The Great Galaxy-Mod Bug Hunt 2020
Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2020 21:45
Just to get this out of the way first: When I refer to Galaxy-Mods, I'm talking about all the mods for Keen 4-6 as well as Keen Dreams, not just for the two games that were actually part of the "Goodbye, Galaxy!" series.
As some of you might already know, I started digging deep into the realm of Galaxy-Mods this year. My initial motivation being the seemingly random crashes that some of you might have run into while playing some of the Galaxy-Mods.
Some of the bugfixes I came up with address general issues that already existed in the original Keen games, the mods merely inherited these bugs from the games they were based on. Other bugfixes address issues that were introduced by the mod's patches, like miscalculated jump addresses and other errors that resulted in memory corruption when the patched code was executed. In some cases, some of the files were incomplete (mostly EGAHEAD files), indicating that the tools used to edit the EGAGRAPH files weren't working corretly. And in one case (MAPHEAD data in the "official" release of Keen Meets the Meats) the data was outdated, preventing the game from loading most of the levels at all.
My initial goal was to fix the parts of each mod's patch file that needed to fixed, but I ended up doing a little more than just that. For some mods, I also edited some of the levels to make sure that there are no holes in the walls that Keen could climb into and either get stuck in the wall or glitch out and get pushed through solid walls.
But I have to admit, I haven't actually played through half of these mods, so there might be things that I've missed. This is where all of you can help. Here are the current versions of all the mods that I've "fixed" so far:
Keys of Krodacia
Dead in the Desert
Battle of the Brains
Keen Dreams Plus
The Eight Accumulators (Update: 2021-01-22)
Suburb Shenanigans (Update: 2020-11-25)
Operation Ocflore (Update: 2020-11-25)
The Terror From Outer Space
Marooned on Mars - Galaxy Version
XMAS 2010
Keen Meets the Meats
Dead in the Desert - Community Mappack
Aliens Ate My Babysitter Again
Bounty Hunting Brouhaha
Hello, Galaxy!
Mink's Puzzle Pack
Short Circuit Oracle
The Sunnylands
Mirror Menace (Update: 2020-12-30)
Underworld Ultimate (Update: 2021-01-06)
Please playtest them and if you find any bugs, please post them in this thread. If it's something I can fix (without having to redesign the entire game), then I'll fix it and update the download links.
Please note that you should not try to load saved games that were saved in older versions of these mods. That's because the old saved games might already have some corrupted data in them (if there were bugs in the old patches that caused memory corruption). And in some cases, I had to move some of the data structures around to avoid errors. Old saved games might look for these data structures at the old position and therefore will not work with the new patches in place. So please don't use old savegames.
Appendix:
Since I'm probably not going to release an update for every mod ever made (for various reasons), I figured I should probably share the results of my investigation and let you know which mods are fine and which ones have issues in the patch scripts. Just to be clear, I'm always referring to the most recent version on the KeenWiki (as of August 2020).
The following mods have (sometimes severe) issues, but I probably won't create any updates for them:
- The Prisoner's Dilemma
- Galaxy Defender
- The Temple of Cydonia
- Adventures in the BWB Megarocket
- Cyber Zero's Episode -3
- Zero X
- BWB Megarocket Keen 5
- The Grand Intelligence Gold
- Intelligent Intellect
- Another Helping of Veggies
- Keen 4 "Ultimate Edition"
- Space Evaders
- Kube
- Pakeen
- Kreeg Crisis
- Keen Dreams Modette
The following mods also have severe issues, but should get an (unofficial) update at some point:
- Keen's Valentine Bash
- Skater Squirrel
- Zoltan's Revenge
Mods that don't seem to have any patching bugs:
- Keen 5.5
- The Armageddon App
- Torgopolis
- Birdman
- Gridlock's abandoned mods (Keen 1 redone, Lava)
- Commander Keen x BioMenace
- Pyramid of the Allowed
- any mod or level pack that only patches in the new audiohed/egahead/maphead data (obviously)
Edits:
2020-11-25: added Operation Ocflore and updated Suburb Shenanigans.
2020-12-30: added Mirror Menace and Underworld Ultimate.
