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#84 Randen house movement deadlock
Using 0.99.cvs.20070319, as distributed by Ubuntu
In the house in Randen of the woman who is worrying about her husband, you can get stuck if you have two characters and you go onto her left chair with Ajarath behind you just below the left segment of the table, and the woman below you and to the left of Ajarath. It creates a movement deadlock, no one can escape and the woman sprite stops moving. Game over! You are forced to quit, or restore from a Save. Apologies, I did not take a screenshot.
Confirmed that this bug is also present on kq-linuxbin-20080202 version,
downloaded from this Sourceforge repository. Took 2 screenshots showing the possible positions of Noslom. He can move N and S, but he can't move W because of the chair, he can't move E because of the table, and he cant move N then W because of the cupboard. There is no way to switch the Lead to Ajathar, which would solve the problem. Also, the old lady is not bypassing Ajathar by passing S of him - which is what should normally happen, right?
Deadlocked position (1)
Deadlocked position, only free space to move to
A similar deadlock can happen at the right side of the table. There, you can't even more to the north, because there's a bookcase blocking the way.
You _can_ switch the lead: press Enter to open the menu, then Left to switch to the character list, then Down to select the other character, and finally Alt to choose that as the lead character. However, this does not help at all, because it also switches the positions of the characters, so that the new lead character is stuck at the same place as the previous one.
I can think of these ways to fix the bug, in decreasing order of preference:
(a) If the follower is diagonally adjacent to the leader of the party, and there is no obstacle at that exact position, then let the leader walk to the follower, even if the path seems blocked.
(b) Change the movement algorithm of the lady so that, if she can't get where she wants for several seconds, then she walks in some other direction. There may be other NPCs who would have to be changed too.
(c) Somehow detect that the leader is stuck, and make the arrow keys temporarily control the follower.
(d) Make it possible to topple the chairs in the room by pushing against them for a second or so. Then the lady might ask you to leave.
(e) Make it possible to push some NPCs out of the way. That would be rather rude though, especially in her own home.
(f) Change the leader-switching feature so that it does not swap the positions. However, when I got stuck in the house for the first time, I did not know it was even possible to switch leaders except in the mansion; and it seems spikerobinson did not know either. Other players getting stuck would thus probably not notice this feature and would end up loading a saved game. Also, the follower often gets left behind in twisty corridors and then runs through walls; so a check would have to be added to prevent switching if the follower is in a wall.