2.41 Bugs

[Steve Walmsley]

Steve -

I posted this before, but it disappeared.  Not to rush you, but do you have an ETA for 2.5?  

Probably 2 weeks. Next Saturday I have a poker game so although I am going to look at Aurora I probably won't be able to get enough done to release it until the following week. The problem at the moment is that I am getting up at 6am for work and not arriving home till 8pm, giving me a couple of hours to eat and relax before going to bed. As you can imagine, weekends are fairly busy too. Once I (finally) sell the house and move nearer to work my life will get much easier.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

I think I finally nailed the bug that causes a very occasional hang during system generation so if you see this bug reappear in v2.5, please let me know. I think the problem was caused by a potentially endless loop if the primary in a multi-star system is the lowest mass star possible, because the program will keep trying to generate lower mass stars for the second star.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

Steve- I've just finished fighting out my first ever ground combat, and several weird things popped up.  

First off, I got an error message when I ordered my ground units to stop attacking the enemy - "Error in cmdCeaseGroundAttack_Click".

Fixed this one. It was caused by me trying to update a field that didn't exist in a database recordset.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

Secondly, I'm not sure ground combat is working right, the battle was between 1 mobile infantry and three garrison units on one side, and three heavy assault divisions, three mobile infantry, two assault divisions, two garrisons and an HQ on the other side.  To further unbalance things, the side with the eleven divisions had researched ground unit strength 14, while the weaker side only had the basic level (10, I think).  After three combat rounds, the weaker side had lost the mobile infantry division and one garrison, while the stronger side had lost the following:
Heavy Assault: 2
Assault: 1
Mobile Infantry: 2
Garrison: 1

While certainly within the bounds of possibility, it seems that this result is highly unlikely.

Just to check, were the defending units in a PDC?

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

Finally, preceding the ground battle, orbiting cruisers initiated a general bombardment, just to teach the rebels a lesson.  The results were gratifying, especially given the outdated weaponry used (thermal torpedoes).  The results were so good, as a matter of fact, that I stopped the bombardment after just one round.  The problem is, every time I run a turn more damage is being done to the planet, even though all of the ships ceased fire a long time ago.  In fact, I moved them away from the planet just to eliminate them as a possible cause, and at this point they are far beyond the range of their weapons.  Even so, I continue to get the following message in the Event screen:
               suffered 1 hits for a total of 4 points of damage. Casualties...

Note the blank at the start.  I think that relates the name of the rebels.  After the resolution of the battle I deleted them, but for some reason Aurora is continuing to bombard them.  The above message is followed by another indicating that the loyalist population on the planet has also been hit for the same amount of damage.  The radiation level increases every turn as well.  

I haven't been able to reproduce this problem and I have carried out a planetary bombardment in my current campaign. Its possible this is something else I have fixed inadvertently since v2.41. The repeating damage may be caused by a record remaining in the FireResult table, although this should be deleted after it has been applied.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

This raises a question.  Should there be any radiation from bombardment by energy weapons?

That's a good question. I think for the sake of gameplay the answer should be yes to avoid painless (for the attacker) bombardment.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

A minor one:  It looks like the "Location" dialog box on the F4 screen is not being updated for commanders of HQ - it looks like it just stays with whoever the last one is.  Not sure if this applies to other ground units too.  Note that the HQ in question is in a PDC, so that might be the problem.

It's s problem for commanders of all ground units based in PDCs. Fixed for v2.5

Steve

[Kurt (OP)]

Secondly, I'm not sure ground combat is working right, the battle was between 1 mobile infantry and three garrison units on one side, and three heavy assault divisions, three mobile infantry, two assault divisions, two garrisons and an HQ on the other side.  To further unbalance things, the side with the eleven divisions had researched ground unit strength 14, while the weaker side only had the basic level (10, I think).  After three combat rounds, the weaker side had lost the mobile infantry division and one garrison, while the stronger side had lost the following:
Heavy Assault: 2
Assault: 1
Mobile Infantry: 2
Garrison: 1

While certainly within the bounds of possibility, it seems that this result is highly unlikely.

Just to check, were the defending units in a PDC?

Steve

No, there were no PDC's on the planet.  In addition, IIRC, most of the attackering units had commanders, many of whom had combat bonuses, while the defenders largely had no commanders.  This should have been an additional bonus to the attackers, but as I noted, the attackers suffered disproportionate losses before winning.  

I wish I had more detailed information to give you, aside from a report of seemingly inconsistent results.  

Kurt

[Steve Walmsley]

Ships aren't immediately removed from the "available for refit" list as they're given refit tasks.  For example, if I have Viper 01 and Viper 02 in orbit and have a shipyard with two slipways that I want to use to refit them to Viper-B, then both of them show up as possible refit candidates even after I've given a refit order for Viper 01.  

