Crippling Sunstar Bug

[Pikachu4Prez]

Okay, I honestly don't know if it's because of my computer or if it's legitimately a bug in the game itself, but I've tried fighting Sunstar TWICE now and both times my game has crashed before I can get any further into the first phase. Apparently, whenever Sunstar gets close enough to grapple you in the fight, the game crashes to the desktop and stays frozen for a few minutes before forcefully closing. This would be bad enough on its own, but every single time I get back to the game, all of my save data from the last hour or so would be nuked. This means that all of that effort to collect screws to get every single weapon before taking on the Wily Star? GONE. The Stardroids I defeated? It's as though I never killed them at all. One hour of progress made so I can finally see the final boss? Completely wasted.

This is really starting to piss me off and I don't know how to fix this problem - and that's even assuming this is an issue stemming from the game itself and not something wrong with my laptop. Can somebody please help?

[CutmanMike]

Haven't heard of this issue before. First things first, are you using software mode or opengl? If you're in software, try switching to the opengl renderer.

Second, here's some codes to help you get back where you left off. You have to open the console with ` to use them:

mm8bdm_saveprogress 1124
mm8bdm_mmvsaveprogress 255

That should get you back to where you were, but obviously won't give you your exact unlocked weapons, so here's a code to help you get those back:

mm8bdm_screwcount 5000

[Pikachu4Prez]

Haven't heard of this issue before. First things first, are you using software mode or opengl? If you're in software, try switching to the opengl renderer.

Second, here's some codes to help you get back where you left off. You have to open the console with ` to use them:

mm8bdm_saveprogress 1124
mm8bdm_mmvsaveprogress 255

That should get you back to where you were, but obviously won't give you your exact unlocked weapons, so here's a code to help you get those back:

mm8bdm_screwcount 5000

Yes, I am in OpenGL and I've been using that renderer for the whole game. It's weird because the entire rest of the game, I have not had any sort of hiccups or problems with the game (the Mega Mech Shark, which previously lagged a little in the previous version, ran smoothly this time), but when I get past the initial part of the Sunstar fight (the one where he's walking slowly and primarily picks you up and throws you across the room) and start fighting him for real, whenever I end up right in front of him, that's when the game suddenly crashes and kills the progress I had up until that point.

The first time it happened, I bound the MDK command to a key and went to town to build my screw count back up (though using it kinda made the encounter with Uranus sort of screwy) and to get back to Sunstar (and the game even says that it's saving the data when I get to the point where Wily is released from his cell), but when I got to Sunstar the second time, it happened again. Not wishing to do this a third time, I came here to alert the team to this issue because I wasn't even sure if it was an issue with the game or if there was some sort of issue related to my computer and I really want to be able to see this game to the end rather than just watching it on YouTube.

I do appreciate the codes, however. Hopefully they'll be of some help. In fact, I'll input them into the console and then try to get back to Sunstar to see if it ends up erasing the data again (hopefully not but if it does I'll definitely let you know).

[NES Boy]

Second, here's some codes to help you get back where you left off. You have to open the console with ` to use them:

mm8bdm_saveprogress 1124
mm8bdm_mmvsaveprogress 255

That should get you back to where you were, but obviously won't give you your exact unlocked weapons, so here's a code to help you get those back:

mm8bdm_screwcount 5000

I recommend that you also use mm8bdm_mmvweapons 255 to get the Stardroids' weapons back without having to fight them again.

[CutmanMike]

Your save progress only gets recorded to your ini file when the game closes properly. I.e, if you ran the entire game of 8bdm and it crashed on the final boss, you'd lose everything. I recommend closing the game after using those codes to ensure the data is recorded.

Does it only crash in phase 2 then? Couple of things to try:

Instead of going through the cutscene with wily again, just do the following codes:

mm8bdm_sunstarunlock 3
map unkown6

This will take you straight to phase 2 without any other fluff in the previous cutscene loaded. If it still crashes then, try the same but in software mode.

[Pikachu4Prez]

Your save progress only gets recorded to your ini file when the game closes properly. I.e, if you ran the entire game of 8bdm and it crashed on the final boss, you'd lose everything. I recommend closing the game after using those codes to ensure the data is recorded.

