3.2 Bugs

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Was just checking on something in the SM Mods screen, and I noticed that the Shipyards entry for the colony was .652, but there are 5 yards with a good 25 slips.

Could this also be related to the refinery issue?

That entry on the SM Mods window should no longer be there. It's been replaced by the SY mod section on the economics window and I have removed it for v3.3. What it is probably showing is the state of any shipyard currently under construction.

Steve

[jfelten]

Hit crtl-F7 and you can mark the nameless ones obsolete.

Thanks.  And now that I know to look for it, I found the "View Tech" button that opens a window to let you do that.  I marked those "nameless" engines as obsolete and now it doesn't pester me with 3 errors every time I open the class design window.  I think the best "fix" would be to make the input field smaller so the user couldn't enter name that is too long, although it wouldn't hurt to truncate it to the maximum length of the field as well just in case.  

Before I did that, I had a very weird thing happen when I restarted Aurora.  When I first opened the Class Design window I received no errors but the Class Design window showed no Engines whatsoever.  Apparently those "blank engines" caused it to ignore all engines when I restarted it.  Fortunately marking those 3 "blank engines" as obsolete has worked around that as I restarted Aurora after marking them as obsolete and I do see engines now.

I've seen this one too and I still haven't figured out the problem. I don't think its related to the engines you mentioned. I think Aurora is listing components for PDCs rather than ships but I am not sure yet why it occasionally does that.

Steve

I was pretty sure it was because the name I was entering for the engines was too long.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Done that, (fuel production raised to 24.000l per anno) still no joy
All 4 races have the same problem.
Fuel production for civilian space centers went up to about 6.650l per 5-day-turn (pretty close to the 20% increase supposed to happen for refineries, was this linked to the refinery tech?) for each one, but the fuel refineries still don´t generate anything.

As the database is about 50Mb by now (I have to look into it, maybe I can shrink it a bit), I am not eager to mail this thing to you, but I can upload it to rapidshare, so you can download it, if you want to.

I think I have tracked down the fuel refinery problem. It's caused by an old bug that wasn't actually causing a problem until I added the ability to shut off sections of industry. As part of the production code I have a variable called MaxUnits, which is the maximum number of something that is produced, be it missiles for ordnance factories, fighters for fighter factories or minerals for mines. Production only takes place if MaxUnits is greater than zero. A long time ago I copied and pasted this section of code to the fuel refinery section but nowhere in that section is MaxUnits actually set so it picks up the value from the previous code sections, which in this case are mines and fuel harvesters. Because they always produced in the past, MaxUnits was always greater than zero and therefore the MaxUnits in the fuel production section was always greater than zero and the fuel was produced despite the bug. Now if the last population to be checked for mines has its manned mines switched off and doesn't have any conventional industry or automated mines (which can't be swtiched off), then its MaxUnits value for mining will be zero. If there are also no fuel harvesters operating for any Empire then the MaxUnits variable will not be set by that section of code either and will remain at zero (if it was set to zero by the previous set of circumstances). Or if there are fuel harvesters in operation but the last one to be checked is not at a gas giant with Sorium then MaxUnits will also end up as Zero (this latter situation would have happened prior to v3.2 but rarely enough so that no one would notice). In either case, with MaxUnits set at zero the fuel production code will not run and refineries will therefore not produce any fuel.

I have obviously fixed this for v3.3. For v3.2 there is no easy workaround except not switching off mining production. Although I guess you could create a small fuel harvester and set it going on some remote gas giant as that would also reset the variable correctly

Steve

[Cassaralla]

Hit crtl-F7 and you can mark the nameless ones obsolete.

Before I did that, I had a very weird thing happen when I restarted Aurora.  When I first opened the Class Design window I received no errors but the Class Design window showed no Engines whatsoever.  Apparently those "blank engines" caused it to ignore all engines when I restarted it.  Fortunately marking those 3 "blank engines" as obsolete has worked around that as I restarted Aurora after marking them as obsolete and I do see engines now.

I've seen this one too and I still haven't figured out the problem. I don't think its related to the engines you mentioned. I think Aurora is listing components for PDCs rather than ships but I am not sure yet why it occasionally does that.

Steve

I've noticed something very similar a couple of times.  I was trying to design a new ship but no ship based detection systems appeared on the Design Screen until after I'd added an Engine to the Design.  I checked and I was on Ship design and not PDC design at the time.  As it corrected itself once I'd added an Engine I didn't really think anything more of it.

[Hawkeye]

I've noticed something very similar a couple of times.  I was trying to design a new ship but no ship based detection systems appeared on the Design Screen until after I'd added an Engine to the Design.  I checked and I was on Ship design and not PDC design at the time.  As it corrected itself once I'd added an Engine I didn't really think anything more of it.

Happend to me sometimes too.
What I do is reselecting "Ship" in the Ship/PDC selection.
Apparently, sometimes PDC stays selected, even if it says Ship.

