Guarding the Scientists in Dark Mode Crash with Shulga Dialog Thread - MISERY mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

I found a bug, not sure if anyone else has had the problem, though.

When playing in Dark Mode in Misery 2.1.1 and siding with Duty, I got a perpetual CTD after initiating dialog with Shulga to get Dutyers to replace the guards for the scientists at the bunker in Yanov. The crash would happen immediately after I clicked on the option saying "They're looking for people to replace their guards" or something like that, and hearing the sound effect indicating I had completed the quest to find the scientist's new guards. I'm guessing that is the time when the new guards actually spawn at the bunker.

I tried doing the trick that fixes the same kind of problem with talking to the military medic guy inside the Pripyat kindergarten basement fridge, by temporarily reducing the switch distance setting in alife.ltxt to 10, but that didn't help in this case. Although it does fix the problem for me when I get it at that location in the game.

However, I did find out that replacing the base files from the original Misery gamadata folder to temporarily disable Dark Mode fixed the problem, and I didn't have to restart my game. It allowed me to get past the dialog with Shulga, save my game, then I was able to get my reward from Hermann after re-enabling Dark Mode without crashing. So the problem is definitely caused by something in the Dark Mode files.

I'm not sure why anything in Dark Mode would cause this problem, especially since I was doing the quest at night. But at least I found a workaround for it that didn't totally ruin my game. Has anyone else completed the game in Dark Mode without this kind of problem? I have no idea if the same problem happens when trying to use a different faction to replace the guards, I only tried it with Duty so far.

Anyway, for my own convenience in case I have this problem again, I made a patch that simply disables Dark Mode after you have already started a game in it by only replacing the files that Dark Mode changes with the matching versions of the original Misery files, so I don't have to re-copy the entire gamedata folder from the original Misery installer archive to turn it off. And since the installer already comes with a patch to enable Dark Mode, it makes it a lot easier to switch it on and off when needed when you also have a patch to disable it because of bugs like this that are associated specifically with Dark Mode. Here is the link in case anyone else might find it useful: Disable Dark Mode in Misery 2.1.1

Edited by: dangalong

AFAIK there are no differences other than the amount of radiation during daylight that could possibly cause a problem. Did you kill the mercs on top of the bunker before they attack you in the Jupiter plant? This does cause CTD's during dialogues later on. Also, just to verify you are not using quick and auto saves?

Actually Dark Mode does effect NPC behavior to some extent, and you can see that modified versions of behavior scripts are included in the Dark Mode patch that comes in the Misery installer archive.

No, I never killed the mercs before I picked up the admin docs at the Jupiter Plant, I waited for them to spawn on me there and I killed them all at that time.

I tried loading from both a hard save and a quick save when I was trying to work around the problem.

In the end all it took was disabling Dark Mode to stop the crash.

Did you start a game in one mode and later change modes and resume that save? If so, you can't do that.

I'm in the same situation... It is only for Duty guards. The Freedom guards work.

Send last part of log. Few lines before error happened to the end of log. Only with that info is possible to intercept and prevent CTD.

It has nothing with dark mode, quests are the same as in normal mode, except background radiation on daylight. Issue is something elsewhere.

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