Bug with room separation algorithm? [BUG??}

[ellie1337]

Room/area separation appears to bug out with the pricier visitor tables sometimes:

(see attached image)

As you can see here in the red circled area, neither the remote door to the cell, nor the visitor table next to it, form an "area separator" that allows separate deployment options.

This also seems to confuse the pathing, guards do very weird stuff in this prison of mine. You should be able to reproduce the issue by just reconstructing the cell layout from the screenshot, somebody on reddit managed to do it like that as well on first try.

 

[ellie1337]

This is the right forum for bugs, right?

Edit: oops, seems like it isn't. Can I move this over somehow?

 

[jjwalker]

I've come across that several times with perimeter walls and fencing. The game runs a "checklist" at certain intervals, although I haven't been able to pinpoint at what interval exactly. What I do know is these intervals get spaced further apart the more complex the prison is in terms of AI being able to navigate it.

You'll also notice that when this "exception" happens, the job queue will stop and reset, and is visible as staff will stop moving and other odd behavior. It also makes a note in the Debug.txt when this happens as well. I haven't explored the problem much further than that.

Debug.txt usually outputs the line "Pathinding error blah blah resetting blah system" or "stale object in blah space".

 

[ellie1337]

Right, although when the queue gets fully stuck you can always place a canteen at the border and it will reschedule and fix itself most of the time (since canteens always make a zone boundary). However, in the screenshot case I used all these tricks and it still breaks so it's not just a scheduling problem. You can also try rebuilding the cell exactly as on the screenshot and it will likely break for you instantly, so there is no need to make a big prison to overwhelm the scheduling to get this to be confused...