4.26 Bugs

[Paul M]

Steve, in my new conventional start I just completed my first PDC and it is showing up in my maintenance window for my homeworld.  Is there someway to get it to be no maintence as it should be?

[sloanjh]

"Sensor Data reveals that the alien ship class Civilian Cart III (Civilians) is capable of 2390237 km/s"

~8*light speed - that's pretty good for Nuclear Pulse Engines!

Seriously, this happened a lot more in 4.0b than 4.2x.  IIRC this happens when timesteps change and the civie is still in view of sensors.  There was a bug in 4.0b where the time marks for delta_x didn't agree with the time marks for delta_t (an off-by-one thing), which would give incorrect velocities whenever the update size changed.  It mostly affected the reported speed of alien contacts (possibly only passive contacts), but it also hit civies this way.  I suspect that this is still going on.

John

[waresky]

1) PDC are in my maintenance,same as above.
But r in 4.0..4.1..4.2..not ever..but very many campaign ive found this bug.

So if ive 20 barracks..are very cost:)))
ok srry for my terrible english mates.

2) And second vicious bug,must restart program if happened,are the Cycle orders error..occur sometimes in 2 campaigns..and am must restart whole campaign,because stopp me when am check Task group who r bugged.. Amen

[alanwebber]

Shipping Lines Error


Steve

I'm also getting the AddToShippingLineWealth error (see previous message).

I've been running a game for about 8 years and both my shipping lines have 1 colony ship only. No ships have been built apart from these since the start of the game. They both have a wealth of 300-400. As this is the first time I've run a game with civilian shipping, I'm not sure if this is expected or not but it's rather put a crimp in my colonisation plans as I was relying on them to move infrastructure etc. I've now had to build more freighters and colony ships than I expected to..

The error occurs about every 2 months and needs up to 10 clicks to clear.

Regards

Alan

[sloanjh]

"Sensor Data reveals that the alien ship class Civilian Cart III (Civilians) is capable of 2390237 km/s"

~8*light speed - that's pretty good for Nuclear Pulse Engines!

Seriously, this happened a lot more in 4.0b than 4.2x.  IIRC this happens when timesteps change and the civie is still in view of sensors.  There was a bug in 4.0b where the time marks for delta_x didn't agree with the time marks for delta_t (an off-by-one thing), which would give incorrect velocities whenever the update size changed.  It mostly affected the reported speed of alien contacts (possibly only passive contacts), but it also hit civies this way.  I suspect that this is still going on.

More info - it appears that this is happening when the civies transit a JP into a neighboring system.  I have the far side of the JP under observation with passive sensors, but not actives.

John

[sloanjh]

I've now got trade relations (both ways) with my neighboring NPR.  He's got some ships plying the trade lane between Earth and Mars.  The problem is that I'm now getting interrupts at an irregular spacing on the order of an hour (I'm using 5 minute increments and 1 day updates).  I strongly suspect that the iterrupts are being caused by him gaining and losing contact with the (neutral to him) merchant shipping in my home system.  This has vastly slowed down the amount of wall-clock time it takes me to get through each (5-day) econ update - I've got from needing 5 pushes of the time advance to needing 10s or even 100.  I think the filtering on when a contact status change with neutral commercial shipping causes an interrupt needs to be tweaked.

While we're at it, I don't notice any transponder signals coming off the NPR ships.

John

[sloanjh]

It looks like NPR point defense is still broken.  My friendly (actually they're neutral) next-door aliens decided to send a major squadron (~6 anti-missile escorts (from resolution 1 active sensors), ~4 capital ships) to visit Earth, without asking permission or telling me their intentions.  I decided to play out the scenario of Earth panicking and attacking them (I saved the DB first so I can go back to my real game) just to see how my pitifully low-tech fleet would do against a hi tech fleet.  My GB squadron launched a total of 22 missiles in 8 salvos.  The aliens just watched the missiles into their ships - neither missile nor beam point defense would engage.  

Another thing that doesn't look right - even though they've taken missile hits from me, their relations are still showing up as "neutral" - they're even still giving me trade access.  So I think the diplomatic penalties due to an act of war might be broken (unless they'll kick in at the next econ update).  Along a similar vein, I haven't noticed their rating go down even when I detect them on actives....

