New Seed for 0.5.1?

[Uzguz]

About a week or so ago, I decided to fire up 0.5.1 in Firefox for Ubuntu to test for the sticky keys bug reported in the bug thread. I didn't find that bug, but, after losing a couple of deadheads in the starting area for lack of docking (since I wasn't actually trying to play the game), I did notice something else of interest: the name of the starting station was not the same. I was in Moranport, apparently, and the nav reading was very different. Intrigued, I've been playing in it since; however, curiously, a new game later started in Windows landed me in the familiar sector centred on Haynesport, making me wonder what exactly caused the difference.

Highlights of the Moranport sector include:

• A factory very close to spawn selling Bravo Blursties for 100 credits a pop (I haven't bought any, but it sure was tempting)
  
• A Juliet-class merchant ship near one of the beacons packing Prismatics, Missiles, Plancks and Twin Boosters that blows itself up if it turns left after firing (Christmas come early?)
  
• This:
  
  "In the Navy..."
  
  (Please don't ban me)
  

Has anyone else found entrance to this sector? Can you, if you try now? If not, I can try to create a new save file in it and share that.
(Farbs: Do save files contain any information about the account that spawned them?)

[pieman]

yes i have been to this sector ... and its not too hard to get to if you know where youre at ... best method is to head from + 240 y at or around the -45x mark to get your last air stop in .. you will pass a field of G level ships but dodge or kill what you can untill you get to +186x +213 y . use your nav com there to direct yourself to the faget sector lol ..

[Uzguz]

Well by "sector" I meant the whole map, though granted, the term is used inconsistently.

I just started another dummy new game in Windows, this time in Chrome, and got the Haynesport sector again. Very strange.

[Ozzatron]

Here I was hoping to see a new sector I could play my beloved 0.5.1 in. I've completely conquered Haynesport's sector, unfortunately. Couldn't Farbs just add a new map like he did with the 0.5 Major and Minor sectors?

[Uzguz]

I now have a fresh Moranport sector save file ready to go, pending confirmation from Farbs that sharing it will a) work, and b) not pose a security risk. I'm sure it'll be just fine, but it can't hurt to check.

[Uzguz]

So I just gave that save file a test run in Firefox for Windows, and... it froze the game. After the loading bar disappeared, the SOS marker appeared in the top left, but with the letters [EMG], and that's as far as it got. No VMEDS startup sequence or anything.

I think I might know why. The Firefox I'm using in Windows is 32-bit; the Firefox bundled with my Ubuntu is 64-bit. That might also explain why the same hardcoded seed value produced two very different sectors.

I'll try installing 64-bit Firefox on Windows to see what happens.

Edit: Oh. There isn't an official Firefox 64-bit for Windows any more. Well that's annoying. Chrome, then?

#2: No 64-bit Chrome for Windows either? Goddamnit. Okay.

So apparently there's an unofficial 64-bit Firefox inventively named Waterfox. That might do it.

#3: Victory! Waterfox loads the Moranport save game just fine. It starts new games in the Moranport sector, too!

So apparently there are at least two compatibility issues between 32-bit and 64-bit: world generation is different (if only in how it interprets the original seed - I haven't seen anything in the Moranport sector to indicate it's actually broken), and save files don't translate across. How's that for a pair of headaches?

But for those of you who just wanted to play the Moranport sector and don't care for the technical details, grab a 64-bit browser and go wild. Or, if you're in the Moranport sector already, I suppose a 32-bit browser would take you to Haynesport instead. Everyone wins!

#4: Come to think of it, I wonder if this two-seeds-in-one business translates to older versions too?

[Ozzatron]

I only now just realized the magnitude of what has just transpired.

The Captain has been doubled!

For every 32-bit sector we have mapped there is a corresponding 64-bit sector. Twice as many places now to search for the Upgrade Juliet that I've sought after for so long.

[Farbs]

Oh no!

Thanks for sharing this. There was an interesting bug in one of the builds where I patched the game and accidentally changed the seed, so old save games loaded the old sector, and new ones loaded the new one. Hopefully that's what's happening here. Note that when you start a new ship you continue using the old save, since that keeps track of which stations have been rescued, the contents of banks and warehouses etc etc.

Sharing savegame data is totally fine by me, but I can't guarantee that you won't find encoding issues etc when transferring files between operating systems.

[Ozzatron]

Well I just tested it by getting rid of my old save file (not permanently, just renaming it) and I still spawned in Haynesport. So no, it's not one of those bugs.

[Farbs]

Thanks Ozzatron.

I'm also only seeing Haynesport on Firefox and Chrome, Windows 7 64bit.

I was thinking that Moranport was using the old seed value, not Haynesport. Uzguz, do you know whether you had ever run 0.5.1 on the Ubuntu machine before? Would you be able to remove your savegames to see whether that brings you to Haynesport?

It would also be v handy to see your moranport savegame, so I could check whether the seed value was in fact different.

Thanks!

[Uzguz]

It's not the architecture of the OS that makes the difference, but of the browser - and by extension, the Flash plugin that it uses. Currently, Firefox and Chrome are both strictly 32-bit on Windows.

However, since the two browsers that had produced the Moranport sector for me previously were both Firefox variants, I just tested it again in both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of IE9. Removing the save file and starting a game in IE9 32-bit landed me in Haynesport; removing the save file and starting a game in IE9 64-bit landed me in Moranport. Loading a save file in one variant of IE9 that was produced by the other variant resulted in this:


For reference, here are the save files they produced:
IE9 32-bit
IE9 64-bit

I can understand you wanting this issue to be about anything other than the Flash plugin's target CPU architecture, but unfortunately the evidence is clear.

[Farbs]

Haha, thanks. Also damn!

Ints in flash are all supposed to be 32 bit, and all the seeded RNG is implemented in simple integer arithmetic. I'll look into this a bit more tomorrow, but my guess is either:
a) The values are 32 bit but the arithmetic operations are performed in 64 bit, thereby changing overflow behaviour etc
b) The values are 64 bit despite assertions in the documentation to the contrary.

Woo!

Thanks again. This info has been very helpful.

[Ozzatron]

And regardless of which of those two it is, the issue can be traced back to Adobe being stupid.

But still. Double the Captain Jameson? I'm okay with this.

[Uzguz]

Yeah. It still needs to be fixed, of course, but as I haven't seen it actually break anything other than save cross-compatibility (Moranport's is a perfectly normal sector), I wouldn't call it urgent. So if it's a pain to fix - and I realise it probably will be - I don't think anyone will complain if you leave it until after 0.6

[Farbs]

This is a preeety late reply, but can you re-confirm this? I'm having trouble reproducing the bug with waterfox. Hopefully this means that Adobe have already fixed it under the hood.

[Uzguz]

Just tested on a recently-purchased Win8 64-bit laptop that had never played Captain Jameson before. Waterfox and IE10 with EPM both started Moranport games, and Waterfox failed to load Firefox's Haynesport save file.

[Farbs]

Thanks!

[Ozzatron]

I use Waterfox as my normal browser now, and I can confirm that I still load Moranport sectors fine and crash on Haynesport save files.

::edit:: Oh, and yeah, Firefox crashes on Moranport sectors and loads Haynesport sectors fine. I figured that would go without saying though.

[Captain Michaela Nul'dolaer]

Lol. This is pretty cool how a sector gives you one thing after another that's awesome. Trying this out...