I was investigating the bug that I mentioned
here and I stumbled upon something else related. I think it deserves its own thread.
I launched two copies of A&A to try to recreate the aforementioned issue. I think I was probably wrong about poison being the source of the crash; that could have just been a coincidence. I let druids kill both characters with poison multiple times in my testing and there was no crashing. Not sure about aspect.
But the issue where "Player 1" crashed and "Player 2" was unable to do anything else in the game environment (can't open doors, use floor switches, etc) is easy to repeat. It also results in "Player 2"'s character being saved when they abort the mission. "Player 1"'s character will be as it was before play started (since the game crashed and it wasn't written).
Basically, load two copies of the game and connect to a server with two different characters. Start a quest. Take each player's stuff and toss it on the ground (or just let them be killed). Hit each other a few times to gain some experience. Open Windows Task Manager and end one of the game processes (AA.exe). The player that's still in the game is unable to interact with the world. Abort the mission and it will prompt several times ("requesting abort" and then "force abort"). When you're back in town, go to the store and check your inventory. It will be empty (assuming you dropped everything). Start a new quest and check your stats and you'll see that experience is still there.
So what happened originally was I died, my game crashed, my friend died, and then he found himself stuck on Q1M4 with an empty inventory because he couldn't open the door right in front of the spawn point. When my game crashed he just couldn't do anything. So he went to abort the level (via the interface), and when he did that, his character was saved with an empty inventory. If he hadn't died right after I crashed then that could have been advantageous for him. But since he did, it hosed his character...