[jfelten]

I sometimes get the below errors from the Task Groups window, I think when it tries to display a TG that no longer exists, which might happen via the Join order.  I think if a TG is currently being displayed, and that TG executes a Join order, it results in this error.  I also sometimes get several "broken" TG's that result in this error if I try to view them.  Again I think this is caused by the Join order somehow.  And when this happens you have to be extremely careful with the Delete TG button.  It will delete the last real TG you viewed, not the current "broken" one being displayed.  Thank god for the SM mode "Fast OOB" option!  

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Aurora
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No Record of task group in cboFleets_Click
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OK
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[jfelten]

I ran in to the bug that someone else reported and that Steve said was fixed in 3.3 where the civilian freighters will add infrastructure to an empty colony.  I created an empty colony several systems distant to exploit some ruins.  For some reason the civilian freighters now seem obsessed with carrying infrastructure from my HW there.  It is especially annoying when there are colonies with population within the home system that really need more infrastructure whereas that zero pop colony several WP's distant obviously does not.  I know this is being fixed for zero pop colonies in 3.3, but could you also change the logic of civilian freighters to favor colonies that are short on infrastructure?  

Does anyone have a work around for this in 3.2?  I don't need that colony anymore since the ruins have been exhausted but I can find no way to delete it.  The stupid civilian freighters keep dragging my valuable infrastructure to it.  It makes me tempted to shoot any civilian freighter that heads that way.  Could a delete colony button be added in 3.3?  Perhaps make it viable for 0 pop colonies for the player and viable for any colony (destroying it) in SM mode?

[jfelten]

Non-jump civilian ships seem drawn to enter systems via Jump Gate for which there is no return Jump Gate and therefore they get stuck.  At least they seem to then offer to sell me the ship which I can buy and then rescue, but I don't think they should enter such systems in the first place, unless perhaps it is the home system (not sure how they got out then, perhaps via a different route which is unlikely but possible).

[jfelten]

I mentioned this earlier but I've verified when it is happening.  If I have a survey TG enter a new system to start surveying, and I have that TG open in the Task Groups window, and I have the check mark to show it on the System Map checked, I get a flurry of errors.  I think this keeps happening for awhile as the survey is progressing.  At some point it stops erroring.  It must have something to do with trying to display an unsurveyed or partially surveyed system in the System Map window.

[Father Tim]

Does anyone have a work around for this in 3.2?  I don't need that colony anymore since the ruins have been exhausted but I can find no way to delete it.  The stupid civilian freighters keep dragging my valuable infrastructure to it.  It makes me tempted to shoot any civilian freighter that heads that way.  Could a delete colony button be added in 3.3?  Perhaps make it viable for 0 pop colonies for the player and viable for any colony (destroying it) in SM mode?

At the bottom of the F2 'Population & Production' screen is a button to Delete the colony.  Make sureyou have the correct colony selected, because as I recall the confirmation box doesn't tell you which colony you're trying to delete, itonly asks "Are you sure you want to delete this population?"

[jfelten]

Does anyone have a work around for this in 3.2?  I don't need that colony anymore since the ruins have been exhausted but I can find no way to delete it.  The stupid civilian freighters keep dragging my valuable infrastructure to it.  It makes me tempted to shoot any civilian freighter that heads that way.  Could a delete colony button be added in 3.3?  Perhaps make it viable for 0 pop colonies for the player and viable for any colony (destroying it) in SM mode?

At the bottom of the F2 'Population & Production' screen is a button to Delete the colony.  Make sureyou have the correct colony selected, because as I recall the confirmation box doesn't tell you which colony you're trying to delete, itonly asks "Are you sure you want to delete this population?"

Thanks.  I'll give that a try.  I guess I need to wait until that civilian ship is on its way back as I don't know what may happen if I delete that "colony" while it is en route there.

[Erik L]

On behalf of JFelten...

I had one odd glitch awhile ago.  I think it was after I entered a new
system the game paused and I was hopeful that meant it was generating
a NPR (the system did have a 19% Oxygen planet but it is totally
uninhabitable by my species due to other factors), but then it threw a
torrent divide by zero errors.  I held down the Enter key a good while
and must have O.K.'ed hundreds of them.  I was getting close to giving
up and killing the game when they finally stopped.  But when all the
dust settled, I couldn't find anything wrong so kept playing.

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Error in SetupPlanet
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Error 11 was generated by Aurora
Division by zero
Please report to stevewalmsley@btinternet.com
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OK
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[jfelten]

Typo:  In the Technology Report window, the Gauss Cannon report shows 10,000Km/s in the "Max Range" column.  I assume that should be "Km", not "Km/s".

[jfelten]

The Quick Loadout Calculator (creating a missile loadout for a class) has the wrong mouseover text over the fields where you enter the number of a particular missile to add to the loadout.

[James Patten]

The missile design window has a strange tab arrangement, hitting tab takes you all over the place.