4.26 Bugs

[sloanjh]

I have a PDC on Earth which is taking damage from an NPR's UV laser.  It looks like the "lasers can't penetrate 1 atm" code is getting missed for PDCs.

And yes, this means that humanity's in trouble :-)

John

[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?

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

Yeah, the awaiting acknowledgement part was to do with their grade. I just haven't noticed it before since I would be doing pulses greater than a couple of minutes.

The thing with the 'imminent action' part is that the Scout had no way of detecting the missiles as the search radar was designed for long range detection of ships and my thermal sensors wouldn't have detected any missiles until they were 20k km off (judging by another engagement with Precursor missiles). So, I would have thought that if I can not detect the threat then it shouldn't interrupt?

I flicked through the DB to see if I could track down records that could be attributed to those errors - but no joy =/

[Beersatron]

I have a colony in Seattle which is two jumps from Sol, when setting up orders to return to Earth using the 'show all pops' checkbox the intermediate jumps are set correctly, and the final command has the right text. But, the fleets will settle into orbit of the sun and not earth.

Another thing to do with the 'show all pops' commands is that if I want to have my fleet refuel at earth and then resupply at earth it will try to add the intermediate jumps for both. The 'system locations available' list doesn't update after the first refuel order.

[sloanjh]

The thing with the 'imminent action' part is that the Scout had no way of detecting the missiles as the search radar was designed for long range detection of ships and my thermal sensors wouldn't have detected any missiles until they were 20k km off (judging by another engagement with Precursor missiles). So, I would have thought that if I can not detect the threat then it shouldn't interrupt?

And it's all about you, is it?

Seriously, what I meant by that is that Aurora will also interrupt for the benefit of the NPR.  So if the NPR is having a targeting failure (because e.g. you're out of range or something), it will interrupt every 5 seconds because it's confused.  And if it's running point defense against an incoming salvo, ditto.  In particular, I'm pretty sure that if they've got missile launchers with a 10 second cycle time that are firing on you, then Aurora will interrupt every 10 seconds so that it can go through the code to launch the missiles (which doesn't happen during the pulses).  And if there's some launchers firing on "even" and some on "odd" timesteps, then it will interrupt every 5 seconds.

I think the fundamental reason for these interrupts is that there are certain things that are only done at the beginning or end of the update, not during the impulses.  One of these is looking for new conditional orders if the order list has run out; I suspect that another is weapons fire.  I suspect this might be why Aurora seems to be interrupting whenever contacts are gained or lost by the NPR - it needs to go through the code to decide whether to fire.  Itmay also be that Aurora simply doesn't distinguish between player and NPR races when doing interrupts.

I pretty much abandoned my 4.26 campaign today (unless a patch comes out that interrupts a LOT less frequently when NPR are sailing around in a non-hostile home system) - I'm pretty much unable to get an update that's bigger than one timestep any more, which means I'd have to crank the timestep size up to 1 day in order to make decent progress in the game.

I flicked through the DB to see if I could track down records that could be attributed to those errors - but no joy =/

I doubt you'll find anything in the DB about this - I think it's all algorithms that are in code.

John

[Beersatron]

The thing with the 'imminent action' part is that the Scout had no way of detecting the missiles as the search radar was designed for long range detection of ships and my thermal sensors wouldn't have detected any missiles until they were 20k km off (judging by another engagement with Precursor missiles). So, I would have thought that if I can not detect the threat then it shouldn't interrupt?

And it's all about you, is it?

[Andrew]

I have spotted a couple of errors in a fight with an NPR
I started launching missiles while the aliens where set to Neutral , as far as I can tell this means that neither of us can engage the incoming missiles with antimissiles, although my ships have been firing gauss cannon in self defense agaisnt the same missile salvo's which they could not engage with antimissiles.(I get Error 6 Error in Fireallweapons also rarer Error 19 Error in automatedantimissilefire object variable or with block variable not et)
I also saw some size 0 nuclear detonations from a missile launch from my fighters suggesting that the NPR may have size 0 warheads on its antimissiles which failed to shoot down my missiles

[Steve Walmsley]

Steve,
Just had one of my officers retire due to health reasons, previously assigned to "Member of 0".  As it turns out this particular officer was assigned to an espionage team that had been captured.  Evidently somehow they had made it back home without telling anyone.  This goes along with another previously reported bug about teams not being disbanded correctly and replacements not working out right for teams.  

