Placing newly created vehicle tag on pad will corrupt tag

[Dave247]

I've tried to narrow down a core reproducible issue as much as possible to make it easy as possible for you guys but this has turned out to be a rather weird and inconsistent one to pin down. I even managed to shomehow crash the game which for all I know might not even be related. I'm also still early on playing through the story so my ability to test if this happens in other parts of the game is somewhat limited.

What I am confident that I have been able to nail down consistently though though is the following,

1. Start the third (Ninjago) level Elements of Surprise with the starter figures. (Batman, Gandalf, Wldstyle & Batmobile (Registered)
2. Play up until the third area fight and trigger Wldstyle's super build ability.

The message for placing down a unregistered vehicle figure for appear. At this point if you trigger a re-sync on the website, the batmobile will completely disappear from the toypad and box and things start becoming unstable.

Through my testing I encountered a lot of other ways where all kind of unintended things started happening, but the only thing I can trace it back to is that it has something to do with the Batmobile (or perhaps vehicle tags in general?) I've had the containers terminal open to monitor it didn't notice any errors.

I should also note that if I ignore the message and play the level as intended I was able to successfully complete it with no other issues.

[Dave247]

It appears it's not just limited to the third level either. I had the unregistered vehicle message appear again when interacting with the keystone. When I looked at the terminal output I noticed a unusually repeated amount of vehicle read requests. When I tried moving the Batmobile to a different pad without issue and tried interacting with the Keystone again, The unregistered vehicle message deosn;t appear.

I'm just going to try to play the game normally and not suck all the fun out of it by getting side traded going bug hunting. If I happen to encounter anything else I'll leave an update. Though I won't mind if there is something specific you nrrd me to try and report back on that would help.

[Dave247]

Alright last on and then I'm taking a break. When I quit the game but still had the emulator connected and running the following error/crash occurred, and the Batmobile had once again disappeared from the toybox/pad entirely.

node:events:497
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
      ^

Error: ESHUTDOWN: cannot send after transport endpoint shutdown, read
Emitted 'error' event on ReadStream instance at:
    at emitErrorNT (node:internal/streams/destroy:170:8)
    at emitErrorCloseNT (node:internal/streams/destroy:129:3)
    at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:90:21) {
  errno: -108,
  code: 'ESHUTDOWN',
  syscall: 'read'
}

Node.js v22.21.1

[Dave247]

After playing until after unlock X-PO I have another update. The message now shows a picture of X-PO, except from my understanding he's a gadget part of a unreleased/scrapped set and isn't even an option to select in the emulator. Perhaps that has something to do with it?

[Berny23]

This message normally appears if you scan a token and miss the required DLC or latest game update.

[Dave247]

Ah you're right. It's exactly the same when placing a newly created vehicle tag on the pad. I thought I was on to something where the icon would change but I should have checked first. Or should not even be happening either?

I'm playing the PS4 version on PS5 with the game updated to 2.4.3 which was the last update released and have all the content packs downloaded (not that it should matter in this case) so I can't think of what else might be triggering it.

I did try to set the emulator up in a virtual machine so I could try to see if I could replicate the problem in a different environment but ran into another problem #292 which didn't leave me with any other options.

[Dave247]

There is one other thing related to "updates". Whwn launching the game I always get the message how it failed to connect to the Lego Dimensions server, despite that I have updated the game and downloaded all of the DLC. At first I didn't think anything of it as I didn't think it did much seeing as the game has ended service. But now I'm wondering because of it failing that check there is some minor thing it's missing that is causing the issue.

I have an Australian copy of the disc on an Australian PSN account so it shouldn't be an issue with mismatched regions either, as that is the closest discussion I could find online to my problem (where the user had a Asian PSN account when the game was never released there).

The reason I keep thinking the emulator is involved somehow is because of how the vehicles keep disappearing/being deleted when it syncs after the problem occurs. If it was truly only a problem with the game itself, then it shouldn't be able to affect that?

I do have a Homebrewed PS3 and Wii U I could try the emulator on to see if I can replicate the same issue. Althrough it will be a hassle I can't think what else to narrow it down further.

[Berny23]

I had no problems (except RPCS3 crashing pretty often) with reaching 100 % on the EUR version for PS3.

Back then, I played every level pack, tried every character, upgraded all vehicles to max, collected all 1016 gold bricks, collected all 30 red bricks and even unlocked every doctor version.

That's why I am very sure that the toy pad emulator works as it should and that it is possible to reach 100 % completion. This goal was the reason for starting development of this project for me, by the way. ;)

[VladimirKuletski]

@Dave247 could you please try to reproduce issues with "old" code in Pi Zero image? Discussed here: #188
Would be helpful to get statistics for previous version also.

[Dave247]

@Dave247 could you please try to reproduce issues with "old" code in Pi Zero image? Discussed here: #188 Would be helpful to get statistics for previous version also.

Apologies for the delay in responding, I've been busy with other things the past week.

Thanks for the idea @VladimirKuletski, but unfortunately I should have mentioned I am using a RP4 so your image doesn't work for me as a LD SSID does not show up as the hardware is going to be too different. I did read you saying in that thread how the code itself should work on a RP4 and you never did find someone to try it which I would be willing to do if you were still looking for someone.

I noticed the image was dated the 11th of May last yeah so I I had the idea to try cloning and checking out the repo at that point in time using 9ec994a and following the readme instructions for that commit, but unfortunately it threw all kinds of errors and I wouldn't know what changes I would need to make to it to get it to work.
I did also see if I could get the dame commit for VM using both exclusively and a combination of the old and current instructions but same issue with the errors.

Side note but another good thing about containers is that I imagine it will make version control a lot easier with the ability of having perfectly created snapshots in time that can be reused in the future.

[VladimirKuletski]

I was able to go through old manual version on Pi 4. But have never seen a ready-to-go image

[Dave247]

I was able to reproduce the issue in a VM environment using RPCS3 and when comparing to it's built in toypad emulator I think I have finally managed to reach the root cause of the problem.

When creating a vehicle on the website, if you then place it on the toypad it will appear as the listed vehicle, but display the update message. This is where the problem lies, as doing this is not typical gameplay behaviour and appears to irreversibly corrupt the tag.

What clued me in to this was how RPCS3 handles creating vehicle tag, where it creates a blank tag, and it only after resetting or saving vehicle data does the blank tag turn into and is recognised as a vehicle. If you follow this intended procedure when using the site, where after creating a vehicle tag the first time to play it on the pad is when resetting or saving upgrade data, then everything will work as intended.

If however you create a new vehicle and immediately place it on the pad, the update message will appear and the tag becomes corrupted, as even if you try to overwrite it's data by resetting or saving the upgrade onto it, the issues when using keystone/toypad powers will occur as I have previously described.

Has vehicle tags perhaps changed how they work in past versions? I still haven;t figured out how to build an old version, but perhaps now I may not need to.