How to Fix Homie Cooldown Bugs

[V] IdolNinja

[V] IdolNinja

Volition Staff
Someone on SA found a fix for the homie cooldown that involves using a hex editor to edit your save file:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...serid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=6#post398149530

I have not personally tried this fix yet since my homies are okay, but other forumers here have confirmed it.

Daryl Surat said:
Until a patch comes out that properly prevents this from happening, here is my current fix/workaround for the problem I previously posted, in which my Vehicle Delivery homie option on the phone would become permanently unavailable, even if I'd quit the game and reload. I didn't figure out any of this. Some random user on the official Saints Row 3 community message board worked this thing out pretty much by himself. You'd think they'd have Volition support people reading that thing considering there are dedicated sections for technical issues, but no. Anyway.

First up, get a hex editor. I used one called HxD. Next, find your savegame files. They're stored in a strange spot within your Steam folder: \userdata\[your Steam ID number]\55230\remote. The savegame names will start with "sr3save_00.sr3s_pc" and increment from there. Make backup copies of these just to be safe. I didn't need to revert back, but you want a safety net in case things don't work.

Open your save in the hex editor. Now goto offset 4330 in hexadecimal. It'll look something like this:

Code: 
Offset(h) 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F
---------------------------------------------------------
00004330  01 00 00 00 44 05 EE 36 05 00 00 00 41 0E 85 B7
00004340  01 00 00 00 A7 D8 22 B6 08 00 00 00 A8 41 41 84
00004350  01 00 00 00 BF 38 27 BE 00 00 00 00 F9 B1 BD 6E
00004360  00 00 00 00 7A F8 D1 C2 00 00 00 00 2A C2 69 FD
00004370  00 00 00 00 7A 4F 2A 9E 00 00 00 00 08 BE D4 E9
00004380  01 00 00 00 6C 6B B4 70 00 00 00 00 25 58 6B 50
00004390  00 00 00 00 B5 71 B7 9F 00 00 00 00 B9 E7 8A 86
000043A0  00 00 00 00 25 68 56 8C 00 00 00 00 70 2B A8 4D
000043B0  06 00 00 00 D7 65 CD BB 00 00 00 00 06 4E 2E 8D
000043C0  00 00 00 00 EA 13 14 11 00 00 00 00 D9 22 48 26
000043D0  00 00 00 00 4A E7 16 FE 06 00 00 00 49 10 FF B7
000043E0  00 00 00 00 DE BC C0 7E 00 00 00 00 B3 05 D4 C0

We are only going to look at the contents of two columns: 00 and 08.

The different values correspond to different statuses of the phone entries, with each offset row presumably representing a specific homie. For the sake of this fix, all that matters is that "01" means "is listed on your phone and not greyed out." Whether they'd be busy or not is another matter, presumably controlled by where you are in the story.

00 means "not being displayed at all" which would be the case if you didn't unlock something yet. I opted to just leave those untouched. Whether changing them to 01 would unlock things early is not something I care to delve into. Other numbers presumably refer to cooldown timers. From what I gather, once you call a homie, it sets the status value to 06, greys itself out and then counts back down to 01 at which point you can call them again. For whatever reason, it seems there are occasions where values greater than 06 get put in these fields, which amount to them just being grayed out forever even if you reload.

Solution? As long as there was a value other than "00" in either column 00 or 08 that was greater than "06", I changed it to a "01". In the case of my savegame listed above, there was only one single such value: the 08 over there in 4340 offset column 8. I saved the changes, loaded the game, and presto: I could once again have my Manapult delivered right to me for those times when I needed to quickly get on top of a building to collect drug pallets.

No idea if the problem will reoccur, but that's how I fixed it. Looks like nobody else was having that problem here anyway!
Click to expand...
 
I can confirm that this works. However, it seems as though some phone items (characters, equipment) are not in this block of addresses. I went through the offset range of 00004330 through 00004410 (which is actually longer than the quoted offset range, just for sake of being thorough), and Jenny, from the Space DLC, is still unavailable for me. I'm using a process of elimination to figure out which offset address relates to what/whom, and I'll post that when I'm done, but I have a feeling Jenny's outside this range somewhere else in the file because she's DLC. If anyone could shed some light on that, it would be awesome.
 
I can't call Sexy Kitten since some weeks, I try this solution I can call all the character of SR3 but I still can't call her.

But it's not like she's busy or something like that, I just can't call her ( like when you have already call this character ).
 
With Corrodias back for a few days, I was inspired to do some save-game testing to map-out where each homie is located in the save game.
Hopefully this info can get added into the Save Editor.
If not, at least people now know where to look to reset a specific homie that might be locked.

My results can be found below:
Code: 
Offset    Homie

4330    Unknown
4338    Vehicle Delivery
4340    Pierce
4348    Shaundi
4350    Saints Backup
4358    Zombie Gat
4360    Angel
4368    Angel (Masked)
4370    Kinzie
4378    Zimos
4380    Oleg
4388    Viola
4390    Josh Burk
4398    Nyteblade
43a0    Mayor Reynolds
43a8    Tank (Challenger)
43b0    Helicopter (Tornado)
43b8    VTOL (F-69)
43c0    SWAT Team
43c8    Zombie Horde
43d0    Police Forgiveness
43d8    Gang Forgiveness
43e0    Mayor Reynolds Favor
43e8    Taxi (Does not Grey-out)

DLC Homies

16690    Unknown (Possibly Johnny TAG)
16698    Cheapy D
166a0    Angry Tiger
166a8    Sexy Kitten
166b0    Sad Panda
166b8    Tammy Toliver
166c0    Yarnie Delivery
166c8    Jenny
166d0   Space Brutina
166d8    Aisha Brutina

Note for 4330, No matter what I change it to, nothing in my list changes.
And, in my list, Johnny TAG is greyed out, but no matter what I change, he never becomes available.
Yes, I do have all of the DLC, and I even re-played Trouble w/ Clones to see if maybe I could unlock him again.
In my save, 16690 stays perma-set to 09. If I change it, and reload, TAG stays greyed out, and if I re-save it, it gets reset to 09.

As a side note, there is another section in the save that starts at 0x18ac8 that appears to also be homie states (same format) but changing these yielded no changes in my game.
 
That's probably accurate for vanilla SR3. Be warned, though, if you have a modded homies.xtbl file, that can change! The 4-byte integer that immediately precedes the status flag is a hash of the homie's name as defined in homies.xtbl. If you add a homie, the position of the homies on that list can change, and the only way to find them is to look for the hash you want.

I put a "fix homies" button onto the WIP version to set any unlocked ones to 1, but I should probably go ahead and add a full editor.
 
The only thing I modded my Homies.xtbl was to remove the mission restrictions for testing. (I called every homie to see what byte changed from 01 to 04/06. 04 when they're on their way, 06 when they're on cooldown)
All of their names remain unchanged, and no homies were added or removed.
 
this didnt work for me as the string was 01 for vehicle delivery :(
 
Do you have a modified Homies.xtbl in your game folder?
If you do, does it add/change the positioning of any of the Homies?

As Corrodias outlined above, if your homies.xtbl is modified to change the order or name of any of the homies, it will mess up the list I've compiled.
 
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