True Patch Gold Edition -- OFFICIAL THREAD

[slayermbm]

Sorry for posting those links.

You have to contact him in order to include his patch, ok.

I hope you can, but thanks anyway.






 

[Tessera]

And I thank you for your support.  

I should point out that the various utilities bundled into the True Patch are not a part of the actual patch. That is why they are in separate sub-folders. Those utilities... including the VTMB ResPatcher... were tossed into the complete package as a courtesy to Bloodlines players. Their use is considered to be OPTIONAL.

The actual patch itself is contained within the big sub-folder named "TRUE_PATCH_MAIN" and it should not be confused with any of the optional material bundled into the larger True Patch Gold package.

So with all of that in mind, the ResPatcher becomes a rather minor issue. If people would prefer to use another widescreen utility which they feel is more functional, then they are certainly free to locate it on the web and then install it themselves. I don't see any reason for it to conflict with the main functions of the True Patch, so it shouldn't be any problem. No guarantees though, because I have not tested the utility that you mentioned... thus its compatibility with the True Patch is an unknown factor.

For the record, I use the VTMB Respatcher that is included within the True Patch Gold package and I have not noticed any significant problems with it. It looks just great on my 1920x1080 HDTV.  

[Tessera]

FUTURE HOTFIX PLANNED...


Extended play testing is revealing a small number of map triggers which... while not exactly broken... are located in less than optimal locations. None of these map nodes were dealt with in the initial release of the TPG patch, because as I say... they are not actually broken. All of them work... they are just located in spots on the map which need to be adjusted slightly.

An example would be when we first enter the Asylum club. There's an invisible map trigger just inside the door and its function is to instruct Jeanette to intercept the player. This is how we first meet Jeanette: we step on the trigger and she runs over immediately to intercept us and start her opening dialogue ("My my, what do we have here?" etc.). The trigger works... it's just in a less than optimal location. If the player stops moving immediately after hitting that trigger, then we end up talking to Jeanette through the intervening wall.

Another example would be inside the Confession club. There's an invisible teleporter in the floor near Venus. The function of that teleporter is to send the player up to Venus' office at certain key points (such as when we return from doing her quests and she says "What? I can't hear you. Let's talk in my office.") Again... the trigger works fine, so it was not dealt with in the initial Gold Edition release. But I have always felt that it needs to be adjusted, because there is a small chance that it can misfire if the player approaches Venus from certain angles. The result of a misfire is that Venus teleports... but we don't. We're left stranded downstairs with no way to reach her, other than to use the "noclip" cheat. Not good.

Yet another example: there are some map nodes inside Club Vesuvius that need to be optimized, in order to prevent NPC's from constantly playing "bumper cars" in there and getting snagged within the narrow places on the map. These could be fixed by adding special switches to some of the floor nodes, so that an NPC will not enter an area if another NPC is already occupying it. I can only assume that Troika did not get the chance to fix those nodes... probably because ActiVision was forcing them to disable a LOT of sexual content that was originally included in the Vesuvius map. They were probably so bogged down with that shit that they simply neglected to finish optimizing the normal traffic (pathing) nodes. The Asp Hole club in the same zone has similar issues... even worse, in fact.

Last example: the patrol nodes for the cops are all messed up in a few places. For example, the Santa Monica cops can sometimes get hung up on the burning barrels that the bums sometimes huddle around. I'm referring to the area between Gimble's place and the parking garage. There's a "bum fire" there and the cops sometimes get snagged on the edge of the barrel as they walk past. And in Hollywood, the cop patrol path sometimes leads them straight into an NPC in a cramped area and they end up getting tangled together and stuck (across the street from Vesuvius is one such place where this can happen). None of these are major problems, but by simply moving the patrol nodes a little to the left, right, up or down, we can get the cops to walk around these objects a little more deftly... so they do not get snagged.

