4.2 Bugs

[schroeam]

Steve in 4.22 I created a Xenological team then a new officer came up that I wanted to assign to it.

First I tried to assign one of the existing officers to "not assigned" in the officers window under the assignment section team and this didn't work, he remained in the team.

Second I tried "disband team" thinking I would just remake the team with the new person in it.  This does not work as the old team members no longer show up as assignable to the new team in the team creation window.

Is there no way to make them so you can assign who you want and change them over time?

Paul,
I've ran into the same issue, only with team members who die, yet still contribute to the team.  What I have to do is disband the team and then individually move the team members to the planet where they are, or where you want them to be, then create a new team with the members you want.  I haven't tried just moving the individual team members out of the team without disbanding said team and then assigning a new member.  I think this should be possible, I just haven't tried it.

Adam.

[Paul M]

Ok a bit of a workaround found...

When I looked a the team members they were assigned to:  "Member of 0"  I then manually re-assigned them to a ground unit, then unassigned them and could then assign them to the new team.

The problem is the "Member of 0" I guess.

I think the code needs looking into there Steve.

[sloanjh (OP)]

Steve in 4.22 I created a Xenological team then a new officer came up that I wanted to assign to it.

First I tried to assign one of the existing officers to "not assigned" in the officers window under the assignment section team and this didn't work, he remained in the team.

Second I tried "disband team" thinking I would just remake the team with the new person in it.  This does not work as the old team members no longer show up as assignable to the new team in the team creation window.

Is there no way to make them so you can assign who you want and change them over time?

I think I ran into this in 4.0b - I think assigning to an actual command (as opposed to "unassigned") will work.

John

[ussdefiant]

Hmm, a problem has popped up with me trying to use torpedo launchers as a PD weapon after 3 Precursors popped up and only one of them attempted to charge my pre-genned starting fleet. Meanwhile, the other two just sit back and use ECM to prevent my Missile Cruisers from firing on them.

When the enemy missiles get within range in which my torpedoes theoretically might be able to fire, an error message pops up, the torps apparently don't fire, and my ships get ravaged.

AutomatedAntimissileFire
Error 91 Object Variable or With block variable not set

after clicking through a bunch of those, the only things i see from the torpedoes is a bunch of "No Attempt to fire as the Fusion Torpedo is out of range" messages in the log.

[Paul M]

The disband team command leaves them assigned to "Member of 0" and you are correct John assigning them to a command and then unassigning them gets around the problem.

[rdgam]

Thought I had a game stopper here.
I was getting an error message every cycle and the time was limited to 5 seconds.

Error in SelectNPRTarget
Error 6 generated by Aurora
Overflow

I was getting about 6 of these each cycle.
I tracked it down to an NPR had put a xeno team on a planet with Precursors in the system.
The xeno team finally discovered a tracking station.
I believe the Precursors wanted to kill it, but this error was generated instead.

I removed the colony and the team via deletes in the database.
Next cycle did not give the error.  Hope you can track this down.

[SteveAlt]

Just realized we're up to 4.22, so starting a new thread (since there's already 7 pages in the 4.1 thread ).

On the Manage SY tab of the F2 screen, Civie fleets are showing up as potential "target" task groups in the "Create Task" area.  In other words, you can accidentally send your new construction into a civie fleet.

Found and fixed.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

Similar Issue:  On the Task Group (F12) screen, "civilian shipping" shows up in the "Task Force" pull-down to which task groups can be assigned.

Also fixed.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

This is on a fresh installation.

I created a new game, selecting USA as Racial and Commander Themes but it looks like the Commander Theme has been set incorrectly.

The ranks are R1 through R8 and have Rear Admiral (lower half) plus Rear Admiral (upper half). The R7 (Admiral) is called Aura Gupta and none of the other commander names look 'American'.

Pretty sure the USA Commander Theme is only R1 through R7?

