Gold Pieces Crashing SOM

[JC Bailey]

This is a bug that I noticed when testing Return to Melanat. Apparently, leaving too many gold pieces on the ground will eventually crash a Sword of Moonlight game, I believe the amount is around 100. Is there any way to fix this?

[Verdite]

Yep. This was the case. I just went around and picked up a good 500 "invisible" gold. I think the gold spawns beneath the small bumps on each grass tile, and I don't grab items if I don't see any drop.
Funny, I and some friends were just talking about Morrowind and Oblivion's loot overflow bags just the other day. They're the Elder Scrolls' answer to the same problem.

This happened before, and theres no fix other than to pick up all the gold in that area. I remember telling you when you first started ‎ 

[JC Bailey]

Oh yeah, I know. I was hoping someone else on here might know a fix. But I guess I can remove gold from the game, I was actually ending the game with far too much gold, so maybe this will balance things out.

[Verdite]

Its a good idea to have a gold 'item' found in chests or containers that give an event lump sum when you take it. That way you can gauge the amount of gold that a player recieves, and when.

So say if you want to place 3 stashes of gold per map, a fast way would be to have 3 items in the parameter listed Gold 1, Gold 2 and Gold 3.

In your map you would setup 3 'always on' events
Each with starting condition ‎  "have item = gold 1/2/3"
In leaf 00, you'd have
Change player parameter - amount of gold > increase by > (number)
Change player parameter - number of item = gold 1/2/3 set to 0
Display message - 'Obtained (number) gold'
Control active leaf > this event > move forward one leaf

[HwitVlf]

EDIT: Ha ha, Verdite beat me to it! I'll still post this, but it's pretty much the same as what Verdite says above ‎ 

As a workaround, you could set the auto-gold drop to 0 and make a normal "gold coin" item which the enemy drops when defeated. ‎  You then make an "always on" event that checks if the player has the 'gold coin' item. If they do, the event is triggered and removes the coin item and increases the players gold. If you set the gold coin item to 'non-crucial' the old drops should be culled out if they don't get picked up.

The event would look something like this
Event1 - Always On (Start condition: Have Item "Gold Coin" quantity > 0)
‎  ‎  Change Player Parameter (Item# "gold coin' decrease by 1)
‎  ‎  Set Player Parameter in Counter (Have Gold Amount in Counter#1)
‎  ‎  Generate Random Counter Value (Counter#2: Between 1 and 100)
‎  ‎  Change Counter's Value (Counter#1 Increase by Counter#2
‎  ‎  Change Player Parameter (Amount of Gold Set to Counter#1)
‎  ‎  Display Message "Gold Obtained"

[dmpdesign]

I would almost think this may be something that could be easily tracked down in code and fixed - if I am not mistaken SOM was not designed to crash but to make money disappear if not collected once you reach 100 pieces on the ground? ‎  Afterall there is an item drop setting for 'crucial' items (items that should take precedence from disappearing in this fashion) correct? ‎  I wonder if there is simply an error in a line of code on storing a value of 100 items in a map, like an inability to either store a value of 3 characters or some such.

Im no code guru, but I suspect there is someone out there that could fix this on runtime.

In general though, I dont foresee anyone being that lazy as to not pick up 100 items in a single map on a play through, unless of course they made the game and are trying to just rush through ;)

[HwitVlf]

SoM has to save the XYZ location of each gold drop model as well as the amount. If it's handled like everything else in the SoM, there are a certain number of 'slots' where gold drop info can be stored. They should have made it start back at the beginning and overwrite "slot1" when all the gold-drop slots get filled, but I expect someone overlooked it. ‎ 

[dmpdesign]

Wasn't some very intelligent individual able to increase the map set limit in the editor? ‎  Couldn't it be feasible to change the 100 slots to something much higher?