4.0b Bugs

[sloanjh]

When refitting a ship in a single-ship fleet to a slower class type, the speed of the fleet doesn't go down when the refit is over (although the "max speed" is correct").  Also, pushing the "max speed" button does nothing in this case - it's acting as if there's an early-exit test for current_speed<max_speed.  I assume this happens for multi-ship fleets to, I just haven't ever done it so I don't know for sure.

John

[Steve Walmsley]

On the system map , when you are in SM Mode and there are precursors in the system you get the option to switch between empire views . The precursor view shows what the precursors can detect of the player race and the missiles they have launched but not their ships.

If in precrusor view you click on technology you get an error 91 in populatelasers which will not go away

That shouldn't be possible (switching to precursor view) - an oops on my part. I'll fix it for the next version.

Steve

On a related note: Are you supposed to be able to Communicate with the precursors? Non-intercourse? Non-Aggression (19% chance currently)? Trade (1% chance)?

Not at the moment. Although I guess the way the diplomacy window is set up you probably can initiate communication and even sign treaties. The problem is that at the moment they will ignore them. I hope to sort out Diplomacy in v4.2

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

Shipyard is tooled for a Jump Ship yet has a Freighter and the Jump Ship class available for construction.

That is probably working as intended. As well as the currently tooled class, you can build any other class for which the refit cost will be less than twenty percent of the tooled ship cost. Its a way of simulating that shipyards would be able to build other classes if they used very similar components. In this case, if you strip away the jump engine etc. you may find the jump ship is very similar to your freighter design. The shipyard is aware of that and therefore would be able to build the freighter.

Also, the default Task Group is not sticking on the Shipyard TG but moving to one of the civilian fleets (which I presume we shouldn't be able to see in dropdowns?).

Yes, you shouldn't be able to see it. Not sure why the default fleet is changing. Sorry if this is a dumb question but did you press the default fleet button to set the default fleet?

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

That sounds annoying.  I remember in 3.x a couple times I unintentionally paid to refit some civilian ships because the names were the same.

That must have been an earlier version. I've checked and civilian ships don't show up as available for refit. I assume must have fixed it at some point.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

Those Pesky Civilians are stealing my ship sequence numbers!!!  My freighter class is called Africa Queen.  I was merrily popping them out from my shipyard (using auto-numbering, e.g. Africa Queen 001, Africa Queen 002, ...), until one day I noticed something weird - I had "forgotten" to build Africa Queen 007; I had just built 008, but there was no 007!  I thought it was my fault, so I slotted the next 2 freighters to be 007 and 009.  What was really going on was the civies built a freighter, named it Africa Queen 007 (and another one that was 009), and bumped the counter up.  (I figured this out a posteriori by peeking in the data base - there's an Africa Queen 007 that's not mine, and it's in the civie fleet, at which point the light bulb went off in my head.)

v4.1 includes different civilian companies, referred to as Shipping Lines. Every civilian ship will belong to one of theses Shipping Lines so the name of each civilian ship will be (Short Version of Company Name + Class Name + Number of Ships built by that Line). So it might be "Ramirez Galileo 007" for a Galileo built by the Ramirez Freight Corporation that is the seventh ship built for that company. This won't affect the parent Empire's hull numbering.

This wouldn't be a big deal, except the civilian ships are showing up as potential commands in the F4 screen.  I realized something was wrong when I finished building "my" 007 and 009 and found their names doubled in the F4 screen, at which point I peaked in the database.

I can't recreate this one as the civilians seem to be excluded as possible commands. There are over seventy civilian ships in my current game and none of them are showing up. How many civilian ships are affected by this problem in your game?

Steve

[Beersatron]

Shipyard is tooled for a Jump Ship yet has a Freighter and the Jump Ship class available for construction.

That is probably working as intended. As well as the currently tooled class, you can build any other class for which the refit cost will be less than twenty percent of the tooled ship cost. Its a way of simulating that shipyards would be able to build other classes if they used very similar components. In this case, if you strip away the jump engine etc. you may find the jump ship is very similar to your freighter design. The shipyard is aware of that and therefore would be able to build the freighter.

Also, the default Task Group is not sticking on the Shipyard TG but moving to one of the civilian fleets (which I presume we shouldn't be able to see in dropdowns?).

Yes, you shouldn't be able to see it. Not sure why the default fleet is changing. Sorry if this is a dumb question but did you press the default fleet button to set the default fleet?

Steve

I kind of figured the Shipyards were being 'smart' about what they would let you build, thanks for clearing it up.

Yeah, I clicked on the default fleet button a few times, closing the economic screen and even Aurora totally sometimes and then coming back in. So far, it hasn't repeated the issue again so it might have just been something stupid I had been doing!

[sloanjh]

This wouldn't be a big deal, except the civilian ships are showing up as potential commands in the F4 screen.  I realized something was wrong when I finished building "my" 007 and 009 and found their names doubled in the F4 screen, at which point I peaked in the database.

I can't recreate this one as the civilians seem to be excluded as possible commands. There are over seventy civilian ships in my current game and none of them are showing up. How many civilian ships are affected by this problem in your game?