Fixed for v2.5

Steve

[SteveAlt]

A rather annoying bug from a recent battle:

1.  4xPDC on the homeworld of a despicable alien race;
2.  Each PDC has fifteen missile launchers and three missile tracking systems;
3.  Ten valiant human ships attack the despicable alien world (yea!);
4.  The four PDC's allocate five missile launchers to each tracking system, and then split their fire among all attacking ships, resulting in two ships targeted by two tracking systems (ten launchers) each, while the other eight ships are targeted by one tracking system each;
5.  The PDC's launch.  The first hint of trouble is that the resulting missile salvoes show up on the map as 4x15 missile salvoes, instead of 12x5 missile salvoes;
6.  The 4x15 missile salvoes attack four human ships (booo!) with fifteen missiles each, instead of eight ships with five missiles, and two ships with ten missiles each.

After the combat was resolved I checked the weapons allocation and targeting assignments on the battle management screen.  The launchers were properly assigned, five to a tracking system, and each tracking system was assigned a different target.  They certainly weren't targeted all on the same four ships.    

This is the first battle using missiles in this campaign.  I don't know if it is PDC specific, or if this would happen with a ship as well.  

FYI, the valiant humans were lucky that the despicable aliens couldn't hit the broadside of a terraformer ship.  

I have reproduced this by setting up a similar situation. The problem occurs when a ship shoots the same type of missile at two targets at the same time using two different fire control systems. I have fixed it for v2.5.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

5.  During the battle, the Event  Update screen consistently displaying the following message: "24th July 39 04:12:16,Terran,New York,Cleveland Mk 2 006 - Main Fire Control targeting Luhu 003 at 405,200 km: Base Chance to Hit: 0% (Fire Control To Hit: 0%  Modified by Crew Grade: 0%)".

The name mentioned in the above message only for targeting messages like the one above, for damage or any other purpose the correct name displayed.  

I am at a loss.  I checked the ship window, the class window, the task group window, and none show any ships with the name Cleveland Mk 2 006.  I even cracked the database open and checked the "ship" database, and there were no ships named Cleveland there either.  I don't know where Aurora is digging this up, but it appears to be in the targeting routine.  

The name is also being held on the FireControlAssignment table. I added the name field for ease of data retrieval during a battle but longstanding assignments will result in the problem you described. Therefore I removed this field for v2.5 and changed the code to retrieve the correct ship name when it is needed.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

Two more bugs related to the recent battle:

1.  I have attempted to have damage control repair damaged systems after the battle on three human cruisers.  All three ships have both a damage control system and spares.  I received multiple error messages during the turn resolution after I pressed the time advance, but the Event Update window showed that all three ships had been successful in repairing the system I told them to repair.  However, when I went to the ship display, no damage had been repaired.  

Fixed for v2..5. Damage control is now working as it should.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

I'm getting several cboRace_Click error when I open the Fuel Report (ctrl-F12, I think).  I think it's because I've got some terraforming ships without engines - they get towed everywhere.

That probably would cause divide by zero errors. I have changed the code so that no range calculations are performed on ships without engines.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

This one's a bit witchy, so you might have trouble tracking it down.

  Every now and then, my construction queue gets messed up - it's not building the thing it says it's building.  In the most recent example, it's supposedly 80% done building a mine, but during the update cycle it's eating tritanium and when I look at the installations in SM mode, I see 80% of an ordnance factory.  My recollection is that if I delete out the corrupted job(s) and re-queue them, the problem goes away.  The only two clues I can add are that in the most recent case I had just finished building a spaceport and that I think I've seen it last through more than one completion of a queued item (automated mines) in another case.  Could spaceports be having some sort of long-term corruption effect?

  If you can't track the problem down, you might see if the same query is being used during the update cycle to decide what to build and during display of the construction queue - that way the corruption would be obvious when it happens.

I can't reproduce it so far but intermittent problems are always a pain to track down. Production during the update cycle is handled as a large case statement so that shouldn't get confused, which means any error must be in the data it is using. I have tried creating a long queue of items to construct but there weren't any errors. However, I think I fixed a problem with PDCs in the installation queue for v2.5 so I might have also fixed the above problem too. Let me know if you encounter it after v2.5 has been released.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

I've long since killed the game that the example came from.  But,  the intent was to have a carrier standoff around 1m km and launch fighters.  Since the carrier's speed is 3000kps and the targets is 1800kps this should be doeable.  I'd turned off the sub-pulses do the the movement errors I'm getting when fighters move.  I was more than a little surprised to find (think after 5 minutes) that the slower ship was something like 15k away from the carrier and pounding it into scrap.  Oh and the fighters speed was something like 12k kps and about 500k km away from the fight.

In the interim, I've gone to way points, micro-managing the speeds and living with thumping enter (a lot) to keep fast carriers at loyter ranges while fighters strikes overrun targets.

Definitely something weird here. I haven't been using fighters in the last couple of campaigns so errors may have crept in due to changes elsewhere and I haven't noticed. I'll need to setup some fighter battles and try and reproduce these problems (or just play my campaign more until I get some fighters )

Steve