So... I'll be taking a look at these issues during the next couple of months. My skills at map editing are increasing by leaps and bounds these days, thanks to some mods that I've been creating for tessmage.com members only. That learning process has definitely helped me to identify quite a few legitimate map bugs in Bloodlines that are in need of some minor adjustments and optimization.

Note that none of the things I am talking about would change anything about the gameplay. The goal is to tidy up a few loose ends left behind by Troika... not to make any arbitrary changes to the game itself. These are just technical glitches that if eliminated, would help the flow of the game to be a little smoother and without so many collisions between NPC's.

I'll post an update in the future, after I've had more time to work on this stuff. None of it is critical... just minor annoyances that don't need to be there.

[Cylnar]

I had the "no-Venus-teleport" error when approaching Venus after killing Boris in my current game. Fortunately, everything had been fine the first time I went to her office, so everything was open - I just ran upstairs and turned in the mission.

Three more minor map issues I've noticed (so minor I'm only reporting them now):

1) In the "Necromantic" quest, when I sent Milligan out of the apartment (whether to get eaten by Pisha or to flee for his life) he was getting hung up on some books or something in the cutscene and thus the cutscene never ended (and you can't get out of it - any chance you could add that functionality to cutscenes, since they're obviously map-related?). I ended up having to kill Milligan myself - which, unlike sending him to Pisha, does cost a humanity point - but it still satisfactorily resolved the quest (Pisha gave her same line the next time I talked to her, about how Milligan's fate was sealed as soon as he walked into the hospital). I'm attaching a copy of that save.

2) After receiving my Chantry haven (I'm playing a Tremere) and having Heather change clothes a couple times, I went back to the old Santa Monica haven to get some stuff I left there. I've done that before and usually the laptop is gone (so you have to use the computer in the Skyeline haven once you get it). Imagine my surprise to find not only was the laptop there, but so was Heather! Now I usually either reject her right away or just before blood-bonding her (this Tremere is the first bastard to actually feed her three times). The Heather in Santa Monica was wearing the default outfit. Ordering her to change it worked, but also advanced the outfit on the Chantry Heather when I went to check. Just to confirm my suspicions, I noclipped into the Skyeline haven and there was a Heather there too. Copy of the save attached.

3) In the Nocturne theater, "A Tangled Web" quest, the first ladder (the one in front of where you first enter the backstage area) has a small issue. At the top of the ladder there seems to be some sort of invisible obstruction. So instead of just climbing up the ladder and moving directly onto the scaffolding once at the top, you have to hop a little bit to clear the invisible block. Same if you try climbing down - you first have to jump on top of seemingly nothing, then climb down. The other ladder works fine - no invisible crap in your way. No save attached - just a very minor issue and I've seen it every single time I have played this quest since first getting the game.

[Tessera]

1) In the "Necromantic" quest, when I sent Milligan out of the apartment (whether to get eaten by Pisha or to flee for his life) he was getting hung up on some books or something in the cutscene and thus the cutscene never ended (and you can't get out of it - any chance you could add that functionality to cutscenes, since they're obviously map-related?). I ended up having to kill Milligan myself - which, unlike sending him to Pisha, does cost a humanity point - but it still satisfactorily resolved the quest (Pisha gave her same line the next time I talked to her, about how Milligan's fate was sealed as soon as he walked into the hospital). I'm attaching a copy of that save.

This is a very old bug... and it happens perhaps once in ten game plays. I remember when Acrimonious was trying to resolve it, back when we were working on version 5.04AT. He thought that he had minimized the possibility of it happening again... but obviously, he didn't eliminate it completely. I am not certain as to the cause of this bug, however. If it is map related, then I can probably find it by simple trial and error. But if it's being caused by something else, then the solution may end up being more complicated than it is worth. I will look into it more deeply after I have finished checking on a few other things.

