Massive cover bug in 1.4?

[EsoxGreen]

I ran multiple times in the following bug:

A soldier goes into cover which shows a blue shield, yet his animation is as if he was standing in the open (straight up holding a gun). Naturally, he gets shot next turn. Usually reloading a save game fixes the issue. However, last time I reloaded the save game, the cover re-appeared on my soldier, but disappeared from an Advent trooper. Reloading multiple times did not fix the trooper's cover. I can provide a save.

This occurs with vanilla assets - lampposts, roof side covers, etc. I do have several popular map mods installed, but I checked their comments and nobody else reported the bug there. The bug appeared in 1.4.

Could somebody please look into it?

[I am posting in the general forum, because I think more people should be well-aware of this potentially game-breaking bug. But feel free to move it if necessary.]

[Steve-O]

The only people who NEED to be aware of a bug are the devs, really.
If I, as a fellow player, am not already aware of this bug for having run into it, then clearly it isn't a problem for me.

[tracktwo]

This sounds like one of the vanilla bugs with cover. There may not be much we can do about these, unfortunately, but I have been busy enough with the bugs we know to be LW2 bugs that we can fix that I haven't had time to look into more speculative stuff lately. Cover bugs are one thing that I would like to poke at once I get the time, though.

[EsoxGreen]

Thank you for quick response!

I am aware that vanilla had some bugs, but I don't think I ever encountered it before 1.4. I had about 300 hours with LW 2 1.1 and 1.2 and it was never an issue. I updated to 1.4 and this bug occurs almost every mission.

But given this information, I will let you guys take it from here.

[Antifringe]

It's an issue that goes all the way back to vanilla. You've just never noticed it before. I talk about the different categories of cover bugs in this thread a bit.

[LordYanaek]

This sounds like one of the vanilla bugs with cover. There may not be much we can do about these, unfortunately, but I have been busy enough with the bugs we know to be LW2 bugs that we can fix that I haven't had time to look into more speculative stuff lately. Cover bugs are one thing that I would like to poke at once I get the time, though.

If you could fix the cover bugs, you would be the hero of many XCOM2 players (and many rookies would thank you for not dying horribly )

IIRC, LW1 fixed some vanilla (XCOM1) cover bugs on the map level. In XCOM2 i guess it would be the parcels. I don't know if anyone already attempted to look at those but seeing it's usually the same items that fail to provide cover they might be badly designed.

Do you think it could help if we try to gather some saves when we have cover/LoS bugs? Everyone could certainly gather a bunch of those as those bugs are quite frequent.

[tracktwo]

Having saves would certainly help for the cases where it's reproducible. Some of them seem to fix themselves after a reload, and that class of cover bug will be extremely difficult to pin down unless someone can figure out exact steps to make it happen consistently. The PCS eating bug was like this and it took several months of playtesting before one of our testers managed to work out a sequence of steps that would reproduce it, but once he did it was trivial to fix. For the ones that repro across a load, certainly feel free to send me saves.

But I can make absolutely no promises about what is fixable here. Like I said, I haven't looked into the cover part of the game at all, it's entirely possible that most of it is locked away in native code we can't do much with, but sometimes we can work around issues in the native code or otherwise trick it into doing what we want. It's also possible that another modder has already gone through this exercise and it'd be mostly a waste of time for me to do it again myself

[WanWhiteWolf]

I encountered 3 cover - type bugs in my campaign (close to the end)

.1. You blow the cover with explosives. It doesn't update. You have to save/reload to update. Was present in vanila as well.

.2. Your soldier has a flank shield; although he is in cover. Reloading fixes it. It also happens to enemies. (I think I saw it 3-4 times in my campaign). Enemy behind full cover and I have a flanked shot. It also shows flanked on icons / perfect information shows the flank shot percentages after shot.

.3. Your soldier does not seem to use cover. As in ... he does not "lean" on cover. He stays like a soldier would stay in the open. Perfect information shows the reduces damage shots from enemy (calculated as if the soldier was in cover) but enemies seem to focus him and hit quite reliably for the chances they have. It's hard to tell here because it happens quite rare / not enemies left to shoot overall when it happens.

Unfortunately reloading seem to fix all cover bugs.

[maikk]

.1. You blow the cover with explosives. It doesn't update. You have to save/reload to update. Was present in vanila as well.

.2. Your soldier has a flank shield; although he is in cover. Reloading fixes it. It also happens to enemies. (I think I saw it 3-4 times in my campaign). Enemy behind full cover and I have a flanked shot. It also shows flanked on icons / perfect information shows the flank shot percentages after shot.
.

These are all vanilla bugs and are easily fixable with a simple TTC console command (just teleport in a adjacent tile and teleport back to the original one), no need to reload the game.