John

PS - The puny 4-point warheads in the salvo barely scratched the paint on the aliens.

[Paul M]

Steve an update on the PDC issue.  This is very odd.  My Skywatch Sensor Outposts cost maintenance but my PDC and MDB don't.  All and all it is wierd.  The Skywatches are classified as PDCs so I am not sure why this is.

Another thing came up, I was running 5 day updates when one ship ran out of fuel.  I had to switch to 1 day updates and set the pulse to 1 day as it pesists in telling me the ship is out of fuel.  Could you maybe change this to something less disruptive?  I know it is out fuel and have a ship on the way to refuel it so perhaps this event should not interupt the game?  This is a bit tricky since being out of fuel is important information but on the other hand it interupts the relief effort.

[sloanjh]

Another thing came up, I was running 5 day updates when one ship ran out of fuel.  I had to switch to 1 day updates and set the pulse to 1 day as it pesists in telling me the ship is out of fuel.  Could you maybe change this to something less disruptive?  I know it is out fuel and have a ship on the way to refuel it so perhaps this event should not interupt the game?  This is a bit tricky since being out of fuel is important information but on the other hand it interupts the relief effort.

Have you tried deleting the ship's orders?  I think that stops the spam (except for the message during econ updates).

John

[sloanjh]

It looks like NPR point defense is still broken.  My friendly (actually they're neutral) next-door aliens decided to send a major squadron (~6 anti-missile escorts (from resolution 1 active sensors), ~4 capital ships) to visit Earth, without asking permission or telling me their intentions.  I decided to play out the scenario of Earth panicking and attacking them (I saved the DB first so I can go back to my real game) just to see how my pitifully low-tech fleet would do against a hi tech fleet.  My GB squadron launched a total of 22 missiles in 8 salvos.  The aliens just watched the missiles into their ships - neither missile nor beam point defense would engage.  

Another thing that doesn't look right - even though they've taken missile hits from me, their relations are still showing up as "neutral" - they're even still giving me trade access.  So I think the diplomatic penalties due to an act of war might be broken (unless they'll kick in at the next econ update).  Along a similar vein, I haven't noticed their rating go down even when I detect them on actives....

John

PS - The puny 4-point warheads in the salvo barely scratched the paint on the aliens.

I think I understand what's going on here.  It looks like the NPR did (eventually) drop their opinion (as measured by relation points) towards me.  The problem is that it looks like the check for change in treaty status isn't performed until the end of the 5-day update.  So while I was throwing salvo after salvo of missiles at them, their admiral was stuck in the automated phone menu at their foreign ministry trying to find a person to whom he could explain that they'd just sufferred an unprovoked attack and could someone pleaaase change the political status so that he switch from "Neutral - do not fire upon" to "At War - blow those stinky aliens to smithereens" rules of engagement....

I'm not sure if the opinion drop was when they detected my missiles or (more likely) when they were actually hit the first time.  You might want to put some thought into this, e.g. go back to the suggestion that a race can tell when someone has them locked up with fire control.

John

[Beersatron]

I have a Task Group of 8 GE's that I normally give the orders:

1. Survey Nearest Body
2. If fuel less than 30% then refuel
3. If Supply less than 20% then resupply

I will then have them move to a system and on the entry gate do 'Transit and Divide' which works great - they go off as individual sub fleets and do their thing.

Now, the problem occurred when I got into a very large system with a million-and-one asteroids spread over what I think is 50billion KM square of space. I didn't have any tankers at this point of the game so they had to head back to Earth to refuel - running out of fuel before they even got to the exit gate. So, I managed to do some manual fuel transfer and got them all back to Earth whilst building some supply ships (flagged as both Tanker and Supply).

The next go at surveying the system ended the same, although this time I had the supply ship on hand to help. To stop the fuel warnings and the sub-pulse stops I removed any affected sub-fleet's orders. As they were being refueled I would move a sub-fleet to one of 4 waypoints setup in the outer asteroid belt and once they were all ready I went into the head fleet and gave it the orders noted above. I then checked to incl default orders and conditional orders and hit 'copy'.

