on the humorous device from GalaxyQuest,

to enable me to undo a mistake in combat or the questline, as like a "quicksave gamestate restore/pivot" mod...

needless to say, operator-error led to a similar time-lock stopped clock error hehe.

 

1 - ArchaicWare/Depricated obsolete issue.

Some games used .dlls or other old fileformats, which no longer function properly on some OS's or even hardware combo etc.

they must be run on emulated environs or else parsed-ported via interoperable framework to function at all.

 

2. it appears to be a hexadec error code,

which if memory serves, Alliance/AllianceWare had some error code charts.

I think its a hexadec overflow error.

PoorlyAged, RedRocketTV, Shavkacagarikia etc have tutes on that.

 

Essentially, the game was not intended to be played for more than 40 hours,

let alone 10 years.

so, the gametime variable must have had a hyperdefinition/bloat issue metapredicate,

with everything that called it on the trip causing an overflow to trip.

rather than hard crash, it 'paused time'/'stopped the clock'.

floatingpoint and infinitesimal crud is rather annoying as it leads to cumulative errors per gameplay calc moment,

that's why the overflow catchbacks are stringent.

 

----

you've gotta remember,

we didnt have QDotler, E8mathematical structure/metallic simplexes,

and AGI-interoperable stuff for topological computing back then,

and, a lot of folks assumed the userbase would play a game for ~40hours and that'd be it. done, on to the next game.

 

it is odd that the game's time wasn't pre-batched or modulo'd

modulus timescales might've avoided some of these kinda "Clock-hangups".

 

Oblivion wasn't designed like a UniverseSim RealTimeStrategy to be time-reversible/time-traversed though.

 

 

 

anywho,

are you still modding awesome stuff for ye-olde oblivion?

if so, cool!

a dunmer orrery or two would be awesome

[lubronbrons]

heh

interesting I never thought that behind script that handle GameHour var can be stuck like that

maybe there is something in your load order that modify GameHour into minus value??

who knows

since flipping that var is very easy, modder is human, we tend to make errors everywhere

but is this happen on vanilla quest ?

if this thing is vanilla thingy, it need to be reported to UOP I think....

 

based on my research no matter how big that GameHour var is, they always get modulation 25 for next day count calculation

so if you force it in console with this command --> set gamehour to 50

the game will count is as instant two day passing

I could say that the game will keep GameHour var value between 0 - 24.999...#

but minus number ? stuck? lol

Edited June 12, 2018 by lubronbrons

[QQuix]

According to the Wiki and this StackOverflow reply, "-1.#IND" means 'indeterminate' / 'NaN - Not a Number' and is used when a math operation returns a value that is not a real-number (like a square root of a negative number).

 

Which leads to the conclusion that either the vanilla fast travel or some mod has a bug with that scenario.

 

I suppose a console command "Set Gamehour to 1" should return the game to normal.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, I must admit my game isn't exactly in a good shape right now anyways.

 

Prior to this I always CTD'ed immediately when I crossed this point in time, be it via waiting, sleeping, fast traveling, or raising timescale and watching the weather cycle by, so I'd say it's safe to assume it would've also crashed by me just standing around until this point in time got crossed.

 

My game's currently heavily over-modded, 400-500 plugins (of course many merged/imported into the Bashed Patch, so the hard limit isn't reached) and all inactive ones also "ghosted", or else the overall data files limit would also be crossed. I installed first Bevilex' mod list, then Angkor's unfinished one on top, and let's not forget some mods of my own choice and/or doing are in there as well. So I wasn't the least surprised both my performance and my stability were down to an all-time low.

 

I was going to de-mod it again, actually, just started with getting the core features up-to-date, which is when I installed the latest version of Oblivion Reloaded, v6.5, if I'm not mistaken. And it was on a test-run shortly thereafter when this oddity happened. Good news is, it doesn't CTD anymore when I cross this point in time, bad news is, whatever "caused" it still isn't fixed. I take it the game time going into NaN was what caused the CTD previously, as it would only make perfect sense to assume that. It's still happening at exactly the same point in game time, just not CTD'ing anymore. Yay!...

 

Of course my own scripts aren't really going lightly with the game engine right now either. Heavy ab-use of Blockhead beta functions and stuff, animation changes on button presses, race-eye-hair-shifts on a whim back and forth, all the funny stuff that easily makes your game go *poof*, and there's aplenty of it.

 

And let's not forget I'm on old Windows 8.1, running in a Virtual Machine, not even Oblivion Reloaded can detect the simulated graphics card correctly, so I end up without a depth buffer and most, if not all, shader effects inoperable as a result. Then there's also ENBoost wrapped around it all, and quite some OBSE plugins, of which at least one was never designed to be used in Oblivion but written for Fallout New Vegas instead. Don't ask me why it's so advertised to be the best of its kind for use in Oblivion, too. ...Well... pick your poison. Lots of available options for what can make my game break.

 

It's like, I studied all the Best Practices, how to correctly mod your game, preached it myself for like 10+ years on at least a daily basis, and then... I went ahead and ignored it all and did just the opposite of it in my own game. o_O

 

 

So, let this be a lesson, people. Listen to what I "say", but don't do what I "do"!

 

 

Well, I'll see what to do with my current savegame, or if I can even salvage it still. It's not like I didn't make another save every second step anyways and never overwrote an existing one. But I already tried going back some saves before, only for the CTD to just become "prolonged", but not avoided, then.

The video on YouTube I did was on a savegame from months before the current, thus it's also way more stable and all. But I'd bet my monthly wages (if I was into betting that is) it will also definitely break at the same point in time, it'll just take longer to reach it.

 

But these are all throw-aways anyways. It's not like I seriously played the game anymore for like 5+ years? Just playing around, testing stuff, and modding, is all that's left now. ...I didn't even realize I initially COC'ed out of the tutorial dungeon to test some stuff, then never returned to the main quest again, only to several years later suddenly wonder why my skills aren't advancing at all! :sleep: Yeah, that's an expert feat, I tell ya'.

 

 

Anyways, thanks for all the help so far. Still wondering what exactly could've caused this... bug now. But I'll either get rid of it during the de-modding process I'm wanting to undergo for some months now, or still run into it when the list of candidates got significantly reduced. We'll see. If I "can" fix it with this console line though, I might also be able to continue using my main savegame. :happy:

[QQuix]

When you say it happens when you 'cross this point in time', i understand it means a certain time on a certain date.

 

For debugging, it may help (or not) to know the values of the other time global variables at that point (GameDay, GameMonth, GameYear and GameDaysPassed)