I updated the US theme. Those are actually the correct ranks, although both types of Rear Admiral are usually just referred to as Rear Admiral. Interestingly I found that a few navies, notably Russia and Brazil, don't have any rank equivalent for Commodore (the US Rear Admiral Lower Half). They both promote straight from Captain to Rear Admiral. The Russian rank equivalents for Captain, Commander and Lieutenant Commander are Captain 1st Rank, Captain 2nd Rank and Captain 3rd Rank so I invented a new Senior Captain 1st Rank to fill the gap so the Russian ranks would match the major NATO countries. I hope the Russian Navy doesn't mind . For the Brazil theme (which is in the DB but I'm not sure if it has been released yet), I didn't include a new rank but I extended the ranks down to Capitão-Tenente, which is equivalent to a Lieutenant.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

I think there may be a subtle sequencing bug in orbital motion.  Two things I've noticed on the Earth-Mars run:

1)  My civies sometimes end up where Mars was, rather than at Mars.  One possibility (non-bug) is that the update length was just a hair too short, so that the fleet didn't quite make Mars orbit, then Mars moved away.  The other possibility is that it made it to Mars and did stuff, but wasn't properly flagged as being in Mars orbit and so didn't move with Mars.  I had thought it was the former, but....

2)  I just got a new error message "Colony 01 failed to Load Colonists Earth.  Any additional orders will be on hold until this problem is resolved" on my colony ship, which I've got on a repeat loop picking colonists (and fuel) up at Earth and unloading at Mars.  It had already made several circuits, so this was something unique, but on this one it looks like it didn't get unloaded at Mars - there were still 50K colonists on board when it tried to execute the load at Earth.  I think (but am not sure) that it might have been in the "Mars moved out from under me" situation when it last was at Mars - this leads me to suspect some sort of glitch where it arrived at Mars, cycled to the next order in the queue, but when it tried to unload Mars was gone.  The only other thing I can think of is that the colony ship refused to offload at Mars because off overpopulation relative to infrastructure (but I didn't see any warning about that).

I'll post more if I see it again and get better info.

I have noticed an occasional bug with civilian freighters where they somehow end up either loading twice or have two unload orders. As you say there is something weird happening in the sequencing logic somewhere but it only happens occasionally and I haven't been able to pin it down yet. I hadn't considered a problem with orbital movement though. As far as I can tell from the code, all fleets move as they should. The civilian fleets are treated just like normal fleets of the parent race unless they are specifically excluded. I cannot see any such exclusion in the orbital movement code or any reason why I might have excluded them. That doesn't mean orbital movement isn't a factor - just that I haven't figured out why yet.

Btw, I assume your version is v4.22 with the data update?

Steve

[Beersatron]

I posted his before but the example I used at the time was for the secondary default order to be 'head to trade hub' which you have since removed as an option, but the issue is still happening.

I have a TG of GVs and I give it a primary default of 'survey nearest survey location' and a secondary default of 'return to entry JP'. It also has 'if less then 30% fuel then refuel at nearest colony or refuel ship' and 'if less then 20% supply then resupply at nearest colony or resupply ship'.

Before v4.1 I would give it an order to 'transit and divide' and from there it would break up into single ships and follow the primary default order. Once all locations were done/occupied then each ship would return to the entry JP.

Now, it transits, divides and performs it's secondary default order - closing on the entry JP. It then performs the primary default order and when I look at the TG screen I see that the secondary default order has been removed for all the (sub)fleets.

Every order copies fine when it transits and divides. But the secondary default order appears to get fired first and then once complete is removed. When the locations are all done/occupied the ships will just stand still and shout at me for orders (as apposed to heading to the JP and shouting at me )

Just thought of a suggestion as I typed this. Would it be possible to add another option to the secondary default orders that would 'enter orbit of nearest colony'? Or maybe even better if you could do something something similar the conditional order and have 'refuel at nearest colony'? (without the condition)

[SteveAlt]

Allow editing of destinations and/or cargo of civie lines in SM mode.  Even a "clear cargo" and/or "clear destination" buttons on the shipping lines screen would probably do the trick.

I'll tackle the rest of the above post later. For the moment I have added a clear button to the Shipping Lines window. This will allow the player to clear all cargo and orders from a civilian ship. In this case, civilian freighters will be given an order to head for the nearest trade location while civilian colony ships will look for the nearest source of colonists.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

Ok, a little more infor that I think is related - it's a good news/bad news thing....

The good news: Mars has produced a load of export news (chemicals) that are wanted at Earth!!!