Weird - all of them for me.  10 cargo and 3 colony.  BTW, I put this in as an explicit bug downthread.

John

[Kurt]

Shipyard is tooled for a Jump Ship yet has a Freighter and the Jump Ship class available for construction.

That is probably working as intended. As well as the currently tooled class, you can build any other class for which the refit cost will be less than twenty percent of the tooled ship cost. Its a way of simulating that shipyards would be able to build other classes if they used very similar components. In this case, if you strip away the jump engine etc. you may find the jump ship is very similar to your freighter design. The shipyard is aware of that and therefore would be able to build the freighter.

Also, the default Task Group is not sticking on the Shipyard TG but moving to one of the civilian fleets (which I presume we shouldn't be able to see in dropdowns?).

Yes, you shouldn't be able to see it. Not sure why the default fleet is changing. Sorry if this is a dumb question but did you press the default fleet button to set the default fleet?

Steve

Steve - I've seen some oddities in 3.2 with shipyards, and I noticed when playing around with 4.0 that it hasn't been fixed.  The problems above may be related.  

Essentially, all of the problems I've noted are always related to the bottom shipyard listed.  The problems are:
Can enter more work orders than there are slipways
Won't default to the shipyard task group
Won't auto-advance to the next unit when selecting units to refit

There are probably others, but those are just the ones I can remember.  As I said, the other yards listed work fine, its always the bottom yard in the list.  

Kurt

[sloanjh]

Every now an then, in the System Map (F3) display, the civilian contacts from my home system magically are super-posed while I'm in a different system.  If I switch to another system and back, it's fine.  I don't know the event that's triggering this - the system starts out ok, then something puts the "ghosts" on the screen while the window is already open and the system already chosen.

John

[Steve Walmsley]

Steve - I've seen some oddities in 3.2 with shipyards, and I noticed when playing around with 4.0 that it hasn't been fixed.  The problems above may be related.  

Essentially, all of the problems I've noted are always related to the bottom shipyard listed.  The problems are:
Can enter more work orders than there are slipways
Won't default to the shipyard task group
Won't auto-advance to the next unit when selecting units to refit

There are probably others, but those are just the ones I can remember.  As I said, the other yards listed work fine, its always the bottom yard in the list.  

Thanks for that. I will look into it. The fact it is always the bottom yard explains why it is has appeared to be an intermittent problem and it would have been a lot harder to tackle without that very useful piece of information

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

Every now an then, in the System Map (F3) display, the civilian contacts from my home system magically are super-posed while I'm in a different system.  If I switch to another system and back, it's fine.  I don't know the event that's triggering this - the system starts out ok, then something puts the "ghosts" on the screen while the window is already open and the system already chosen.

I have seen this one too, although I can't get it to happen on a regular basis either. It's been around for a while but I am no closer to figuring it out. Once I narrow down the trigger it should be easy to fix.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

Steve - I've seen some oddities in 3.2 with shipyards, and I noticed when playing around with 4.0 that it hasn't been fixed.  The problems above may be related.  

Won't auto-advance to the next unit when selecting units to refit

Fixed this but no idea why

When you set the Index (i.e. the currently selected item) of a dropdown box, it is supposed to trigger a click event and the code for the click event  of the refit class dropdown box refreshes the ship list, removing the ship for which you have just created a refit task. However for some reason setting the index for the bottom shipyard does not trigger the event while setting the index for any other shipyard does trigger the event. I have absolutely no idea why this is the case. It might even be some VB6 weirdness at work. Now I am aware this is happening I have added a check to see if the click event takes place and if it doesn't I trigger it manually. This has fixed the problem but I am totally baffled as to why the event won't trigger automatically for the bottom shipyard only.

Steve

[sloanjh]

On the Ordnance/Fighters tab of the Class Design (F5) screen - magazine capacity doesn't update (recalculate) when magazine count is change on the "Design View" tab.  I got it to update by switching to another class then switching back.

John

[Steve Walmsley]

Can enter more work orders than there are slipways

Fixed this too. A similar problem but with a rational explanation. The greying out of the Add Task button is done when the shipyard is checked for the number of tasks compared to the number of slipways. If they are equal, the button is greyed out. In this case the check was made by changing the row on the shipyard grid to the selected shipyard to trigger a grid selection change event. Within that event was the code for slipways vs tasks. This wasn't happening for the bottom shipyard because the shipyard info is filled in again before this check is made and the bottom row was already set, as that was the last one filled in. The event relied on a change of value in grid row for the event so when the bottom shipyard was selected it didn't trigger the event because it was already selected. Now I check if the selection is already correct and if so I trigger the event manually.

I assume the other problem must be related somehow but it makes no sense as that is a dropdown list and there is no way for the list to be affected by the grid - aaargh!

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

On the Ordnance/Fighters tab of the Class Design (F5) screen - magazine capacity doesn't update (recalculate) when magazine count is change on the "Design View" tab.  I got it to update by switching to another class then switching back.

Fixed for v4.1. Any change to the design now refreshes the ordnance and fighter data.

Steve