Topic: Can the double weapon hardpoints be fixed?

[Lepton1]

Quote:
I'm thinking that the doubled fire effects may be caused by the "doubled" ships for the carrier/PF-race donation routine.

You know, the AI tracking both a F-DDG & L-DDG in the same spacial location, but with individual (Federation & Lyran) hardpoints / charge meters.

It's the only thing I can think of.  Other issues, such as super phasers, etc, I can't begin to guess about (unless it's just a manifestation of 2xPh-1 volleys at the same moment... (look ma, way to get SFB-style internals done...  )  

Could you explain this doubled ship business for us?  When I look at the ship list, all fed ships appear to be lyrans with ESGs and such.  Duh??  Very confusing.  But if the program is indeed "using"  two ships to make the capabilities for one, I can't see how  it can't be this.  If the scripts have to call up the specs for two ships to make one AI, it would be like two separate ships sharing exactly the same space in the game, which was a crazy idea I had had myself.

[Lepton1]

It has also been noted that sometimes AI ships are taking longer to blow up than usual.  Perhaps if the ships are "doubled", this means the number of internals needed to blow them up are doubled.   This might be a test that could be done to explore this.  If we can determine the number of internals that is needed to destroy each ship, in instances where double firing is happening, the destruction of that ship might prove to have doubled hitpoints (internals taken) as it were in the mission summary screen.

[NuclearWessels]

Quote:

Quote:

One thing for sure though, all these things seem to only happen in the missions I wrote, Dave's missions are unaffected, which tends to suggests its a scripting problem. Why then, we don't see these hapenning on the test server, is a mystery.  

Turn off the Officers that you enabled in your missions and see if that stops it.   It's the first thing that stands out to me based on these results.

 

It can't be just the officers, since the AI gets legendary officers (except for helm officer) in many of the ED scripts as well.

It's possible it's some form of interaction between the legendary officers and something else in the ET ( ) scripts, and/or between the scripts and the DOE shiplist.

<scratches head and looks befuddled>

dave
 

[Herr Burt]

If the bug were only happening to fighter carriers (which are the ships that appear in the list twice with the same name), I might view the shiplist as a possible suspect when combined with certain missions.  But that doesn't seem to be the case.  It's hard for me to judge though as I've still never seen the bug.  

A few mission-packs ago, some Evil Dave base assault missions had a problem where the AI would fight you for control of your ship.  I noticed then that you would have two sets of weapons in you ship; one that you could fire and one that the AI could fire.  I'd suspect this problem is similar that one.  The difference being that now the AI controls both sets of weapons, and so reaches the decision to fire both sets at once.  In the Dave missions I rarely agreed with the AI decisions for my vessel and thus I usually fired my weapons seperately from his.  (when I could get my ship pointed in the same direction)

For information sake:
The Gorn get their fighters from Federation entries.  Being second in the shiplist, they had but one choice for a donor.

-Herr Burt

[FPF_TraceyG]

Well, I'm glad its not just the AI Officers, thanks Dave. Its difficult to 'debug' when I can't reproduce the problem on the test server though.

[Julin Eurthyr]

Quote:
If the bug were only happening to fighter carriers (which are the ships that appear in the list twice with the same name), I might view the shiplist as a possible suspect when combined with certain missions.  But that doesn't seem to be the case.  It's hard for me to judge though as I've still never seen the bug.  

A few mission-packs ago, some Evil Dave base assault missions had a problem where the AI would fight you for control of your ship.  I noticed then that you would have two sets of weapons in you ship; one that you could fire and one that the AI could fire.  I'd suspect this problem is similar that one.  The difference being that now the AI controls both sets of weapons, and so reaches the decision to fire both sets at once.  In the Dave missions I rarely agreed with the AI decisions for my vessel and thus I usually fired my weapons seperately from his.  (when I could get my ship pointed in the same direction)

For information sake:
The Gorn get their fighters from Federation entries.  Being second in the shiplist, they had but one choice for a donor.

-Herr Burt  

If only carrier ships are duplicated, then the Rommies only have their "B" variants placed in the ISC shiplist, correct?  Well, why did I have an I-BHR escorting me when the I-BHR doesn't even touch fighters???

[Julin Eurthyr]

And a followup with proof...



Notice the I-SEAs.  If anything, they are Drogue ships, which means they should be only on the Romulan portion of the shiplist...  Yet, they're flying from the ISC here... (and cloaking quite intellegently, thank you... Perhaps the ISC should get the Cloaking device, as our AI uses it nicely... )  

For the record, this was AlliedPatrolB...    

[Herr Burt]

Quote:

If only carrier ships are duplicated, then the Rommies only have their "B" variants placed in the ISC shiplist, correct?  Well, why did I have an I-BHR escorting me when the I-BHR doesn't even touch fighters???  

Yes, only the B variants are duplicated.  The I-BHR isn't a duplicate; it has its own name and is thus treated by the game engine as its own entity.  This is no different than the G-DD being treated differently from the F-DD or the L-DD.

The way the donation works is keyed on the two different ways the game looks for ships.  (At least a far as I've been able to reproduce the game's logic.)

 When  in the shipyard, what the game wants to do is build Romulan ships.  It isn't too particular about which ships it builds.  So the game chooses the most logical search path for this task by looking at the left-most column in the shiplist and finding the block of ships listed as belonging to the Romulans.  (And woe be upon you if you've got any Romulan ships listed away from their brethren; your server engine will have apopletic fits and produce nothing that appears in the shiplist below this errant Romulan ship.)  All these ships that say Romulan in their left-most column are built and offered for sale in the shipyard.

However, if you place a fighter-carrier in this list, you get big trouble in mission since the block of ships with Romulan in their leftmost entry have no programmed logic on how to launch fighters.  You'll try to launch your fighters and nothing will happen.

The solution to this problem lies within the way that the game looks for your ship in mission.  When you start a mission, the server cares very much not just which race you fly for, but which exact ship you own.  Therfore it scans the third column in the shiplist and looks for a ship with the proper name.  If you have a R-SUB, for example, it will spot the R-SUB in the ISC list and stop looking.  (Since it has found what it is searching for.)  You will thus get an ISC ship in mission your mission and your fighters will work find since the ISC knows how to launch fighters.

If you have a R-SEA, on the other hand, the engine will skip right past the I-SEA since it has the wrong name.  In the same manner -- with a stock shiplist -- if you have a L-DD the game engine will skip right past the F-DD and the G-DD since they ahve the same name.  No confusion is caused and there is no duplication.

Why do I have the ISC with ships in their fleet like the I-SEA and the I-WER?   The missions require each race to have an ally and for this ally to have bases relatively near to your space.  Otherwise they will "create" an ally and you will wind up with Feds or Gorn on both sides of the.  (It's annoying.)  The "cheat" I settled on here was to give the ISC to the Romulans as an ally, but make their ships look Romulan.  If you close one eye and squint, you can make-believe that there are no ISC in this war.  (As, historically, there should not be.)

-Herr Burt