Did you ever retest this with TILED_ICON_MAP like I mentioned previously? You were doing some icon manipulation that was affected by the upgrade so this issue could simply be related to that.

Ah, my mistake.

After running your demo with the problem blocks uncommented I didn't see the dynamic .rsc getting appreciably bigger after the first run; it got a little bigger but not by much. But I also did not see any icons output, so I couldn't compare good vs. bad results. (You refer to files like goodH3.dmi and such but those are not included in your demo.) All I could do was run the program and look at the file size, which isn't so much productive. If there's a problem I'll need more substance in the demo to find out. I did get the "bugged" message, but the fix to your other issue made that go away.

One thing I did notice is that none of the problem sections that are supposed to contribute to the .dyn.rsc file growing actually involve icon operations. I believe what is causing the dynamic .rsc to grow is that you're assigning /icon datums to an image which is being made into an overlay, and the act of assigning that icon is implicitly calling fcopy_rsc() to make that icon a cache entry--so if that's all there is to it, then that behavior is actually normal.

As for the inconsistent icons I have nothing to work with in this demo. There is no way to tell if an icon is being made correctly or not. What I would suggest is that in your game, you should try keeping track of the parameters used to make the broken icon--e.g. what color selection was used, etc. Once you have that info you should be able to distill the issue down to a single test case.

It also happens most, if not all the time with 'Players - Merchant Base.dmi', but during our beta test of NEStalgia, it was not limited to just that icon.

Here's the final version of a demo where I trimmed out everything but what is required to trigger this.

[Demo removed]

I set up two icon cache lists and without them, the bug will never occur. They are named head_cache and body_cache. In the update_icons() proc I left the lines which create a dynamic icon from existing dynamic icons as they are also needed to trigger this issue.

Here's the lowdown: After a base icon is created it is placed into one of the icon caches. Later, before creating a new base icon, it'll check in the cache and use that first instead of creating a new icon. Sometime after creating an icon using one of those cached icons, when it goes to create a new base icon it fails to create it properly either not scaling correctly or improperly setting the icon's size.