v4.9 Bugs Thread (no longer current)

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Turning off 'Realistic Officer Promotions' does not turn off the 'up-or-out' function, resulting in Aurora firing 90% of my officer corps when I wished to retain them.

The Up or Out is controlled by the auto-assignment option, not realistic promotions

Steve

[sloanjh]

I thought they only built ships that were actually useful for something? Like cargo ships, colony ships, and luxury liners (or rather, ships with cargo bays, cryo storage, and room for passengers). They've never built my terraformers, troop transports, or gate construction ships.

In any case, this design was classed as a PDC - why should a civilian ever build a PDC, whether or not it has military components? What on earth would a civ do with an immobile defense base?

Civilians build ships based on their type. such as freighter, colony ship, etc. There must have been something about this design that caused the class design code to classify it as a cargo ship or colony ship. The extra check about not buliding PDcs should avoid anything similar in future. I have also added a check to prevent civilians building ships slower than 100 km/s in case they try and build a half-completed design.

Steve

You might also want to avoid unlocked designs....
John

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Is it a bug when a task uses data that is out of date?
A ship will use the data available at the time an order is given, not the actual data at the time the task is performed/attempted.

situation:
send a ship towards a planet to drop off two teams, once there the first order will get canceled because the target is not a pop.
Now make it a pop, advance time, the second drop team task will also cancel due to the target not being a pop.
reissuing the orders once the body has been designated a pop will allow the team to be dropped as it was supposed to.-Ar (now updated to 3.92!)

The destination Population ID is set at the time the order is issued. In some cases, setting an unload order will create the colony but over time the implementation of this has become patchy. I have corrected it so the following orders will now automatically create a colony at the destination.

Unload Fuel Refinery
Unload Construction Factory
Unload Mine
Unload Infrastructure
Unload Automated Mine
Unload Tracking Station
Unload <Mineral Name>
Unload All Minerals
Unload Ground Unit from Transport Bay
Unload All Ground Units from Transport Bay
Unload All Installations
Drop Off Team
Unload Research Lab Components
Unload Maintenance Facility
Unload Mass Driver
Unload PDC Component
Unload Terraforming Installation Components
Combat Drop Ground Unit
Unload Ordnance Factory
Unload Fighter Factory

Steve

[sloanjh]

While you can not assign scientists to research technologies you don't have perquisites for, you can however queue such technologies  (with the "all projects" radio-button), no matter how far down the line they are (without queuing previous ones).

Fixed for v5.0

Steve

This was actually a useful feature (which I never used ).  An annoyance with queuing right now is that I can't queue the next tech in a tech sequence until the existing one is researched.  So if I want to bump mining by 3 levels, I'd like to set "Joe Scientist" to research the first level and queue the next level.  As it is, I need to queue a different project (so as not to loose the spare change when the first level finishes), then cancel and adjust when the first level finishes.

John

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

You might also want to avoid unlocked designs....

I like the principle but I am concerned about the law of unintended consequences. Sometimes I might design something for the civilians, like a luxury liner, that won't get automatically locked because I will never build it myself. I guess I could lock it manually but I would probably forget . I also unlock things sometimes so I can check it out before copying it and don't always remember to re-lock it.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

The mineral shortage message for a shipyard expansion or ground unit training task includes the mineral name in the message:
"Mineral shortage (Neutronium) in Ground Unit Training for Alzarius"
The mineral shortage message for Production does not:
"Mineral shortage in Production of Convert Conventional Ind to Industrial Capacity at Alzarius"

Fixed for v5.0

Stee

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

On the (F2) 'Population & Production' window, the Production ("Amount Remaining") and Research ("RP Required") tabs count down your progress on each task, whereas the Shipbuilding ("Progress") and Ground Unit Training ("TP Accumulated") count up

Industry and Research both use actual amounts whereas Shipbuilding uses a percentage. Ground Units do use an amount so I have changed those to TP Remaining rather than TP Accumulated.

