Official v6.20 Bugs Thread

[Vynadan]

I abandoned a colony with 0.1m population while three civilian freighters were ferrying infrastructure in (stupid civvies settling my archeological dig site). The civilian freighters continued their journey towards the now-empty planet, clicking the Clear Orders button in the shipping line screen didn't delete their orders (but those of other civilian ships) and they're now stuck in an infinite "Unload trade goods at" order (no planet specified). They're not getting scrapped by age (as they all carry 10 units of infrastructure) and just hover there over the empty planet.

[Maharava]

When I click Create Game, I get a never-ending stream of Error in GetPromotionScore
Error 3265 was generated by DAO.Fields

It requires a ctrl+alt+del out

[Vynadan]

I'm not sure if this counts as a bug, or is just a known consequence of how civilian ship names are hidden.

This image shows civilian ship names displayed (left) and civilian ship names hidden (right). Both times the Rideth Installations TG are PDCs on the planet's surface.
Playing with civilian names hidden, I thought my PDCs had bugged out and taken off into deep space for a while, rendering me quite confused xD

[Thundercraft]

[snip]
.   .   .   
- My IE9's menu bar changes colors to yellow and popup boxes change to game theme when running Aurora.         (Not very important, just saying:)).   

And here I thought I'd be the first to report this.     

I'm running Windows XP Pro with SP3 and I can confirm this bug.    But for me it is much worse than what Phobos implies.   

Here's how to reproduce it:

Start Aurora and on the gen window just click the [X] in the upper right corner to terminate the program.   



However, instead of terminating, the program assumes a galaxy was already generated.    A narrow horizontal game menu bar appears.    Next, click on the [X] of this menu bar to terminate the program.   



The result? The Windows' menu color is permanently changed to Aurora's dark grayish-beige color.    This is not just for IE, but for all Windows programs and applications that use the Windows' theme.   



I can also confirm that terminating the program prematurely with the [X] button is not the only way to cause this behavior.    Merely starting the program as normal and then selecting the "Exit" option from the "Game" menu will do the same thing!

(Personally, I feel like Aurora should not even attempt to mess with the menu color at all.    We all have our own preferences for Windows' themes, don't we? But if this is a must, it should save the user's original color, change it for Aurora, and then automatically restore user's default color right before exit.   )

In Windows XP, this is what is necessary for me to fix the messed up menu color:

1.    Right click on desktop
2.    Click "Appearance" tab
3.    In bottom right corner, click "Advanced" button
4.    In the "Advanced Appearance" window, under the "Item:" list, scroll down to select "Menu".   
5.    To the right of this Item: > Menu, under "Color 1:", scroll down to select whatever old color your menus used.    (For me it was the Windows XP default 'Beige' [R:236, G:233, B:216].   )

Also, I have another "bug" to report, of sorts.    It's merely a grammar error, though.   

In "Game Details" window, the pop-up text for hovering over "Construction Cycle Time" says,

The time in seconds between production cycles (i.   e.   , everything but movement/combat) in seconds.    Default is 400,000.    Warning: Reducing this may have a significant effect on performance.   

I highlighted the typo in red.    It would be more appropriate to say,

The time between production cycles (i.   e.   , everything but movement/combat) in seconds.    Default is 400,000.    Warning: Reducing this may have a significant effect on performance.   

[Aldaris]

I had this exact same bug earlier in 5.6:

When in the economics screen, clicking on different colonies has zero effect. The screen remains locked on the species capital, effectively rendering my incapable of doing anything in my empire.

Fortunately this time it happened before even a second of game time passed, instead of after several decades, but it still makes the game unplayable.

[davidb86]

I had this exact same bug earlier in 5.6:

When in the economics screen, clicking on different colonies has zero effect. The screen remains locked on the species capital, effectively rendering my incapable of doing anything in my empire.

Fortunately this time it happened before even a second of game time passed, instead of after several decades, but it still makes the game unplayable.

Aldaris,

Are you playing on a dual screen system?  If so Aurora (actually Visual Basic) has trouble if the secondary screen is left of the primary screen.  Steve said that this causes the cursor tracking algorithm to return negative x coordinates, which VB cannot interpret, so it does not know where you are clicking.  Try moving the economics screen onto your primary screen,  if this fixes the problem then you can consider whether you want to switch your screens around so that the primary screen is on the left, which makes all screen coordinates positive.  if you are playing single screen then it really is a bug.

[Aldaris]

I am indeed playing on a dual screen system with secondary left of primary, and your solution works. Thank you very much indeed.

[OJsDad]

I've been investigating a lot of interrupts in my own game.  It appears that precursor minefields have been setup in systems that don't show up if you look at the precursor map.  Not only that, but these mines don't seem to be detected by player ships in those systems yet are causing hostile contact detection interrupts.  So, as precursor minefields are not a significant part of the game and even if they were working perfectly would still result in a lot of interrupts, I have removed them from v6. 30.  I think this will cut out a lot of shortened increments in the game.

If you want to fix this in current games, you can go into the MissileSalvo table in the database and delete Captor Mine records that relate to the Precursor RaceID.  If you have no idea what I just said, don't try it

EDIT: This has resulted in a dramatic improvement in my game in terms of a lack of interrupts.

Steve

I tired you fix but it did not work.

