b337 dropped clocks bug.

I downloaded James Quest from the PureZC QDB, and from inspection of the quest header the following rules appear to be turned on:
Solid Blocks
Temporary No Return Disabled
Multi-directional Traps
Fast Dungeon Scrolling
Cool Scrolling
Fast Heart Refill
Show Time on Subscreen
No Sprite Flicker
Raft/Ladder Fix
Show Secret Combo Hints When Using The Lens
Fix Link's Position in Dungeons
Items Help Above Link's Head Continue To Animate
Push Blocks Don't Move When Bumped
Hide Enemy-Carried Items
Gold Arrows Sparkle
Fire Boomerang Sparkle
Bombs Hurt Link
Temporary Clocks
...

Notice that No Clocks is not one of these. So either Nightmare never turned off clocks, or there's a bug in the loading code. Without the password to James Quest I can't really check which it is...

Can't you "hack it" per se? The Password is obfuscated, and you, being a dev, should have some knowledge of how the passwords are hidden (The whole "Challenge" you are presented with when loading a quest and it asks for a pass.)

no, quests are encrypted. you need the password because it is a key part of the decryption process.

I've played through james quest 1 and a half times and never got a clock before. Then on b337 i got 3 before I even got to lv2! If you can't break the password I could Email him, or PM him i guess.

PS- I am 100% sure "challenge" quests like JQ1 don't have clocks unless this was a bug in 2.10 (Thats what I played it on)

Unfortunately it's not that easy. Passwords are stored as an MD5 hash, and so cannot be feasible reverse-engineered (and a good thing too, since this way Glenn et al cannot crack your passwords from your quests.)
As I understand it, the challenge is a backdoor allowing me to reset a quest's password, but that doesn't help, because to check what's really going on with the quest rules I need to be able to open the quest file in the original 1.93 ZQ. And I could completely bypass 1.93 password authorization, but I can't because I don't have source code that old.

[QUOTE=DarkDragon;1124478]I downloaded James Quest from the PureZC QDB, and from inspection of the quest header the following rules appear to be turned on:
Solid Blocks
Temporary No Return Disabled
Multi-directional Traps
Fast Dungeon Scrolling
Cool Scrolling
Fast Heart Refill
Show Time on Subscreen
No Sprite Flicker
Raft/Ladder Fix
Show Secret Combo Hints When Using The Lens
Fix Link's Position in Dungeons
Items Help Above Link's Head Continue To Animate
Push Blocks Don't Move When Bumped
Hide Enemy-Carried Items
Gold Arrows Sparkle
Fire Boomerang Sparkle
Bombs Hurt Link
Temporary Clocks
...
QUOTE]

What? Theres so much wrong with that I don't know where to start. Well here goes...

Solid blocks- should be off; you can push them on to eachother
Fast heart refill- Should be off
Raft ladder fix- dont think so
Show lens hints- c'mon, its Nightmare we're talking about here
Bombs hurt link- Bombs do not hurt link
Clocks- well...

Also I just found out this isn't the only quest with this problem.

Find me a quest that's unpassworded, or whose author is still around to send me the password, and I'll fix this issue.

Can't you just open up example first.qst in 192 b183, check off a couple rules, password it, then try it out?

EDIT: Sorry, I don't have a similar quest that is unpassworded. 😞
If anybody has one where this occurs please post it.(or PM DD)

Ah yes, that actually would work quite nicely. Thanks 😉

OK, I did exactly what you suggested, and the current build loaded the quest rules without a problem.

Unless someone comes up with contradicting evidence, I'm going to assume this is Not A Bug.

well, you can easily test the other things such as solid blocks etc. via just playing the quest in a old version then in the newest alpha.

franpa wrote:well, you can easily test the other things such as solid blocks etc. via just playing the quest in a old version then in the newest alpha.

Actually, everything else about the quest works fine. Just the clock thing.
(and the icon thing) I'm gonna PM Nightmare, but who knows when he'll drop by again.

One thing no one considered, there was a bug on older versions of ZC where clocks weren't dropping at all. So the quest never did drop clocks because of a previous bug. Since this is fixed you are seeing clocks in the beta when playing this quest.

DarkDragon wrote:
Unless someone comes up with contradicting evidence, I'm going to assume this is Not A Bug.

Well this probably qualifies as contradictory evidence, although I am aware you can't do much without a testquest, but I just finished over half of JQ1 on 192 b183 and never got a single clock.(along with 2.10) And there are ALOT of enemies. You gotta admit though, if this is just a coincidence, the odds of this happening have got to be astronomical.

Yes, but some of the 1.92 betas had a bug where clocks wouldn't ever drop, even if the quest author wanted them to. Thus some authors didn't bother setting the "No Clocks" rule.
I PMed Nightmare and he refused to give me the password to James Quest 1, though he did for New Quest to help me debug the quest icon problem. Thus the issue remains unresolved. However, from inspection of James Quest I and other old quests in the current ZQuest, and looking at 2.10's quest loading code, I can say with some confidence that a bug affecting only this one particular rule in old quests is rather unlikely.

DarkDragon wrote:Yes, but some of the 1.92 betas had a bug where clocks wouldn't ever drop, even if the quest author wanted them to. Thus some authors didn't bother setting the "No Clocks" rule.
I PMed Nightmare and he refused to give me the password to James Quest 1, though he did for New Quest to help me debug the quest icon problem. Thus the issue remains unresolved. However, from inspection of James Quest I and other old quests in the current ZQuest, and looking at 2.10's quest loading code, I can say with some confidence that a bug affecting only this one particular rule in old quests is rather unlikely.

Ah, that explains it . Well that's good news then.😊