Does it only crash in phase 2 then? Couple of things to try:

Instead of going through the cutscene with wily again, just do the following codes:

mm8bdm_sunstarunlock 3
map unkown6

This will take you straight to phase 2 without any other fluff in the previous cutscene loaded. If it still crashes then, try the same but in software mode.

I was starting to make the correlation between the saves and closing the game to register saves properly before I tried fighting Sunstar the third time. Strangely, it seems to crash any time he lands on top of me or he gets close enough to where I'm in his hitbox. I'll have to experiment with this a little more to confirm this. Hopefully I'll get this squared away; I'm sorry to bug you about all of this. ^^;

[CutmanMike]

Let me know it the issue goes away. If not I'll ask you to reset your ini file and THEN see if it crashes. If it doesn't after that, I'll want to have a look at your ini to try to see what setting is causing it so I can implement a fix.

[Pikachu4Prez]

Let me know it the issue goes away. If not I'll ask you to reset your ini file and THEN see if it crashes. If it doesn't after that, I'll want to have a look at your ini to try to see what setting is causing it so I can implement a fix.

Okay, I think I managed to figure out what was going wrong. First, I tried switching the rendering method, which failed to fix the problem, so that made me realize that the issue wasn't anything to do with the rendering. The second time, I got a bit more experimental, after resurrecting I got close to Sunstar. Turns out that it wasn't even jumping on me that was causing crashes; just getting too close triggered a crash. Around the third time I fought him today, it suddenly clicked.

The problem wasn't anything to do with the game, it was because I was resurrecting myself during the fight.

The third time I fought him, I got to his "power of the star" phase and died there. Not long afterward, I resurrected to continue the fight right from there...and when he finished, he didn't do much else beside just jump around. I stood in place and he simply hopped around the general radius of my character. His health continued to lower as I shot him, but he wasn't changing phases or anything. When I tried moving around to see if he would do something else, the moment I made contact with Sunstar is when the game crashed a third time, but by that point, I was certain I had figured out the issue. I fought him a fourth time just to be sure I wasn't crazy and to experiment with what happens if I were to beat him in this bugged state. It didn't seem to have much of an effect outside of making the fight anti-climactic and when I fought him a fifth time with God Mode turned on, I beat him with no ill side effects.

My theory is that Sunstar's programming and scripting is complicated enough that something as simple as the "resurrect" command would completely break his AI and therefore crash the game every single time it was used. It sounds weird, I know, but I wanted to try and figure this out before I reported back to you. The bottom line is that this does appear to be a sort of bug, but it seems to be caused by console commands rather than anything within the actual code of the game itself. I also can't help but feel like that Sunstar should have some more attack phases beyond the "power of the sun" attack and they just failed to trigger during the successful battle, but that could be just me. Do you think anything should be done about this?

[CutmanMike]

Ohh... Yeah, none of the cheat commands are officially supported (because there's no good way to account for all of them), and using them against bosses can cause abnormal effects like this. Your best bet if you want to cheat is to use the Buddha command, which keeps you alive if you go below 1hp.

[Pikachu4Prez]

Ohh... Yeah, none of the cheat commands are officially supported (because there's no good way to account for all of them), and using them against bosses can cause abnormal effects like this. Your best bet if you want to cheat is to use the Buddha command, which keeps you alive if you go below 1hp.

I gotcha. I just wanted to make sure. Thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to hear me out and I'm sorry if I worried you about this at all.

[Flowey98]

I honestly never heard of this glitch, It is most likely because of your pc because I never encountered this glitch whenever I fought Sunstar, at least the game does not mind when you use cheats and mods in the singleplayer campaign unlike SRB2 (Sonic Robo Blast 2). If you want to quickly defeat Sunstar and (possibly) not worry about the bug, you can just use "give igmetalbladewep" in the console. I hope this helps! EDIT: I read through the topic and  turns out that CutmanMike probably does not know that the "god" cheat or "iddqd" still works in v6, I tried it and it still works.