2) After receiving my Chantry haven (I'm playing a Tremere) and having Heather change clothes a couple times, I went back to the old Santa Monica haven to get some stuff I left there. I've done that before and usually the laptop is gone (so you have to use the computer in the Skyeline haven once you get it). Imagine my surprise to find not only was the laptop there, but so was Heather! Now I usually either reject her right away or just before blood-bonding her (this Tremere is the first bastard to actually feed her three times). The Heather in Santa Monica was wearing the default outfit. Ordering her to change it worked, but also advanced the outfit on the Chantry Heather when I went to check. Just to confirm my suspicions, I noclipped into the Skyeline haven and there was a Heather there too. Copy of the save attached.

There is an error in the Python, then. That stuff is supposed to be dealt with by disabling all of the SM haven crap after the player reaches a certain story state (which happens when you receive your downtown haven). It may be bugged for the Tremere clan. If so, then I will attempt to track it down. I may also have to add a new unique story state, just for the Tremere clan... but that shouldn't be too complicated.

Heather is supposed to appear in our SM haven... but only if we did not get a downtown haven. If we have a downtown haven, then she should disappear from the SM haven. As for the duplicate Heather in the Skyline building, that's not a glitch. You're not supposed to be there, if you are a Tremmy. See, the script simply un-hides all of the Heather models after the player reaches a certain point (story state) in the game (after talking to Heather on the street in front of the Venture Tower). Which means that her models will appear in both of the downtown havens simultaneously... but the player is only allowed to have access to one or the other. And if we have access to neither, then Heather will remain in the SM haven. And since this situation spans two different maps, there is no way to deal with it using map triggers. It definitely needs to be done with Python, so that it will affect ALL of the maps. So you'd better give me a couple of months to figure it out (I'm swamped with too many projects these days).

3) In the Nocturne theater, "A Tangled Web" quest, the first ladder (the one in front of where you first enter the backstage area) has a small issue. At the top of the ladder there seems to be some sort of invisible obstruction. So instead of just climbing up the ladder and moving directly onto the scaffolding once at the top, you have to hop a little bit to clear the invisible block. Same if you try climbing down - you first have to jump on top of seemingly nothing, then climb down. The other ladder works fine - no invisible crap in your way. No save attached - just a very minor issue and I've seen it every single time I have played this quest since first getting the game.

I am familiar with this bug. The invisible obstruction that you are smacking into is known as a "bounding box." Modelers will know what I am talking about. A bounding box has to do with physics. It sets up a perimeter of sorts around the model in question and then designates that invisible perimeter as being "solid." Which in turn means that no other solid object can penetrate that perimeter. This is what allows objects and entities in the game to collide with one another (collision physics). Without bounding boxes, nothing would be solid and everything would pass through everything else.

In this particular case, the fix may not be easy. The ladder needs to have the solid flag, otherwise we can't climb it (we would just fall right through it). But when we get to the top, the railing is what you are smacking into. And since that railing is "baked" into the map, it is most likely impossible to alter its characteristics. Certain objects and entities on the map are variable. In fact, most of them are variable (editable), on the average VTMB map. But other things like walls, floors, certain structural features and some of the furniture and so forth are hard-coded into the map... thus making them inaccessible to any form of line-by-line map editing. No... the only way to get into something like that would be to decompile the map completely, using something like the "Hammer" map making tool that Valve used to distribute freely to modders. But I have no idea whether or not the Hammer program is fully compatible with Bloodlines maps (and it probably isn't). This might turn out to be the same headache that modders keep running into when we try to decompile VTMB's models. We can tear them apart, sure... but recompiling them into a package that the VTMB engine will accept has proven to be a fucking nightmare.

I'll look into it... but don't get yer hopes up. If it's a baked feature on the map, then we're shit outta luck.  

[Azuma]

We can tear them apart, sure... but recompiling them into a package that the VTMB engine will accept has proven to be a fucking nightmare.

Actually, Fire64 has managed to do just this: he created a custom Bloodlines map and run it in an unmodified VTMB. You can read more about it on the Daedalus forum.

[Azuma]

I would like to point out that the resolution patch included within your patch is flawed, because when it changes the game to widescreen, it produces missing screens depending on the direction your character looks,
specially when you look down.

