2.4 Bugs

[sloanjh (OP)]

Typing "0.1" and hitting enter in the Class Designer (F5) special-case range bands field results in a hang (I think this one's been around for a long time).  Could you also put in a "1,000 km" button?  I've got a laser with maximum range of 8,000 km and the damage on the summary screen is showing up all zeros.

Thanks,
John

[Brian Neumann]

Typing "0.1" and hitting enter in the Class Designer (F5) special-case range bands field results in a hang (I think this one's been around for a long time).  Could you also put in a "1,000 km" button?  I've got a laser with maximum range of 8,000 km and the damage on the summary screen is showing up all zeros.

Thanks,
John

It has been around for a while.  Any fraction input for either the speed or the range there will cause the program to hang.

Brian

[Steve Walmsley]

Typing "0.1" and hitting enter in the Class Designer (F5) special-case range bands field results in a hang (I think this one's been around for a long time).  Could you also put in a "1,000 km" button?  I've got a laser with maximum range of 8,000 km and the damage on the summary screen is showing up all zeros.

How did you create a laser with that range?  The minimum is supposed to be 10,000 km, which is range 1 as far as the program is concerned. A 10cm infrared laser has a range of 30,000 km.

Steve

[Brian Neumann]

I got an error while creating a new game.  I chose to use the SM race and find a system I liked.  When I was near the end of the create race I got an error

Error in AddPop
Error 3163 was generated by DAO.field
Field is to small to accept the amount of data you attempted to add. ...
This was just after the questions of did I want to convert ordinance and fighter factories and before the question of did I want to rename the homeworld.

As far as I can tell everything worked fine afterwords.  I advanced the time about two months just to check

[Steve Walmsley]

Typing "0.1" and hitting enter in the Class Designer (F5) special-case range bands field results in a hang (I think this one's been around for a long time).  Could you also put in a "1,000 km" button?  I've got a laser with maximum range of 8,000 km and the damage on the summary screen is showing up all zeros.

I have fixed the hang and prevented the entry of fractions but I can't put a lower band in because minimum firing range is 10,000 km. You can physically fire at a lower range but it is always treated as if you are firing at 10,000 km because of the way the effective range is calculated.

Steve

[sloanjh (OP)]

How did you create a laser with that range?  The minimum is supposed to be 10,000 km, which is range 1 as far as the program is concerned.
Steve

Fire control - I've only got 2400 km/s fire control (w 16000 km range) so I was building a 4x speed, 1/4x range fire control to put on my gunboats.  This gave me the a 4K range fire control, which masked out the damage numbers on my laser with zeros since the summary screen caps the laser's range at the max fire control range.  I ended up making a whole slew of bigger fire controls and temporarily putting them on the gunboat design so I could see the damage numbers all the way out and figure out where the knee was.

I think in a "best of all worlds" case, what I really would love is some combination of the following:

1) On the design window for lasers (and other energy weapons), the same damage vs. range table that shows on the F5 summary screen, so I can see the damage table of the laser as I'm building it.

2) On some sort of tech review screen (maybe accessed through the F5 design tab?) the same damage vs range table for all existing weapons for which it makes sense (beam?).  If I had to choose, I think this one is better to have than the preceding, since it would help you choose which weapon you want in the design

3) The same sort of thing for fire control - a tech review table with hit probability related to range and speed for all fire controls (or maybe one for missile and one for beam) at a given tracking speed (which could either be a similar dialog to target speed or typed in).

4) While typing this, it just occurred to me that I also feel the same way when designing sensors - I don't have a good feel for detection ranges for a "strength 3" thermal sensor.  So maybe the same sort of thing as above, except exposing detection range based on target signature

I realize this is a lot of specialized screen design, so I'm not convinced it's worth your time, however.

Thanks,
John

[sloanjh (OP)]

The minimum is supposed to be 10,000 km, which is range 1 as far as the program is concerned.

I think you're saying that you're using fixed width range bands (at 10,000 km intervals) when calculating damage, i.e. a laser shot at 19,999 km does the same damage as one at 10,000 km.  So my "4 4 2 2" laser damage line really means that it won't ever do 3 points of damage?  Is this correct?

An alternative would be to calculate the damage in floating point using (target distance/laser range) as the parameter in your damage formula and then round down to the nearest integer.

Also, are you doing the same thing for the hit probability vs. range calculation?  The 4K fire control I was trying was giving "0 0 0 0" as the hit probabilities.  Does this mean the fire control has no chance of hitting anything, even at point blank range?

Thanks,
John

[sloanjh (OP)]

Something weird is going on with PDCs in my construction queue.  When I try to reorder queue priorities (using the up and down arrows) they don't "stick" - if I flip to another planet and flip back the queue is back in the original order.

Not sure if it's connected but I get an "Invalid property value" error in cboClass_Click that was generated by UpDown when I do a "copy design" on these PDC classes on the F5 window.

John

[sloanjh (OP)]

More news on the PDC weirdness - it looks like trying to move a PDC triggers a reordering in the construction queue.  Try putting 2 PDCs of different classes into the queue, along with some non-PDC stuff.  If you start changing priorities with the arrows you'll eventually see spontaneous reordering when you pop away (e.g. to another planet) and pop back.  I had actually deleted everything except my 2 PDC build orders and adding the non-PDC stuff back in (so it would go in at the bottom).  Moving non-PDC didn't seem to do much, but when I tried to change the order of the 2 PDCs they decided they wanted to be interspersed with the non-PDC orders.

John

[Erik L]

More news on the PDC weirdness - it looks like trying to move a PDC triggers a reordering in the construction queue.  Try putting 2 PDCs of different classes into the queue, along with some non-PDC stuff.  If you start changing priorities with the arrows you'll eventually see spontaneous reordering when you pop away (e.g. to another planet) and pop back.  I had actually deleted everything except my 2 PDC build orders and adding the non-PDC stuff back in (so it would go in at the bottom).  Moving non-PDC didn't seem to do much, but when I tried to change the order of the 2 PDCs they decided they wanted to be interspersed with the non-PDC orders.

John

It does this with 1 PDC also. It seems to want to keep the order it had. Only way around this I've found is pause the non-PDC orders if you REALLY want that PDC soon.

[Þórgrímr]

Having a problem with the shipyards. I have five yards and five classes of ships. Liburnia, Megellus, Colonia, Cargo, and Spiculum, a terraformer. But the fly in the ointment is that only the 'warship' classes, Liburnia and Megellus, are showing up in the class assignment on the shipyards.

Also it will only allow me to assign those to the first three yards, the other two show no class type at all to assign to the yards.



Cheers,

[sloanjh (OP)]

[quote="

[sloanjh (OP)]

It does this with 1 PDC also. It seems to want to keep the order it had. Only way around this I've found is pause the non-PDC orders if you REALLY want that PDC soon.

That's what I was seeing.  I've just been deleting out the other stuff, putting the PDCs (that I REALLY want :-)  Fortunately, I have a cheap PDC that I can load up with lasers and build quickly (not sure if the lasers will even work through atmosphere, but the politicians don't care :-)

[Þórgrímr]

Have you checked that the SY have enough capacity to handle your designs?  I've not seen anything like this, but I have noticed that it's filtering so that only classes that can be built by that yard are presented as options for retool.

John

Thats a good possibility, let me check it out and get back.




Cheers,

[Þórgrímr]

John, yup, that was the problem. Thanks for the information dude. Man I was getting frustrated as to why three out of the five yards were able to build my scouts but the other two were not able to.  :roll:




Cheers,