Some bugs for the quality assurance

LukeX717 · Post by **LukeX717** » Thu May 22, 2008 8:41 pm

Some bugs and ideas:

1. Flying through suns
2. Selling ships: At which price? Could not find the price listed.
3. No mission descriptions after having accepted a mission
4. Rarely usefull news
5. Esc-Q should always work in the game.
6. Load/save a game from the fighter.
7. Fonts too small (extreme detail) or too big (very high detail), or even both. I failed to set the font size in the config file. (Windows XP SP3)
8. Mouse click spots where you click to come to the bar, landing pad etc are in nonintuitive places sometimes
9. Wingmen are still very expensive, and there are often to few.
10. Doubled text in extreme detail mode (while navigating through a base)
11. The Player's Guide tutorial glitches: Example: It says to buy the jump drive from Jenek...
12. Tractor beams seem not to work on ships at all. Not even heavy tractor.
13. Is there still a repulsor beam somewhere? It could be usefull to sweep some room through asteroid fields (but it didn't work)

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Thu May 22, 2008 11:51 pm

1. Well, flying through suns is impossible to avoid sometimes because the computer can't recalculate collision vectors fast enough (you are travelling 97 times the speed of light, or approximately 30,000,000,000 m/s)

2. Ship sales should indeed have a price indicator. Good call, that's one thing I always mean to suggest and always forget.

3. The mission interface could also use looking at.

4. News, the economy system, and the universe in general are soon to undergo an overhaul.

5. It always works in a ship and its easy to quit from the planet/base interface

6. Not going to happen, you would have to save, very precisely, the locations of ever other ship in the system, plus their equipment etc. => mutiple megabyte savefiles. Bad strategy. Also, it doesn't really seem that it would add much to the game, because saving in the middle of a flight would not be convenient anyway.

7. I also really dislike the high quality fonts on Extreme Detail, I keep it at high mainy to avoid them, although i like the other font alot.

8. Right-clicking in the base interface jumps between movement points so you can find them without searching with the mouse pointer. This should be better documented.

9. You're hiring dudes that will follow you into battle, its not going to be cheap.

10. No experience with it but again the HQ fonts need work

11. The tutorial hasn't been changed in a couple years now, probably could use some work, however, there is now an ingame tutorial mission.

12. There have been reports to that effect. However, it may be due to the difficulties in matching speed rather than an engine-side problem.

13. The repulsor still exists but it will not be able to push asteroids afaik.

Overall not a bad set of suggestions (if I seemed a bit harsh) its what VS needs to keep developing.

Post by **ace123** » Fri May 23, 2008 3:03 am

1. Flying through suns has always been a bit of a bug in the game--the computer should never be stupid enough to try that. I think at some point we tried to disable collisions with suns and just let you go through them/

2. Oops--wow can't believe I didn't notice something that important.
Anyway, the default sellback cost is 50% of the purchase cost plus transportation charges, if any.

3. Yes, the way missions are implemented right now is really, really awful. Though I agree that it would be worth adding another hack to the loading process to make it remember the description as well as the title.

In my opinion a better way would be to abandon the whole concept of a mission, and make them into a sort of "objective" list that can be handled entirely in Python... but that's for a later time.

4. I agree--improving the dynamic universe is on the todo list, and we are starting by changing the way factions work for 0.5.1.

5. Another one of the annoying problems in the game. We do process input inside of bases now, so maybe it wouldn't be that hard to display the "Press Q to Exit" sprite in front of the base.

6. I didn't add the python code to allow you to type in "/save" and "/load"... however it still won't save anything about the area you're in or who you are fighting.

7. Yes, GLUT Fonts are ugly

LukeX717 · Post by **LukeX717** » Fri May 23, 2008 3:58 pm

3. A navigation computer like view for 'missions' might be an idea.

5. I know. Esc-Q in base would be a nice to have anyway.

6. I agree. But loading a game during flight?

7. I like the other font also, but I failed to set its size.

8. Right-clicking: Good to know!

9. The dudes are that expensive, so that I just don't hire them: Never.

10. Yeah, and the font usage is inconsistent: During game startup the smallest font is used.

@bgaskey: It wasn't that harsh at all.

@ace123: I'm looking forward what is good to come!

Post by **safemode** » Fri May 23, 2008 4:56 pm

With the upcoming ray collider i believe it will be possible to run a collision test for the distance you will travel in the next frame, and if one is detected, to reduce the spec factor such that you will only travel half that distance (distance to the point of collision) in the next frame....avoiding the possibility of colliding fairly cheaply.

