v4.9 Bugs Thread (no longer current)

[VariousArtist]

During a turn, I received an error 5, invalid procedure call or argument.  Seems to be repeating endlessly.  Killing the process and starting again, this happens whenever I try to advance the timeline.

Edit - This is with 4.91, about 17 game years elapsed since first start.
Edit again - OK, the problem is not repeating endlessly (not quite anyway).  It seems to be repeaating 4 times for every 5 second update (checked with 5 and 30 second updates, 4 errors for the five second update and 24 for the 30 second update).  I don't think I'll try a day or 30 day update because I don't plan to make that many mouseclicks.  

Found the problem.  An exploration fleet had a conditional order to join its parent fleet if fuel dropped below 30%, but there never was a parent fleet for it.  I have this assigned to the ships of the exploration fleet.  I probably accidentally assigned it to the fleet some time ago, but didn't have an error until it attempted to carry out those orders.

Mike

I have this one, too, but it seems to repeat endlessly (4.91). Not 100% sure what its related too, but reading your edit gives me an idea that it might be cos a grav ship has a conditional order to refuel at the next tanker. The tanker is/was in a fleet with 2 scouts and when Ive detached the scouts they kept the TFs name while the tankers name was changed when the grav ship was already heading for it.
1. Ive assembled the fleet again - error stays
2. Ive deleted the orders of both fleet - cond. order gave the grav ship a new order to refuel at the right fleet - error stays
3. Ive cleared the cond. orders and let both TFs do nothing - error stays
Well, last try to save my game by checking the lots of other ships and maybe delete the orders, but if I cant I will be a really sad panda.
(Ive backuped and RARed the database in case Steve wants to have a look what was going wrong)

[Toloran]

(V4.91) I'm currently doing a "Babylon 5" style game with Jump Gates on all Jump Points. For some reason, my ships are having a hard time doing conditional orders that send them to different systems. For Example:
- In my normal game where I constructed all my jump gates, my colony ships (without jump engines) could easily be set up to do automatic load/unload colonist commands but now it doesn't work.
- In my normal game, my Jump Engine survey ships could easily path back to Earth to refuel when their conditional order told them to. However in my B5 game, my survey ships without jump engines will give me a "There isn't a colony or tanker available" error.

In both instances, I can manually set their orders and they work fine. I'm not sure what is wrong but I'm thinking the automatic subroutine that checks to see if location within 4 jumps can be reached, it's not registering the jump gates. However, I've noticed a few places where it still DOES work but only for a single jump. This applies to civilian vessels as well who don't know how to go to other systems anymore.

[Erik L]

4.91, clicking Queue top throws an error. I was attempting to move a project to the top of the queue that was already queued.

Error in populateresearchqueue
Error 3077
Syntax error (missing operator) in expression.

I'm guessing this is because I had the project queued already.

[Commodore_Areyar]

4.91
I had accidentally deleted the fueltank from a shipdesign, I cheated and updated the design (via newarmour etc), the completed ships stayed the old version though (which is a good thing IMHO.), so I decided to refit them. The design was theoretically identical though because I did not go through the copy-edit-refit method.

So, you can refit a ship to it's redesigned classdesign, this is indicated to take 0 minerals and 0 time, but actually progress is blank.
It also causes several errors that appear when an economy screen is opened.

error 6 overflow in getMineralUsage
error 6 overflow in populateShipyardTasks
x2
each error report repeated for each faulty task.

advancing time also triggers these errors. (when the economy screen is opened always, otherwise only if construction is progressed)
Progress does advance, at least the refit is completes at the next construction turn (6-10 days).

(maybe associated bug: refuel orders are completed and are not removed from orders list of other fleet, causing time to increment in 30min steps, because of orders completed interrupt. deleting the refuel order solves this.)

Now this is buggy,  but it is also caused by using an exploit. karma.

