Daikon Forge

I found some very interesting information on Keiki Lemieux’s blog this morning : Keiki posted some repro steps (discovered by Nock Forager) for consistently reproducing the "Inventory Item permanently disappears when detached" bug that I posted about before and which can be found in JIRA as issue VWR-6610. 

The really frustrating part is that, as I reviewed the posted reproduction steps, I realized that I too have been bitten by this bug literally dozens of times.  When I am working on a sword, I have to detach and re-attach it by necessity any time I edit certain scripts that contain physics calls like llMoveToTarget.  This is less of a problem in Havok 4, but the previous simulator code would not allow such calls to work until the object was re-attached after an edit, so I wouldn’t be able to test the changes until that was done.

So it turns out that my typical process of creating a ‘backup copy’ first, then dropping and re-wearing the sword is actually related to the same damned bug.  I’ve learned to identify the symptoms of this, which typically is demonstrated by the fact that when I attach the sword it does not show up as "worn" in the inventory window (which I leave open when working for the purposes of keeping various backup versions), in fact it doesn’t show up at all, which is not normal behavior. 

When I noticed this in the past, and knew from experience that the sword would be forever lost on the next detach, I would rename the sword (while it was still in my hand) to something like "lost fucking sword" or something else unique and crude so that when I filed a bug report and included the name, the guys at "The Lab" should be able to easily identify it’s orphaned record in the database.  Fat lot of good it seems to have done filing those bug reports, because nearly two years later the bug still exists and seems in fact to be much more prevalent.

So once again, if you’ve been bitten by this bug, I encourage you to go visit the JIRA listing and vote and leave your comments.