You didn't set the FOV and/or r_anamorphic properly.

[Tessera]

To give everyone an idea of what I was referring to in my previous post about a future hotfix, here is an example of one of many map repairs that I am working on:




What you see in that screenshot seems minor... but without it, the patrol cops in that section of Santa Monica can get hopelessly hung up on the burning barrel and stay caught in that spot forever.

The little green boxes represent invisible patrol nodes on the map. The cops are programmed to seek these patrol nodes and follow them in a sequence... from one node to the next. The green lines represent AI node connect vectors... or in more common parlance, pathing lines. The NPC's try to stay as close to those lines as possible, whilst trying to seek the shortest distance between two points.

The problem with that corner was that the pathing was taking the cops too close to the barrel when they rounded that corner of the sidewalk. And if there happened to be a bum nearby at the same time, the cop would try to navigate around the bum... and right into the barrel. And then they would get stuck, because the spot next to the barrel is at street level, where as their pathing nodes are slightly higher up at the sidewalk level.

The solution then was to move the existing patrol nodes in that corner, as well as add an additional one (marked with a big red arrow in my screenshot). The additional node helps to "round out" the corner a bit, so that the cop will swing just a little wider when he makes his way around the corner. The result: he is further from the barrel when he gets to that area, hence his chances of colliding with it have been greatly diminished.

All of this probably seems rather complicated to most of you... so just think of these NPC's as being blind robots. Because that is precisely what they are: blind as a bat, every single one of them. They may seem as if they can see other things in their world... but actually, they can not. What they are really doing is kind of similar to what a blind man does with his cane: they "feel around" for AI nodes on the map, and then gravitate towards those nodes as if they were magnets. And this is how the NPC's get around, from place to place.

Okay... long explanation over. I have this tendency to try to teach people, when most of the time I am just boring them out of their skulls. But anyway, hopefully this particular issue is fixed and I can move on to the next one. Once I have enough of these minor map adjustments compiled, I will release all of them at once as "Hotfix #2."

Actually, Fire64 has managed to do just this: he created a custom Bloodlines map and run it in an unmodified VTMB. You can read more about it on the Daedalus forum.

I know you can construct new STATIC models and place them on the maps. But what I was referring to were baked structures and ANIMATED models. Nobody has yet managed to recompile an animated model and actually get it to function properly. At least, nobody that I am aware of.

[Zenoseiya]

We can tear them apart, sure... but recompiling them into a package that the VTMB engine will accept has proven to be a fucking nightmare.

Actually, Fire64 has managed to do just this: he created a custom Bloodlines map and run it in an unmodified VTMB. You can read more about it on the Daedalus forum.

The Bloodlines Antitribu team has actually managed to add a rapier as a weapon to the game. While I assume it's probably a heavily edited katana model with the same number of vertexes, this does give a small sliver of hope... for what I don't know.

[Tessera]

Currently working on the Downtown hub map. There are a few nodes here and there which are in less than optimal locations. I'm dealing with them one at a time.

Also, a scene which was originally written into the map and then later disabled (no doubt at the insistence of ActiVision) has been re-enabled. Specifically, there is a sordid little scene which is supposed to take place outside and around the wall of the Confession club. It's a scripted sequence, built into the map and as I say, it was later censored. There is a girl and a guy standing there in the shadows, facing each other. Originally, that was supposed to be a scene where the girl is performing oral sex upon the guy... until the player shows up and looks at them. When we look at them (when our crosshairs touch them), they stop what they are doing and then wander away to do other things.

Troika wanted that scene to be there and it makes perfect sense, for a sleazy area like Downtown that has hookers and gang members all over the place. But at the urging of... parties unknown (uh huh), Troika added a "StartDisabled" flag to that sequence... effectively preventing it from taking place. Well, I have just re-enabled it -- and that fix will be included within Hotfix #2.