-Arnoud

[umiman]

Two alien races I've never met are duking it out in someplace I've never been and they're spamming me with this error:

Error in PointBlankPDFire
Error 5 was generated by Aurora
Invalid procedure call or argument

It's really not letting me proceed with the game at all since the error doesn't stop appearing.

Any fixes?

[Mini]

When you try to build a ship from a shipyard that has not yet been refitted to build anything it gives an error:
Error in cmdTask
Error 381
Invalid property array index.

[Commodore_Areyar]

4.91

in UseFuel:
error 91 Object variable or With block variable not set
error 92 for loop not initialized
error 424 Object required
(these repeat a bunch of times in varying frequency, but the joining fleets were quite large so I lost count)

circumstances:
when joining fleets to core fleet on exercises via [recall escorts] command.
also erroneous event messages : "fleet X has run out of fuel" for joined (and no longer seperated Taskforce) fleets

-cheers
Areyar

[Hawkeye]

4.92

4.92?
Did I miss an update ´cause I´m pretty sure I am still at 4.91???

[Erik L]

4.92

4.92?
Did I miss an update ´cause I´m pretty sure I am still at 4.91???

4.91 is the last here.

[Commodore_Areyar]

4.92

4.92?
Did I miss an update ´cause I´m pretty sure I am still at 4.91???

Heh!

No you are right, I lost count at 4.90.
I'll edit my posts.


Little harm done, next version will likely be v5.00.
-Areyar

[Vanigo]

My civilian shipping lines (except passenger liners) all froze up in a game while I had a contract up to move infrastructure to an outsystem colony. When I deleted the contract and cleared the freighters' orders, they started working again. I made a thread about the issue here. I'm not sure, but I've got a gut feeling that the problem was that there were two routes to the colony system, and I had built jump gates along the longer one (since the shorter had precursors).

[sloanjh]

I seem to be having troubles transferring Marines between ships in deep space (at a waypoint).

1)  (Primary):  I managed to tell my TG with a battalion-sized assault shuttle to load a battalion from my TG with a battalion size troop bay (huzzah! ) then gave it a 5-second update to see what happened.  It claimed to have completed the order (which I thought was weird, since it should take a long time), but when I looked at the TG, it still had a "Combat load Marines 07th from Fleet 1st Invasion 01" order in plotted moves, which it thought had 9 hours and 36 minutes to go.  I hit the 1-day advance button, and got another "orders completed" message 30 minutes later (at the end of the 1st sub-pulse).  I did it again, and the same thing happened.  I also noticed that the 9:36 time remaining isn't going down, so this is technically a hang.  I fixed it by simply deleting the order, but it's still a problem.

The rest are more suggestions, than bugs, but since I'm here....

2)  It took me a while to figure out how to transfer the troops - there seems to be only one configuration that works (assault shuttle and transport in different TG, assault shuttle's TG selected with a load-from order targeting the transport).  A few things that should probably work but don't:

A)  In addition to the "load-from" there's a "load-within", but it doesn't appear when I select the troop transport's TG and target the assault shuttle's.  I didn't try unchecking the order filtering box, but this should probably show up for any TG with TT bays and/or battalions loaded.  Also, the wording for these two orders is somewhat confusing - it's not clear which fleet is being talked about.

B)  I originally tried putting both assault shuttle and transport in the same TG, but when I tried to view TG as targets for that TG, it looks like it was being filtered out.  So I don't think there's a way to load drop bays from troop bays within the same TG.

C)  Ditto for loading within the same ship - I was thinking of putting drop bays into my transport, but couldn't figure out how they could be loaded.

D)  I don't think there's any way to choose which drop bay is loaded if there are multiple ships with drop bays available in the TG.

Given all the above (especially the last), it doesn't feel like the the troop transfer interface really belongs on the orders screen.  How about this for an idea - do it through the F6 screen on a ship-by-ship basis (which is where it used to be, IIRC), except set a "transferring troops" state on any ships participating in a transfer.  This state would be similar to the overhaul state - it would immobilize the ships' TG, and include an "expiration date" in the DB for when the loading was complete.  So the F12 display would show ships which were transferring troops as e.g. "Napoleon (loading troops, 6:32 remaining)" in the same way ships show an overhaul state on that screen.