1. The copy command needs there to be an actual order in the list - so I couldn't copy the default and conditional orders.
2. I gave the head fleet an order to activate transponder but to do so I had to click on a location which meant that it then headed off to the planet I had picked before it would turn on it's transponder.
3. the primary default order copied fine, as did the 1st conditional order. But, the 2nd conditional order did not copy correctly. The check should have been 'supply less than 20%' but it was set to 'no condition' and the action should have been 'resupply at nearest colony or supply ship' but it was set to 'refuel at nearest colony or supply ship'


tldr: the 'copy commands' button has a couple of issues  

[sloanjh]

On NPR point defense targetting:  I restored back to just before I opened fire on my neighbors heading towards Sol, then moved them into a hostile stance by hand after I'd fired on them.  The good news is that their point defense missiles seam to be working.  The bad news is that they've got some UV lasers that are causing problems.  I keep getting "Error in NPRTargetting" (maybe 1/2 dozen per update).  When I look in the message list, I find a lot of "Grimsby 001 - Fire Control S04 128-4000 targetting Brisbane-A III at 52m km" and "Energy weapon fire cannot penetrate an atmosphere with pressure 1.0" messages (Brisbane-A III is Earth).  Looks like there are two problems with this:

1) The lasers are targetting Earth from WAY outside of range.
2)  They can't penetrate the atmosphere.

Presumably the errors are coming from one of these two (although I guess they could be from some other targetting and don't log a message).

John

[Beersatron]

I jumped into a an unexplored JP and triggered a new NPR, on the generation of the NPR I got some errors, but I forgot to write them down. The new system is a Nebula, possibly a factor? I think one of the error messages was 'add new tech'.

Now, after every update, I get the following messages:

Error in LoadFleets
Error 3077 was generated by DAO.Recordset
Syntax error (missing operator) in expression.

then:

Error in LoadFleets
Error 94 was generated by Aurora
Invalid use of Null

then a bit of a pause (as other functions are called I think) resulting in:

Error in SetupSensorChecks
Error 3058 was generated by DAO.Recordset
Index or primary key cannot contain a Null value.

[Beersatron]

I have a scout in that above mentioned NPR system and he just got into the NPR's Active Sensor range of the ships around the planet. I have given it an order to move to a moon of the planet, but it is now saying 'awaiting acknowledgement' and the time pulses seem to be stuck on 5secs, no matter what main/sub pulse I choose.

There are no event notifications at all, and I can not detect missiles - especially since it is a nebula and missiles do not work in a nebula.

Which brings me to a point on the design of the NPR ships. They appear to be pretty low on armor and the Nebula is a class 5 so restricting to 500km/s per armor level. Could you maybe give priority to armor level for NPR's that start in a Nebula? Also, might be a good idea to totally ignore missile tech. Some of the contacts are doing that thing were they are trying to open the range - think that is a standard missile ship tactic?

[sloanjh]

I have a scout in that above mentioned NPR system and he just got into the NPR's Active Sensor range of the ships around the planet. I have given it an order to move to a moon of the planet, but it is now saying 'awaiting acknowledgement' and the time pulses seem to be stuck on 5secs, no matter what main/sub pulse I choose.

There are no event notifications at all, and I can not detect missiles - especially since it is a nebula and missiles do not work in a nebula.

Which brings me to a point on the design of the NPR ships. They appear to be pretty low on armor and the Nebula is a class 5 so restricting to 500km/s per armor level. Could you maybe give priority to armor level for NPR's that start in a Nebula? Also, might be a good idea to totally ignore missile tech. Some of the contacts are doing that thing were they are trying to open the range - think that is a standard missile ship tactic?

I think "awaiting acknowledgement" means that you have the fleet training option turned on, and your fleet is stuck in the order delay.  They should snap out of it within a minute (I think).

If you go to SM mode, I suspect you'll see a bunch of messages telling you you've been interrupted due to "imminent action", hence the 5 second updates.  I think this can happen when the NPR is having targetting problems - I've been seeing it in the combat I've been running recently in my home system.  It also seems like Aurora goes to 5 second iterrupts whenever hostile missiles are detected in flight.  This has been causing me some trouble fighting my battle, since the 5 second updates take (I think) 5-10 seconds each.

I got a similar error to the one you saw (about NPR tech generation) when I found the NPR a while back.  I haven't noticed any ill effects on the NPR, though - it seems to have fairly well functioning ship designs etc.

John