[OJsDad]

One thing I've noticed on the increment issue, is that no matter which Time Control button I push, it increments 10 seconds, except if I click the 5 second button, which increments the game 5 seconds.   If I click the 5 second button once the games advances 5 seconds, then I click any other time button the game increments another 5 seconds.   If I then hit any time button, except for the 5 second one, the game goes back to incrementing 10 seconds.

I did go back into the DB and confirmed the mine fix from earlier was done.

[largotuek]

I've been investigating a lot of interrupts in my own game.  It appears that precursor minefields have been setup in systems that don't show up if you look at the precursor map.  Not only that, but these mines don't seem to be detected by player ships in those systems yet are causing hostile contact detection interrupts.  So, as precursor minefields are not a significant part of the game and even if they were working perfectly would still result in a lot of interrupts, I have removed them from v6. 30.  I think this will cut out a lot of shortened increments in the game.

If you want to fix this in current games, you can go into the MissileSalvo table in the database and delete Captor Mine records that relate to the Precursor RaceID.  If you have no idea what I just said, don't try it

EDIT: This has resulted in a dramatic improvement in my game in terms of a lack of interrupts.

Steve

Hi,

could someone please give me the database password, so that I can try Steve's workaround ?

I'm currently experiencing interrupts every 900 and 21600 seconds, in the beginning of a new game. . .

Thanx in advance !

[sloanjh]

Hi,

could someone please give me the database password, so that I can try Steve's workaround ?

I'm currently experiencing interrupts every 900 and 21600 seconds, in the beginning of a new game. . .

Thanx in advance !

It's best to ask Steve for it through a PM.  He doesn't like having people spread the password around because he's afraid of getting bug reports from people who've hacked their databases.

John

[Karmag]

A rather interesting bug I've found: Towards the end of a long running battle between my fleet and an NPR fleet, my computer crashed, I believe in the midst of processing for Aurora.  (The crash wasn't Aurora's fault, my computer is just derpy). 

When I restarted the computer, I found that the enemy ships that I had been fighting had disappeared from the map - they had been almost within beam range, so they didn't just run out of sensor range.  Now, when I tried to increment the time, I get several errors:

"Error in AssignWeapons
Error 3159 was generated by DAO. Recordset
Not a valid bookmark.
Please report,etc,etc. "

"Error in AssignWeapons
Error 3167 was generated by DAO. Recordset
Record is deleted. "

"Error in SelectNPRTarget
Error 3159 was generated by DAO. Database
Not a valid bookmark. "

"Error in SelectNPRTarget
Error 91 was generated by Aurora
Object variable or With block variable not set. "

These repeat infinitely, alternating between each of the 4 errors, without end.  I have to use Task Manager to end the Aurora process to escape.  Quite interestingly, when I re-start Aurora, the event-log shows that the game did, indeed, process a 5 second increment, where it lists 3 new Thermal signatures - those belonging to the enemy ships which disappeared.  These contacts do not, however, show on the map, or anywhere else.

At this point, I figure that my computer crashing in the middle of an increment process meant that the enemy ships were deleted from the record (those poor, poor souls aboard them, they've been deleted from existence!) and my ships, which were targeting them, now throw an error when trying to target an object that no longer exists.  When I navigate to the Combat-control screen, as soon as I select any of the 6 warships of mine that were targeting the enemy, that also throws the same errors at me, again repeating infinitely.  I tried to manually delete the TGs that my ships belonged to (figuring that I'd take the loss, even though that *was* my entire military at the time. . . ), but while the delete button seems to work, the TG is not actually deleted, so I'm stuck.

Thankfully, I can say that this is probably a very rare bug (I assume it requires the entire computer to crash at just the wrong moment), so it's a low-priority fix.  Unfortunately for me, I'm a noob and didn't make any backups, even 54 game-years into the game. . . 

[MagusXIX]

Started a new game.  Haven't even left Sol yet.  All I've been doing is setting up colonies and surveying system bodies and grav sites.  Get this error every time I advance time or open up the map.

Error in ShowMinerals

Error 35602 was generated by Nodes
Key is not unique in collection

Some kind of mineral generation error, maybe?

EDIT: Only seems to happen when I have the system map open in the Sol system.  Every time I move to that system or advance time in that system the error pops up.

[Doren]

In all games I have started so far my "62.   5 EP Commercial Nuclear Thermal Engine"s with power mod of 0.   5x and size of 25hs multiply.   

Most of the games has gone with 2 same engines in my technology report (I have never researched more than one), but one of my games has 8 of these engines in my tech report.    This particular game has 4 races, 2 races has designed and researched engine with power mod of 0.   5x and 25hs size, but all of the duplicates appear in the tech report of my selected default race. 

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that none of these duplicates appear in the design screen. 

[TheRowan]

Whilst re-organising my Ground Units, I accidentally clicked to assign a Brigade HQ to itself as an HQ (ie.  I clicked on 9 Infantry Brigade, 9 Infantry Brigade was already selected in the dropdown menu, and I clicked "Assign HQ").  The Brigade vanished from the Ground Units list on the F2 screen along with all its subordinate units.  The brigade is still present on planet - I can pick it up on troop transports etc. , but it doesn't show in the Ground Units tab on the F2 screen.