John

[Andrew]

I seem to be having troubles transferring Marines between ships in deep space (at a waypoint).

1)  (Primary):  I managed to tell my TG with a battalion-sized assault shuttle to load a battalion from my TG with a battalion size troop bay (huzzah! ) then gave it a 5-second update to see what happened.  It claimed to have completed the order (which I thought was weird, since it should take a long time), but when I looked at the TG, it still had a "Combat load Marines 07th from Fleet 1st Invasion 01" order in plotted moves, which it thought had 9 hours and 36 minutes to go.  I hit the 1-day advance button, and got another "orders completed" message 30 minutes later (at the end of the 1st sub-pulse).  I did it again, and the same thing happened.  I also noticed that the 9:36 time remaining isn't going down, so this is technically a hang.  I fixed it by simply deleting the order, but it's still a problem.

The rest are more suggestions, than bugs, but since I'm here....

2)  It took me a while to figure out how to transfer the troops - there seems to be only one configuration that works (assault shuttle and transport in different TG, assault shuttle's TG selected with a load-from order targeting the transport).  A few things that should probably work but don't:

A)  In addition to the "load-from" there's a "load-within", but it doesn't appear when I select the troop transport's TG and target the assault shuttle's.  I didn't try unchecking the order filtering box, but this should probably show up for any TG with TT bays and/or battalions loaded.  Also, the wording for these two orders is somewhat confusing - it's not clear which fleet is being talked about.

B)  I originally tried putting both assault shuttle and transport in the same TG, but when I tried to view TG as targets for that TG, it looks like it was being filtered out.  So I don't think there's a way to load drop bays from troop bays within the same TG.

C)  Ditto for loading within the same ship - I was thinking of putting drop bays into my transport, but couldn't figure out how they could be loaded.

D)  I don't think there's any way to choose which drop bay is loaded if there are multiple ships with drop bays available in the TG.

Given all the above (especially the last), it doesn't feel like the the troop transfer interface really belongs on the orders screen.  How about this for an idea - do it through the F6 screen on a ship-by-ship basis (which is where it used to be, IIRC), except set a "transferring troops" state on any ships participating in a transfer.  This state would be similar to the overhaul state - it would immobilize the ships' TG, and include an "expiration date" in the DB for when the loading was complete.  So the F12 display would show ships which were transferring troops as e.g. "Napoleon (loading troops, 6:32 remaining)" in the same way ships show an overhaul state on that screen.

John

It is certainly possible to move troops from tranpsort bays to drop bays in the same TF, It is however impossible to choose which drop bay they load into which is a problem .
I have had some problems with loading troop orders , it seems that as soon as the task of loading  a ground unit into a transport bay or drop bay is started they are moved across after the first time increment, you can then cancel the order and save yourslef a lot of time.
I have also aquired a Ghost Marine company which is sitting in a cmbat drop module losing efficiency with regular reports in the events screen, however the shuttle carrying the company was destroyed by enemy fire before it could drop them.

[Commodore_Areyar]

I canceled civvie orders, because a 10000 cap colonyship was just sitting in outerspace moving at 1km/s. *
This not only cancels the orders but also makes it dump its cargo!

This seems rather unethical to me. :p

* edit: turns out this was normal, I had an unlocked design without engines that the corp decided to build.    
(I gather this has already been fixed for 5.0)

[Balibar]

I managed to Design a missle fire control with zero range -- twice.  I believe that what happened was that prior to hitting create, the last thing I did was click the Antenna size parameter.  It was highlighted as 4, but the design got created with a range of zero.  When I clicked some other drop box and then clicked Create the design came out as intended but had the same name.  One cannot tell there is zero range until the racial tech is researched then the design shows up in the Item List as a zero range fire control.