In my considered opinion, this fix represents an actual, legitimate restoration of intended content. It's a subtle little scene... it is very dark... it breaks up as soon as you look at them... it is not in your face (you need to actually go searching for it) and it fits the overall mood of Downtown perfectly. I can only assume that it was eventually disabled at the urging of their publisher... and since I hate their publisher's guts, I have no intention of honoring ANYTHING that Activision wanted with regards to Bloodlines. If they were so concerned about this game, then they should have supported it after its release. But they didn't -- so fuck 'em. We'll fix it, instead.

But once that scene was re-enabled, it left us with a wonky set of pathing nodes. After the oral sex scene finishes, the girl wanders off, followed shortly thereafter by the guy. And when they get to the corner of the building that is near the front gates to the Confession property, they would consistently hit that corner of the building and try to walk up one side of the wall. Umm... right... that looks REALLY natural (NOT).

So I've been tinkering with the pathing nodes in that tight little corner. I haven't made it perfect (it really is a tight squeeze in that spot), but I have at least stopped them from walking up the wall as they round that corner. Instead, they'll manage to keep their feet on the ground as they negotiate the tight turns required to get around it.

Anyway... I'm on the job, folks. I'll continue to post updates as I work my way through these minor problems with the node graphs.

The Bloodlines Antitribu team has actually managed to add a rapier as a weapon to the game. While I assume it's probably a heavily edited katana model with the same number of vertexes, this does give a small sliver of hope... for what I don't know.

Aye but once again, those are static (non-animated) models, which are a lot less trouble to export back into the game. It's the character models that are giving everybody a headache. I wish somebody would crack whatever goofy code Troika employed when they constructed their animated MDL's.  

[Vo_OD00]

Okay... long explanation over. I have this tendency to try to teach people, when most of the time I am just boring them out of their skulls.

I find it highly interesting I lack any programming (/modding) skill, so it's really cool to hear the process of repairing the game like this in laymen's terms, for once.

Are you really positive that you'll never release a new "big" True Patch version, Tessera? It almost seems new bugs arise whenever others get fixed... (although I firmly believe this Wespian phenomenon is not due to your involvement )

[Tessera]

We'll probably never run out of small bugs to fix in Bloodlines. That entire game was a rush job.

But the stuff that I'm working on right now is not major. All of it is just little details here and there that I ignored when the True Patch Gold was being assembled. I didn't want to hold up the entire patch, just for some little things that really don't harm the overall game very much. But collectively, fixing all of those little things represents quite a few man hours... which is the main reason that I held off on dealing with them until the TPG patch was finished. No sense in keeping all of you waiting, just so we can have NPC's who don't bump into the furniture. Just a matter of priorities, you understand.

As for releasing enhancements and other such arbitrary add-ons for Bloodlines, I have no problem with producing a few of those myself... as MODS. And I would like to encourage others to do the same. The True Patch is the baseline, and now that we have established a very solid baseline for this game, I am totally in favor of whatever TPG-based add-on mods that anybody might wish to create for VTMB. In my case, I have lots of interesting ideas for add-on mods, and no... not ALL of them involve sex.  

An example of an add-on mod that I have in mind would be a complete reworking of the Chinatown zones and quests. I think we can all agree that the game takes a downwards spiral into repetitive fighting, fighting and more fighting once we get to Chinatown. It is clearly one of the most rushed parts of the game... and it would be nice to release a mod that makes Chinatown be more consistent in its "mood" with the rest of the main hubs. "Consistent" as in a little more vamping -- and less fists, to put it euphemistically.

If anyone else would like to work on something like that, then by all means... get in touch with me and we can get started on it together. Otherwise, I'll just do it at my own pace... and maybe have something interesting to release by the end of this year.

Since this is the True Patch topic... I need to stress again that I am talking about MODS right now. I would never incorporate that type of material into the True Patch, because it doesn't belong there. Let the modders create mods for this game. The purpose of any -good- patch should be to establish a bug-free baseline, and then stay out of everyone else's way.  

