The wrong light

The idea was simple. In a police car, R does nothing unless you are holding a gun, so it became patrol mode: roof lights on, no siren, no noise. And when you get out, the car stays parked with its roof lit, the way a real unit sits at a scene.

It went in, the log said the roof light had been requested, and the player came back with screenshots of the Chevalier Emperor and one line: with R, the red stripe stays lit, and when I get out too, only that. The roof was dark. What was lit was the red sign on the side of the car.

The effect the mod was switching on is the one the game uses for that side sign. Our own notes had been calling both lights by the same word, stripe, for weeks, so nobody had a reason to doubt which one it was. The roof bar is a different light altogether: the other half of what the game's own siren key turns on. One change, in the three places that asked for it, and the Cortes and the Emperor came back with their roofs lit.

A second bug was hiding behind the first. In the Thorton Merrimac, R did nothing at all. The mod decided whether you were driving by reading a flag the game sets, and in that car the flag said you were not. Why it was wrong is still a guess: probably the exit from the previous car landing late and stamping on it. The fix does not depend on the guess, because it no longer reads the flag at all. It asks the car who is in the driver's seat.

And one limit stays. About twelve to fourteen seconds after you get out, the game shuts the parked car down, and the roof bar goes dark with it. The mod switches it back on once per shutdown, so it blinks off and comes back. Keeping it lit for good would mean stopping the game from shutting the engine down, and the last time the mod tried that, the game crashed. The player watched it go dark and come back, and said: we leave it like that.

The lesson is about names, again. A log line that says roof is only as true as the word somebody chose for the effect behind it. Screenshots from the person playing beat a log that agrees with itself.