Crashing into ships appearing out of nowhere

[Reinski]

Hi there,

I'm enjoying this great game for some days now, but now I got a serious problem, that starts to kill the fun playing this game.
It happens quite often now that I approach a jump point, without my scanners showing any ships there. Then when the FTL compression factor lowers to around 1 the game has a short lag (some seconds) and suddenly I find a massive battle going on directly in front of me.
That battle wouldn't be the problem, but since my speed is approx. 3000 at that time, I have no chance evading the capital ships and so I constantly die by crashing into them...
The same also happens from time to time when approaching planets and ships pop up in front of me. It's always the point where the FTL factor drops to one. Though it has nothing to do with the FTL - it seems just that the game engine is loading the objects only when closing in to a certain distance.

Do you have the same effect and how do you handle it?

I don't really want to decrease speed until I reach that local area around the gravity well and then accelerate again to reach the target, as this would cost quite some time as opposed to just approaching with constantly decreasing speed.

I'm running VS0.4.3 under WinXP on a 1.2 GHz machine w/ 1GB Ram (I know, i know - need to buy a new soon).
Hope someone can help!

reinski

[Shissui]

This is a well documented problem. I agree with you, it is really annoying to see a Clydesdale appear 250m in front of you. The good news -- it has been fixed. However, the fix is only available in the SVN version. You will find instructions for downloading the development version of VegaStrike in the Wiki.

I have not been able to get the SVN version to compile on my machine. My solution is to approach a warp point in flight mode, about 10x my combat speed. When I do that all spawns appear behind me, as I have traveled right through them between when I reach the spawning distance and ship placement. I can always turn around if I decide that I don't like them. Or, if I am flying my own Clydesdale, I am moving slow enough that my escort can (usually) destroy the ship in front of me before I reach it.

[Reinski]

thanks for the answer, though it's good news and bad news at the same time.
Maybe I'll try to download and compile the SVN under WinXP - but I'm soo lazy and would prefer just to play. =D
And though I call me a developer myself, I never did anything in C++ (at least not in the past decade). So I should reserve a full weekend for that...
Greetings & again thanks for the response!

reinski

[mortaneous]

You may not need to compile to use the SVN under XP, there are pre-compiled binaries checked in for Windows periodically. That's what I've been using.

[Reinski]

that's great to hear - I'll give it a try tomorrow!
too bad that i was gaming all day and didn't have a look into the forum earlier...