[Cylnar]

An example of an add-on mod that I have in mind would be a complete reworking of the Chinatown zones and quests. I think we can all agree that the game takes a downwards spiral into repetitive fighting, fighting and more fighting once we get to Chinatown. It is clearly one of the most rushed parts of the game... and it would be nice to release a mod that makes Chinatown be more consistent in its "mood" with the rest of the main hubs. "Consistent" as in a little more vamping -- and less fists, to put it euphemistically.

Not to mention all of the XP they shower on you in Act IV and before the endgame. Seriously, five XP for killing that pussy Johnny? *Six* XP for reconciling those two old hit men? In one conversation with Lu Fang and two short conversations with Ji Wen Ja? That's the same number of XP you get for reconciling Tourette, if I recall correctly...after spending half of Act I running yourself ragged doing various tasks for that crazy bitch (those crazy bitches) and navigating through a very delicate conversation. I think they wanted you to have a certain amount of XP by the endgame, so your character could handle Ming Xiao and the Sheriff - and since AssholeVision was cracking the whip to make their precious release date, Troika had to rush Chinatown more than any other zone and couldn't put as much stuff to do there as they wanted - so they just had to pack the required number of XP into fewer quests.

[Tessera]

Cylnar,

Keep in mind that we NEED more XP by the time we reach Chinatown. The cost in points for the higher level skills and abilities requires that we get oodles of XP points in the late game. For example, it only costs 3 or 4 XP points (it varies) to achieve the first level in a particular attribute. But each successive level costs 8 points... then 12 points... then 16 points... and this way lies bankruptcy. If we don't gather enough points in the late game, then we'll be too weak to face off with Ming Xiao and the Sheriff later on.

What I would like to see in a Chinatown mod would be to keep the total number of available points in that act the same, but bust them up between some new quests that are a bit more varied and imaginative.

Anyway... we can talk more about mods up in the modding topics. I didn't mean to sidetrack us with that stuff. Sorry.  

[Tessera]

*** THIS TOPIC HAS BEEN SPLIT ***

We were getting a bit too diverted into a discussion of possible mods for Chinatown, so I have moved those posts to a new topic, up in the members-only section of the board. You can pick up the discussion here:

http://www.tessmage.com/forum/index.php?topic=56934.0

It's my own fault for getting us sidetracked. But anyway, I am very interested in whatever ideas you folks might have. Let's just try to confine ourselves to the appropriate areas of the board.


We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Normal discussion of the True Patch Gold Edition may now continue. 

[Tessera]

Just in case anyone thought that I was bullshitting about the number of TPG downloads we've seen,
here are the server bandwidth usage statistics for tessmage.com during the month of July, 2010:




I've blurred out a bit of private information regarding our server's numerical ID.
Otherwise... there you have it, in glorious technicolor. The graph you are seeing
was generated by our Linux server. And I've drawn a vertical red line on that graph,
to denote the release date of the True Patch Gold Edition.

As you can clearly see, our bandwidth went right through the roof almost immediately
after the TPG patch was released. And it continues to be sky high, as compared to our
usage prior to the release of the TPG patch.

We're already up to just short of 5.000 downloads of the TPG patch from this server
since its release on July 8th. And according to the server usage statistics, the download
rate is showing no signs of slowing down.

This is gonna cost me, for sure. We're gonna need a bigger boat... 

[upi00r]

Hi.

I have some questions:

Does this patch fix or is it ever possible to fix:
A. Fu Syndicate building - rotating blades do not move (on rails) after loading a game
B. After exit from Fu Syndicate building the phone is ringing. When we answer it, then the receiver is moving from our hand back to it's place on telephone and our vampire is talking to his own hand. I think this was also happening earlier during another phone call.
C. Italian Dinner - in locked room with hooker and a guy laying in bed there is also a shadow of this guy under the bed - there shouldn't be any shadow. Eventually only shadows of his feet.