The bad news: the freighter that loaded them, "Roberts Wheelbarrow 002" seems to have gotten confused and is trying to offload them at Mars, which already has a surplus.  So it keeps moving to Mars, not offloading them (presumably because Mars is an exporter of chemicals rather than an importer), and waiting for Mars to move out from under it on a 5-day update so it can repeat the cycle.  I suspect that the freighter in question hit whatever glitched my colony ship (a repeat of which I've not seen in probably a year of game time) and the freighter is now hitting the "can't offload" error and getting stuck.

I have found a problem in the code. I haven't fixed it yet but I do think I have found the culprit. Aurora has always had a section of code called CheckSpecialOrders that checks post-movement phase to see if any fleets (both player-owned and civilian) have any orders. If not, their default orders are checked and set up where appropriate. As part of the rewrite this was changed to look at objects rather than the database as it is a LOT faster.

Just before this section of code in the sequence of play (still after movement) is a new piece of code called called SetupTrade. This finds fleets that have a Trade Location set, looks for suitable trading runs and sets up the necessary orders. A Trade Location is set after trade goods have been unloaded or when a fleet completes a Move to Trade Location order. The Trade Location is set to zero as soon as the civilian fleet receives any other orders so the SetupTrade function won't be called again until those orders are complete. Because these orders created for civilian fleets within SetupTrade won't be needed until the movement phase of the next increment (before which everything is loaded from the database anyway), there was no need to store them as objects so instead they are saved directly to the database.

Unfortunately that means that the CheckSpecialOrders function that takes place immediately after SetupTrade won't be aware of those new civilian orders because they were saved to the database and it is only checking orders still loaded as objects from the previous movement phase. As civilian freighter fleets have a Move To Nearest Trade Location default order (which was supposed to be a safety net to catch problems), some civilian fleets will be given the Move To Nearest Trade Location order even though they have orders setup in the database. This new order will have a duplicate sequence number to the first order already given in the SetupTrade function and the fleet will execute it either first or second. The result of that Move To Nearest Trade Location order will be that the program will assign a Trade Location. Which means that after the movement phase of the next increment, whether it be 5 seconds or 5 days, it will call the SetupTrade function again and issue a new set of orders which may conflict with those created in the previous increment.

I'll find a way to avoid this happening in future but the above would explain the intermittent odd behaviour of civilian fleets.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

Weirdness with cycling orders:

I have a freighter taking infrastructure from Earth to Mars on infinite loop.  Orders are

Refuel at Earth
Load infrastructure at Earth
Unload infrastructure at Mars

in that order (with the cycle button checked).  On the system map (F3) the ship shows at about 1/2 way back to Earth, and both F3 and F12 claim 2:11:05 as an ETA.  I wanted to change over to carrying construction factories, so started to delete the last two orders.  The first time I hit the Remove button though I get a pop-up "The current order is still being carried out and has & 0:00:49 time remaining.  Are you sure you wish to delete it?"  Note that I just restarted Aurora after going out to dinner, so whatever's messed up is probably in the DB.

My prime suspect here is that Aurora is mixing up orders between my freighter and one of the civies (there's one at Mars right now).

The message (which is badly formatted and I have now fixed that particular issue) should appear if you attempt to delete a partly completed order that requires the passage of time, such as load/unload or surveying, etc.. In this case an order with 49 minutes remaining. I haven't seen it appear in the situation above but I will do some testing. Did you by any chance press yes to the delete and see if the order disappeared?

As far as I can tell from the code, the check is performed on the last order in the queue and it applies to the active fleet only. The active fleet is set when you select it on the window. It's a straightforward piece of code so I don't think the problem lies there. Perhaps the active fleet is somehow being changed. I'll get back to you on this one.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

Forgot to take a note of the error message for this one and the event window won't list it even though I check the error message flag.

I was retooling a commercial shipyard that had no assignment. I clicked once and it set the task to retool correctly, but then I clicked again (I'm polishing off a bottle of wine ...) and it threw an error whilst trying to set a retooling task for the exact thing thing.

I blame the wine *hic*  

It was a divide by zero error. I have fixed the code so you can longer retool to the existing class.

Steve