I have run through every place in the code where teams are disbanded or officers retired/killed etc. and there were several places where this wasn't being handled correctly. I think I have now found and fixed them all so you shouldn't see this in v4.3.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

I've started occasionally getting the following error during regular (not economic) updates:

Error in AddToShippingLineWealth

Error 3201 was generated by DAO.Recordset
You cannot add or change a record because a related record is required in table 'ShippingLines'

When it pops up, I usually get the same error a few (~3-4) times at once.

I am pretty sure this is caused by an NPR not having a shipping line. I thought I had prevented this situation from occuring but it would seem not . I have another look through the code to see if I can find a hole in my logic.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

"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!

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

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....

Yes, that's exactly what happened

The political modifier was being updated but, as you guessed, the check for treaty changes was only taking place in the 5-day update. I have fixed it so it takes immediate effect.

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.

The opinion drop is based on when the missiles hit but that is a good suggestion about fire control.

Steve

[Paul M]

Ok the business with maintenance costs for bases is seriously wierd.  The only bases that don't cost maintenance on my homeworld outside of the original missile bases are my large anti-ship bases.  All the other types are being charged maintenance. I was thinking it might be because they weren't classed as PDC but even after re-classifying them all as PDCs the maintenance cost still shows up.  If I can give you more information on the matter to help track this down let me know.

[Steve Walmsley]

Ok the business with maintenance costs for bases is seriously wierd.  The only bases that don't cost maintenance on my homeworld outside of the original missile bases are my large anti-ship bases.  All the other types are being charged maintenance. I was thinking it might be because they weren't classed as PDC but even after re-classifying them all as PDCs the maintenance cost still shows up.  If I can give you more information on the matter to help track this down let me know.

It appears this is just a display problem. The PDCs are being excluded from paying maintenance in the 5-day increment but they weren't excluded from the list of ships displayed on the Mining/Maintenance tab. Fixed for v4.3.

Steve

[Paul M]

Steve, is this for any base "built as a PDC" or those that have the hull type Planetary Defence Centre?  I am asking because I used other hull types for some of my bases "anti-missile base" and "sensor outpost."

If it is fixed at last thanks.

[Kurt]

Steve -

I've been playing around with 4.26 to stay current, and to test some ideas.  I've been having some problems, though, due to errors that keep cropping up.  Basically, I've been testing an idea, and in every campaign I always end up getting a series of errors that crop up, as follows:

Error in LoadPopulations, Error 6 was generated by Aurora, Overflow, Please report to...

followed by -

Error in Update AllSensors, Error 6 was generated by Aurora, Overflow, Please report to...

There will be one or more of the above errors, but I can get through them okay, but...Aurora will only advance 2 to 6 hours once this error shows up.  I originally thought that this was due to something that an NPR was doing out of sight of my race.  This was eminiently possible, as my race hadn't ventured out of its home system, while the NPR set up at the start of the game probably was exploring far and wide.  However, after having my last campaign come to an end because of this problem, I set up a campaign to test my idea for a campaign/race without any NPR's.   After 14.5 years, my race has not ventured out of its own system, so no NPR's have been generated.  Or so I thought.  

While writing this post, I deecided to check in the database to confirm the lack of NPR's, and I found that there were actually five NPR's listed in the database, and a system in addition to my home system, in spite of the fact that this is the only game on the database.  I then realized what happened.  I opted to not go with the standard Sol system setup, and instead had an SM race generated, and then generated systems under the SM race until I got the system I wanted (so that I could test my campaign concept).  I think that NPR's were generated automatically on suitable planets as I generated the solar systems, and then weren't deleted when their system was deleted.  And I forgot to delete one of the systems that I was keeping in reserve in case I didn't generate a better system.  This may have contained an NPR, and may have been what was causing the problem.  I deleted all of the the races, species, and systems aside from my test race/species, and the precursors, and then tried a time advance.  I still get the loadpop error, but the updatasensors error is gone and the time advances properly.  

I am convinced that the errors are due to something that the NPR was doing.  In all three campaigns where I've had this problem the errors started pretty far along, 10-15 years in, however, I don't know if they are all happening at the same time or not.  

Kurt

[James Patten]

I had a team that was on a ship that got blew up by an enemy, in which the captain of the ship got killed.  The team members did not get killed, and the team still existed, albeit in limbo and the members had no location on the Officer window.