Hello, just encountered the spell bug in Bane where your mass effect spells stop working. Have to revert to an two hours old save. *sigh*

Well, has anyone found out yet when and how exactly they stop working? I have searched the board and found two theories, one that it happens sometimes at levelup and the other one is that has something to do with the first group of monsters in a battle.

Anyone did more research? Which one of the theories is right, if any? Has anyone found a way (perhaps using the Forge Editor) to find out what is messed up in the savegame and how to fix it?

• RE: The Spell Bug...again,Ammar (Guest), 01:03 PM, May-22-06
  • RE: The Spell Bug...again,Ammar (Guest), 01:54 AM, May-23-06
    • RE: The Spell Bug...again,dkby (Guest), 07:36 PM, May-25-06
    • RE: The Spell Bug...again,XenXheng, 01:27 PM, Jun-21-06
  • RE: The Spell Bug...again,magic_screen (Guest), 08:52 PM, Sep-13-06
    • RE: The Spell Bug...again,Scary, 08:24 AM, Sep-14-06
      • Scenario.hdr,Scary, 08:54 PM, Sep-14-06
      • RE: The Spell Bug...again,mad god, 09:53 PM, Sep-14-06

So, did some testing myself.

First, once it happens it seems to be final...
Second, it can happen without using the spell or at the first time you use it. Once, it was not effective at all.
Third, no relation to level up. Did two series of tests in one I switched class with one of my characters. After about 5 combats the spells ceased working. However, almost the same result (6 combats) occured without switching class and without a single level up during the time. Will do more tests to try to observe any relation to first group of monsters - none so far.

So this is definetely my final update. The bug seems to come at random. I have found no way to avoid it. Even when doing nothing at all with five characters and having the last one cast nothing but Nucl. Blast will result in the bug.

Unfortunately it is not enough to reload the first time the spell become ineffective. At that point it is already in your memory and if you saved before the battle it remains ineffective. The frequency in which the bug occurs (at most after 5 or so battles) makes it very hard to just backup and reload everything it comes. So unfortunately I have to recommend not using them at all.

An interesting note is that I tried all Dos Versions of Bane I could get my hand on and the bug happened in all. Of course, I used a (still ok) savegame from the first version.

However, I remember completing Bane twice on other PCs without getting this problem. So at this moment I have no idea what causes this at all.

Sorry cant give any help about that because i never encountered this bug. Kinda weird :/

Oh, that's a bug? I thought strike all spells in Bane just sucked, 'cause I never got a single one of them to work in the five or ten times I've played it from castle to temple.

Food for thought, huh...?

Chris

The Nuclear Blast spell did not work.
Then I have made a class change (Bard->Mage) and the Nuclear Blast spell is working again
So the bug is not final.

I also had some recent experience with this. In one savegame, with advanced characters (waiting to battle the samurai), nuclear blast was not working - CONSISTENTLY not working (ever), after multiple tries and re-loads. This was even though I had purposefully NEVER used any affect-all spells previously in that game. (I was testing a theory that the game gave you a certain number of "freebies" before it shut these spells down.)

I started a new game, low level characters, and my next several hours of game time (spread over several days) were exclusively with those characters. Then, I went back and reloaded that Samurai save: low and behold, Nuclear Blast worked; and it worked repeatedly, in several reloads.

This leads me to believe that whatever triggers this bug is NOT found in the savegame file but one of the other files that gets regularly updated. And furthermore, it can be re-set.

Now that I am home, I can check on my own computer to see which other file it is that gets updated from time to time, in addition to the savegame file: it's scenario.hdr, a small 1-k file. Looking at it with UGE, I'm guessing the principal purpose of this file is just to store the current savegame setting. (I.e., when you go to load a game, this is where the software looks to decide which game to load.) It seems unlikely this would be the source to which the game looks for the spell bug, but maybe some focussed testing is in order.

Have you tried to restart the game in the first place?
Maybe they have some problems with random number generator???