I’ve noticed this a few times just playing alone, but I never got around to posting about it here until I witnessed it occur twice in tournament play. There are times when Fish Tales displays a bonus count but does not add it to the player’s score. I assume this is a software bug, but @gdd hadn’t heard of it, so I thought I’d ask a larger group
A few things I noticed that may or may not be relevant: 4-player game, P1 was playing ball 2 and collected Hold Bonus from captive ball, attempted a save and earned a danger when draining. Drained with ~62M, a 6x bonus count totaling 5+M showed on the DMD but P1’s score remained at ~62M. Ball 3, P1 drains and what should be his held bonus (6x, ~5M again) shows in the bonus count but does not add and he ends the game with less than 70M. None of the other players caught him, thankfully, so it didn’t impact the results, but I’m curious if others have observed this and know the root cause.
@KCB had this happen to him at an old Pinburgh pin golf pre-tourney. He deliberately let the ball drain after checking his bonus, and missed the par score because of it. He was not a happy camper.
I had it happen as (I think?) player 2, and recently had it happen again at SPL under some circumstances that weren’t the same. Luckily I wasn’t bitten twice by it though
I’ve also seen this on two different Fish Tales locally. In one case, the game was pulled because it was giving bonus to some players and not to others. In both cases it was multi-player games. If anyone does know what may cause it and whether or not it happens in single player games, that would be good to know for the future use of the game. Or I can ask a friend who owns one to do some testing to see if single player games have the glitch.
Unfortunately, I’ve definitely had it happen in a one-player game. As a TD, I really don’t want to have to do mental math and close supervision every time it’s in a tournament, but it also feels very yucky to say “that’s just the game!”
I def wondered this aloud, since Matt had dangered and drained the first time it happened. It happened again on Ball 3 when I don’t think he had any dangers, though.
Yeah I definitely didn’t pick up a warning. I really did just let it go because uh…well it was my first trip to the PAPA HQ and I wanted to show off a bit
I wonder if there’s any particular thing that everyone accomplished? Like the feeding frenzy or something kind of rare, or if we just haven’t noticed that a lot of the time we aren’t receiving bonus on FT?
Monster Fish all day with a touch of video mode on ball 2. I’ve had it happen as player 1 in a 1 player game (Magfest) and as player 2 in A 2 player game - more investigation needs to be done for sure!
I think it’s still a fine game otherwise - I’d put it into the “use at your own risk” category. Mention to others that bonus may not award as a bug just to keep an even playing field, and then rule any bug instance as a known issue.
Does anyone have any more situations where this occurs? I’m looking at the code right now for this and the bonus collect is … weird. A couple other routines use this scoring routine as well (rock the boat bonus payout), I wonder if those are subject to the bug too? (That would narrow it down to the actual routine that adds the score vs. the routines that setup the score, but I know that’s really specific)
update, it’s caused by re-use of temp variables, when the display routine sleeps, it assumes (incorrectly) that the temp memory locations can’t change.
can this be expressed in practical gameplay terms? Are there explicit player actions that can cause or prevent temp memory locations from changing, or the display routine going to sleep? Or is this just going to be something that happens sometimes, more or less randomly?
That’s what we’re trying to figure out - right now I have a temp patch for testing that builds the bonus in parallel, since when it happens everyone says that the total bonus is reported correctly, it just doesn’t add it (because it’s getting hosed by the other routines that use the same memory). So the ‘real’ memory gets compared to the other location and if it doesn’t match it uses the alternate to add. Not perfect.
Would probably be better to just process it anew without the sleeps to add the score vs. just displaying it.
It might be Rock the Boat running, since that uses the same location - so if that thread doesn’t get killed in time when the ball drains, it will overwrite it.
The actual bonus routine also uses the upper nibble of it as a counter/scroll counter or something like that - I don’t know why they would have done that, there’s gobs of memory available in fish tales since they don’t use a full blown traditional wpc status area, it’s more like the earlier games that have a status area that gets copied up and down each ball, each player.
