Shunting unload jobs spawning with more drop offs than cars. Game is prevented from saving after this happens

[ben-vanderlinde]

Hi, thanks for a great mod I enjoy it.

I've noticed the following issue :

Sometimes shunting unload jobs spawn with more drop offs than cars.

In my case a single car was assigned to a job with three drop offs. Once the job spawns the game can no longer be saved. When saving the console shows the error : Saving Manual failed: "Couldn't extract carGuidsPerDestinationTrack"

If I accept the job, I cannot complete it, but if I bin the job after accepting it immediately I am able to save again.

After leaving MF with another job, the troublesome job spawns again, and prevents saving. This time I cannot accept the job. The job machine makes the job denied sound (fees have been cleared), but no reason is printed. The save game issue is then resolved by clearing all the cars attached to this job.

The exception & stack trace I found in the player.log is: Exception: Couldn't extract carGuidsPerDestinationTrack at StaticShuntingUnloadJobDefinition.GetJobDefinitionSaveData () [0x0012e] in <4dd6bf05cc8c4e4288a4683024f156b0>:0 at JobChainController.GetJobChainSaveData () [0x00059] in <4dd6bf05cc8c4e4288a4683024f156b0>:0 at JobSaveManager.GetJobsSaveGameData () [0x00028] in <4dd6bf05cc8c4e4288a4683024f156b0>:0 at SaveGameManager.UpdateInternalData () [0x001bb] in <4dd6bf05cc8c4e4288a4683024f156b0>:0 at (wrapper dynamic-method) SaveGameManager.SaveGameManager.Save_Patch1(SaveGameManager,DV.Common.SaveType,DV.Common.ISaveGame) at DV.UI.UserProfileProvider.SaveGame (DV.Common.SaveType type) [0x00005] in <4dd6bf05cc8c4e4288a4683024f156b0>:0 UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:Internal_LogException(Exception, Object) UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:LogException(Exception, Object) UnityEngine.Logger:LogException(Exception, Object) UnityEngine.Debug:LogException(Exception) DV.UI.UserProfileProvider:SaveGame(SaveType) DV.UI.SaveLoadController:OnSaveClicked() UnityEngine.Events.InvokableCall:Invoke() UnityEngine.Events.UnityEvent:Invoke() UnityEngine.UI.Button:Press() UnityEngine.UI.Button:OnPointerClick(PointerEventData) DV.UIFramework.ButtonDV:OnPointerClick(PointerEventData) UnityEngine.EventSystems.ExecuteEvents:Execute(IPointerClickHandler, BaseEventData) UnityEngine.EventSystems.ExecuteEvents:Execute(GameObject, BaseEventData, EventFunction`1) UnityEngine.EventSystems.StandaloneInputModule:ReleaseMouse(PointerEventData, GameObject) UnityEngine.EventSystems.StandaloneInputModule:ProcessMousePress(MouseButtonEventData) UnityEngine.EventSystems.StandaloneInputModule:ProcessMouseEvent(Int32) UnityEngine.EventSystems.StandaloneInputModule:ProcessMouseEvent() UnityEngine.EventSystems.StandaloneInputModule:Process() UnityEngine.EventSystems.EventSystem:Update()

Attached is the full log: Player.zip

[Banjobeni]

Hi, many thanks for the bug report. I will look into it, but I need some more information:

• can you give me a savegame in the earlier state you mentioned? When you could not save but abandon the job
• was this a new car or was it reused after another job completed?

[ben-vanderlinde]

Hi,

Unfortunately I cannot quite give you a save that has the job spawned, because I found as soon as a faulty job spawned somewhere in the game, it then cannot save. I have attached a save of the game just prior to the issue job spawning.

00021_2023-09-05_10_49_34.zip

The car that the job spawned with was CFF982, and is parked in C1L Machine Factory & Town. I think the reason why I could not accept the job after it spawned the second time is because the car is parked in the loading track (which I have since learned is possibly a deliberate feature?).

It is a re-used car from a Freight Haul Job from Steel Mill to Machine factory and town.

Perhaps some additional detail that may help you reproduce the issue :

1. after completing the freight haul job from SM I remained in the MF, and completed some other shunting load jobs.
2. after completing some shunting load jobs, a shunt unload job spawned for the cars I had delivered, but only for half the consist.
3. I picked up and completed the job for the shunt unload job (for half the consist). (I think 5/10 of the original cars).
4. This is when the trouble job spawned, it spawned using 1 out of the remaining 5 cars from the split consist.

Some other behaviour I noted that may be relevant. When completing a job, the new jobs that spawn on the re-used cars seem to behave differently depending on if you stay in or close to the same town, or head to another town and come back.

• If you head to another town and come back, the jobs that are spawned tend to target the entire consist.
• If you spend some time in the town taking some other shunting work, the jobs tend to split the consists up into smaller jobs of maybe only 1 or two cars.

I wonder if it's the splitting of the consists behaviour that maybe leading to the spawning of shunting unload jobs with more parts than cars.

Please let me know if there's any more info I can provide.

[Banjobeni]

Thank you for the detailed explanation. The save will do, I will look into it.

Regarding some points that you mention, for clarification:

• For shunt jobs, the cars must not be on the warehouse (L) track already. That is a deliberate feature of the mod. I opened #5 in order to help make that more obvious
• When new jobs spawn for cars after completing another job, we need to distinguish:
  • (a) regular job chains SL-FH-SU: Those are (should be, see #2) generated immediately after turning the current job in. This should behave more or less like vanilla
  • reuse of cars after SU, LH oder any other way of bringing cars in making them jobless: This is what I call the cars reuse algorithm, and it currently runs on two occasions:
    • (b) Leaving the station. Each minute or so, the mod checks for jobless cars in all stations excpt where the player currently is, and tries to come up with jobs for those cars
    • (c) taking fast travel to anywhere else: This will immediately trigger jobs generation for all (i think) jobless cars

For (a), it should never be the case that less cars are used for the subsequent part, i.e. the total number of cars for SL, subsequent FH, subsequent SU should always be the same.

For (b) and (c), there should be no difference in behaviour regarding splitting of a consist.

While you are inside a station and not fast traveling, aside from normal job chain job generation (a), jobless cars should never be reallocated to new jobs. If you see that happen, I need to look into it.

[Banjobeni]

So it seems the shunting unload generator never really paid attention to the number of cars possibly being smaller than the targetted number of tracks. I'm just clamping the max. number of tracks to the number of cars now. I split up the consist in MF-C1L into 4 pieces, one waggon each, and this is the result after new jobs are generated.

I guess that fixes it, and the fix will be in the next release.