[quote="Admiral Ackguh"]Weapons with a firing pattern of Line can shot only in a horizontal or vertical direction, never at any other angle. This is probably a game feature not a bug; as it makes it harder for the game engine to calculate the line of fire, and hit every square in that line.[/quote]

As it turned out, the weapon (a laser cannon) was set to Icon: Line and Range: Stream, with an insane range tacked on. I dropped the range to something reasonable, and changed it to "Pinpoint", and it worked as intended.

Regarding a version control system, I had never previously given it thought but I can see where it would be quite handy.

[quote="ishtenos"]I usually keep 2-3 versions, and in this case it's starting to look like just one had gotten that map corruption, and I inadvertently overwrote a good copy with it. Oops.[/quote]

It may seem like overkill, but have you considered installing - if you don't already have it - a version control system like SVN, Git or Mercurial, and using it? You don't have to have a repository site, you can use the directory you're working out of, and the nice thing is, you can save an update as often as you want. Once you know you have one that works, if you mess up, you can back out back to a known-good version. And the nice thing about it is the system does the backups for you automatically. You just have to do a commit each time you do a recompile that works so you have that saved.

I've gotten to the point in writing interactive fiction that my games are getting so large and the chances of making a change that breaks a working game are now high enough that it's worth the small amount of trouble to use version control.

There are a number of packages I wanted to look at that you have to have a version control system to get the sources, so I basically have all four of them, CVS, GIT, Mercurial and SVN. Tortoise does clients for CVS, Mercurial (as Hg, the symbol for mercury) and SVN.

[quote="ishtenos"]It was corruption on the maps, and one of the ranged weapons had an odd behavior (would only shoot horizontal or vertical, never diagonal to hit a target)[/quote]

Weapons with a firing pattern of Line can shot only in a horizontal or vertical direction, never at any other angle. This is probably a game feature not a bug; as it makes it harder for the game engine to calculate the line of fire, and hit every square in that line.

It was corruption on the maps, and one of the ranged weapons had an odd behavior (would only shoot horizontal or vertical, never diagonal to hit a target). The latter I fixed by adjusting some of the weapon object properties, and luckily for me I found an older backup that was intact. I usually keep 2-3 versions, and in this case it's starting to look like just one had gotten that map corruption, and I inadvertently overwrote a good copy with it. Oops.

It didn't help that I was coming back to work on this from a long hiatus...

Was it save game corruption, or one of the editors (which one?)

I've had room-type maps get corrupted during long editing sessions if I do a lot of erasing. I think that is fixed now. The stacking makes more a much more complex data structure.

I always do frequent backups while working on a project... Though that's mostly because there's no undo or version control. :)

The download I got was using .70, and I replaced it with .74 shortly after.

I'm guessing just unlucky during a backup/restore then... wanted to make sure before proceeding again.

I thought ACK was bundled with 0.73 or at least 0.72. I'm using it on 64 bit Win7 with 0.73 and it seems to work fine.

Historically the issues with DosBox version seem to be UI related (sound, video, mouse) - I can't imagine DosBox being a reason for file corruption issues.

Has anyone given thought to running ACK with .74 instead of .70? On a 64 bit Win7 setup I was finding color palette issues if I went full screen. I attempted to run ACK with .74, and while those issues went away, my original project eventually developed some bad corruption and became unworkable (maps, etc - may not have had anything to do with .74, but the timing is suspect).