2021-01-06: updated Underworld Ultimate.
2021-01-10: added the Appendix section
2021-01-24: added update note for The Eight Accumulators
As some of you might already know, I started digging deep into the realm of Galaxy-Mods this year. My initial motivation being the seemingly random crashes that some of you might have run into while playing some of the Galaxy-Mods.
Some of the bugfixes I came up with address general issues that already existed in the original Keen games, the mods merely inherited these bugs from the games they were based on. Other bugfixes address issues that were introduced by the mod's patches, like miscalculated jump addresses and other errors that resulted in memory corruption when the patched code was executed. In some cases, some of the files were incomplete (mostly EGAHEAD files), indicating that the tools used to edit the EGAGRAPH files weren't working corretly. And in one case (MAPHEAD data in the "official" release of Keen Meets the Meats) the data was outdated, preventing the game from loading most of the levels at all.
My initial goal was to fix the parts of each mod's patch file that needed to fixed, but I ended up doing a little more than just that. For some mods, I also edited some of the levels to make sure that there are no holes in the walls that Keen could climb into and either get stuck in the wall or glitch out and get pushed through solid walls.
But I have to admit, I haven't actually played through half of these mods, so there might be things that I've missed. This is where all of you can help. Here are the current versions of all the mods that I've "fixed" so far:
Keys of Krodacia
Dead in the Desert
Battle of the Brains
Keen Dreams Plus
The Eight Accumulators (Update: 2021-01-22)
Suburb Shenanigans (Update: 2020-11-25)
Operation Ocflore (Update: 2020-11-25)
The Terror From Outer Space
Marooned on Mars - Galaxy Version
XMAS 2010
Keen Meets the Meats
Dead in the Desert - Community Mappack
Aliens Ate My Babysitter Again
Bounty Hunting Brouhaha
Hello, Galaxy!
Mink's Puzzle Pack
Short Circuit Oracle
The Sunnylands
Mirror Menace (Update: 2020-12-30)
Underworld Ultimate (Update: 2021-01-06)
Please playtest them and if you find any bugs, please post them in this thread. If it's something I can fix (without having to redesign the entire game), then I'll fix it and update the download links.
Please note that you should not try to load saved games that were saved in older versions of these mods. That's because the old saved games might already have some corrupted data in them (if there were bugs in the old patches that caused memory corruption). And in some cases, I had to move some of the data structures around to avoid errors. Old saved games might look for these data structures at the old position and therefore will not work with the new patches in place. So please don't use old savegames.
Appendix:
Since I'm probably not going to release an update for every mod ever made (for various reasons), I figured I should probably share the results of my investigation and let you know which mods are fine and which ones have issues in the patch scripts. Just to be clear, I'm always referring to the most recent version on the KeenWiki (as of August 2020).
The following mods have (sometimes severe) issues, but I probably won't create any updates for them:
- The Prisoner's Dilemma
- Galaxy Defender
- The Temple of Cydonia
- Adventures in the BWB Megarocket
- Cyber Zero's Episode -3
- Zero X
- BWB Megarocket Keen 5
- The Grand Intelligence Gold
- Intelligent Intellect
- Another Helping of Veggies
- Keen 4 "Ultimate Edition"
- Space Evaders
- Kube
- Pakeen
- Kreeg Crisis
- Keen Dreams Modette
The following mods also have severe issues, but should get an (unofficial) update at some point:
- Keen's Valentine Bash
- Skater Squirrel
- Zoltan's Revenge
Mods that don't seem to have any patching bugs:
- Keen 5.5
- The Armageddon App
- Torgopolis
- Birdman
- Gridlock's abandoned mods (Keen 1 redone, Lava)
- Commander Keen x BioMenace
- Pyramid of the Allowed
- any mod or level pack that only patches in the new audiohed/egahead/maphead data (obviously)
Edits:
2020-11-25: added Operation Ocflore and updated Suburb Shenanigans.
2020-12-30: added Mirror Menace and Underworld Ultimate.
2021-01-06: updated Underworld Ultimate.
2021-01-10: added the Appendix section
2021-01-24: added update note for The Eight Accumulators