Could you "fix" some dialogue lines because there are like this:
1. "Example... Example" or
2. "Example...Example" or
3. "Example. . . Example" or
maybe even more.
I think there should be only one style, IMHO the first one. I know that is not really important for many people but I'm very detalist Simple program should do the trick.

[Tessera]

Hi.

I have some questions:

Well, hello to you too and let's see if I can give you some answers...

Does this patch fix or is it ever possible to fix:
A. Fu Syndicate building - rotating blades do not move (on rails) after loading a game

Well for starters, there are a lot of bad physics in the alpha Source engine that Bloodlines was built upon. And it is also due to the way the game saves map data into your gamesave file. I doubt that it can be remedied, because of the wonky way that the game was constructed. When you reload a game, it assumes that the "trigger_once' areas of the maps have already done their thing... thus they will not reset when you reload your game from the same point. I have the feeling that the only way to fix something like that would be to hack into the C++ code of the core files... something which I do not possess the ability to do on my own. But I would welcome any suggestions from people who are more skilled in that type of programming than I am.

 

B. After exit from Fu Syndicate building the phone is ringing. When we answer it, then the receiver is moving from our hand back to it's place on telephone and our vampire is talking to his own hand. I think this was also happening earlier during another phone call.

This sucks, I agree with you. It sucks even more, because it can never be fixed. Those animations are "baked" into the models themselves. The telephone handset is an animated model that floats in the air right where your character's hands are. It is supposed to follow our hand movements as we use it. The player does not actually grab that handset at all... it only looks that way. The handset is actually acting entirely on its own. Well, the choreography is obviously all messed up and so are the timings. It's simply a bad animated model. And to date, nobody that I am aware of has managed to decompile and then recompile an animated Bloodlines model (so that it can be modified)...  and then actually get it to function again within the game itself. Troika constructed their models using some sort of non-standard format... which has made the task of decompiling them properly a nightmare. I sincerely doubt that they followed ANY sort of consistent format from one animated model to the next. It seems to me that they must have constructed each model in whatever way they saw fit, using only the most sparse set of interchangeable standards. "Just get it into the game and make sure that it works. It doesn't matter if it's interchangeable with similar models or not. We're never gonna decompile these after we get them into the game, anyway. So just do it." Know what I mean..? A total "slap it together and make it work" fiasco.

C. Italian Dinner - in locked room with hooker and a guy laying in bed there is also a shadow of this guy under the bed - there shouldn't be any shadow. Eventually only shadows of his feet.

I think you are referring to a sordid little scene at the Giovanni mansion. In any case, that's another shortcoming of the VTMB engine. It projects shadows right through walls and floors sometimes. I have no solution available at this time, and I have actually tried to find out what causes it. I don't know if it can ever be fixed, to tell you the truth. There are similarly wonky things that happen to the skyboxes... you can sometimes see the outlines of objects on the ground floating high in the sky. There is probably a remedy for it to be found within the way that the skyboxes were constructed... but who knows. Once again, Troika was working with a half-finished game engine that nobody had ever seen before. They were also working at the exact time when the industry was switching over from DirectX 8 to DirectX 9. The shaders in VTMB are some sort of bastard child of both DX versions. So I am not surprised that they made so many errors when they were building their game around it.

Could you "fix" some dialogue lines because there are like this:
1. "Example... Example" or
2. "Example...Example" or
3. "Example. . . Example" or
maybe even more.
I think there should be only one style, IMHO the first one. I know that is not really important for many people but I'm very detalist Simple program should do the trick.

I think the reason for some of that stuff was because they wanted to space out the printed lines in such a way as to have them fill up the dialogue window properly. And since they were designing the game around older CRT monitors, they picked a spacing that would look good on a 4:3 display. These days, most of us have switched over to widescreen LCD monitors, so the spacing issue really isn't relevant anymore. I'm just taking a guess about this, mind you... and yes, I agree that all of those need to be re-done eventually. It is, however, a minor issue for the time being.