I could change any or all of them from actual amounts to percentages though. Perhaps those tasks that involve a single item, such as shipbuilding, ground forces and research should use a percentage while tasks involving multiple items, such as industry, should use the actual amount remaining.

Steve

[Father Tim]

Turning off 'Realistic Officer Promotions' does not turn off the 'up-or-out' function, resulting in Aurora firing 90% of my officer corps when I wished to retain them.

The Up or Out is controlled by the auto-assignment option, not realistic promotions

Steve

I don't think so, since I never use auto-assignments.  Not only was the option turned off every time I encountered the problem, it had never even been turned on in this game.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

When in the design turret window, without having a laser design and research, you click on a turret barrel other then one, it sends it into a none terminating loop of error message.

I have added a check that disables the Create button and option buttons in the turret window if you haven't designed any beams. You also get a popup message asking that you design beams before designing turrets.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Turning off 'Realistic Officer Promotions' does not turn off the 'up-or-out' function, resulting in Aurora firing 90% of my officer corps when I wished to retain them.

The Up or Out is controlled by the auto-assignment option, not realistic promotions

I don't think so, since I never use auto-assignments.  Not only was the option turned off every time I encountered the problem, it had never even been turned on in this game.

There is something weird going on then. The code that checks for retirements is contained within a loop created by this SQL

sSQL = "select * from Race where chkAutoAssign = 1 and GameID = " & GameID
Set rsRaceList = dbStarfire.OpenRecordset(sSQL, dbOpenDynaset)

Do While rsRaceList.EOF = False

It then goes into a loop for each qualifying race and within that loop is the retirement check code. Unless the auto-assign flag is set for a particular race, the retirement code is never called.

Has the program made any automatic assignments in this particular game?

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I've run into what may be some sort of infinite loop. My game started running in five-second intervals last night, presumably because two NPRs were fighting somewhere. I left the game running overnight to wait it out. When I came back, four game hours had passed, and the game had thrown up a "System resource exceeded" error - which is weird, because my pagefile was nowhere near full. When I hit okay, it complained about an object that no longer existed a couple times, then being out of resources again. I had to force-quit. When I brought the game back up, it wasn't giving the error anymore, but it's still in 5-second intervals. Even aside from the error, isn't that a hell of a long battle?

Edit: Looking at the SM log, there doesn't appear to be a battle going on at all. Also, here's the errors I got:
Error in AssignWeapons
Error 3035 was generated by DAO.Database
System resource exceeded.
Please report to viewforum.php?f=11
4th November 2039 04:09:21,SM Only,System 0,Error in AssignWeapons
Error 3420 was generated by DAO.Recordset
Object invalid or no longer set.
Please report to viewforum.php?f=11

If you still have this problem, please could you send me the zipped-up database. My email is stevewalmsley at btinternet.com and the database is the Stevefire.mdb file

Steve

[Father Tim]

Has the program made any automatic assignments in this particular game?

Steve

None that I'm aware of.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

also a typo: neutrotic in officer traits should probably be neurotic.

Corrected for v5.0

Steve

[solops]

I keep getting ans Error 91 when I generate a turn (usually 1+ days). Sometimes the error pops up multiple times. Sometimes not.

"Error in NPRPop Planning
Error 91 was generated by Aurora
Object variable or With block variable not set"

The error is not fatal and I keep playing, but what is happeneing on the alien worlds I can only guess.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I keep getting ans Error 91 when I generate a turn (usually 1+ days). Sometimes the error pops up multiple times. Sometimes not.

"Error in NPRPop Planning
Error 91 was generated by Aurora
Object variable or With block variable not set"

The error is not fatal and I keep playing, but what is happeneing on the alien worlds I can only guess.

Its already fixed for v5.0. It is annoying but it doesn't cause any problems. The code is trying to close the same database object twice and the second time throws the error because the object no longer exists.

Steve