Basically, for every frame in spec, I would run a ray collision of twice the magnitude of what my current frame's transformation is and detect if a collision is going to occur along that path. If so, I reduce the physical transformation by half of the distance to the collision or half the total transformation if the collision is detectected to occur beyond the current transformation. I'd then reduce the spec rate to the appropriate value based on the new distance traveled.

This would be guaranteed to avoid flying through objects in your path.

A similar setup is what i plan to use for teaching AI players how to fly around objects.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Sat May 24, 2008 2:27 am

9. The dudes are that expensive, so that I just don't hire them: Never.

Wingmen will probably be neccesary or at least useful if a campaign gets written and integrated and/or if joining a faction and fighting fleet engagements becomes possible. It would be nice to command a battle fleet from the bridge of a Leonidas or Archimedes.

@ Safemode, sounds good. Now, with my rather slow processor (P4 1.8GHz) I tend to fly through my objectives if I'm approaching at the max (97C) and in a heavy ship it can take a while to turn around

But that fix will alleviate this.

Post by **safemode** » Sat May 24, 2008 5:05 am

I wonder if you set your "set" speed to something very low (but not 0) if that long adjustment period for changing direction would be reduced a lot.

SPEC's direction should depend only on the velocity vector for the ship, and the ship's velocity never really changes from whatever it was set to go at when you started SPEC'ing. Thus, changing direction should only be dependent on the _real_ velocity, not the spec.

Keller · Post by **Keller** » Sat May 24, 2008 5:54 am

Actually, if you set your tac speed to 1 m/s, ships are quite spritely in SPEC if using manual mode. Don't make the mistake of using auto when approaching ships, you'll almost always overshoot. (result of fly through bug perhaps?)

Zolk · Post by **Zolk** » Sat May 24, 2008 4:32 pm

To original 6: Load/Save in Flight

I often must stop playing vegastrike quite suddenly. So an inflight save/load-game would come handy. It could be a kind of boss-key, suspending play to restart it later. I wouldn't be bothered if the dump/save-file would need 1 GB. I would still be nice.

Post by **ace123** » Sat May 24, 2008 9:27 pm

You can paste this code into your custom.py to allow saving and loading while in flight:

(it needs to be below the series of "import weapons_lib, guilds, dialog_box, computer, etc.", around line 20)

Code: Select all

def runSave(local,cmd,args,id):
	if len(args) != 1 or args[0].find('/')!=-1:
		VS.IOmessage(0,'game','all','Usage: /save "some file name"')
		return
	VS.IOmessage(0,'game','all','Saved "'+args[0]+'"!')
	VS.saveGame(args[0])
add('save', runSave)

def runLoad(local,cmd,args,id):
	if len(args) != 1 or args[0].find('/')!=-1:
		VS.IOmessage(0,'game','all','Usage: /load "some file name"')
		return
	VS.IOmessage(0,'game','all','Loaded "'+args[0]+'"!')
	VS.loadGame(args[0])
add('load', runLoad)

def runListSaves(local,cmd,args,id):
	import computer_lib
	saves = [ path
		for path in computer_lib.time_sorted_listdir(VS.getSaveDir())
		if path[:1] != '.' and path not in computer_lib.savefilters ]
	VS.IOmessage(0,'game','all','The most recent 20 saved games are:')
	VS.IOmessage(0,'game','all','"'+('", "'.join(saves[:20]))+'"')
add('listsaves', runListSaves)

I'll commit this to SVN too later.

EDIT: This allows you to type bracket to open/close the prompt, then you can do:
/save "some name"
/load "some other name"
/listsaves

However, note that it can be kind of strange to load directly in flight... but that's what you get for saving while in flight.

LukeX717 · Post by **LukeX717** » Sun May 25, 2008 2:07 pm

One more bug:

14. Ships inside planets prevent finishing a mission.

Post by **ace123** » Mon May 26, 2008 4:29 am

Ships are inside of planets? Are you sure?

You might want to hit 'a'... sometimes they are just on the other side of the planet.

LukeX717 · Post by **LukeX717** » Mon May 26, 2008 1:22 pm

Yes. I've seen this on Vegastrike 0.4.3 already. Hitting 'a' on VS 0.5.0 results in some strange maneuvers from the autopilot, but it can't reach the flying ship inside the planet.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Tue May 27, 2008 12:36 am

Maybe the ship is just close enough to the planet surface that the spec drive can't bring you in to it and it would take forever to fly in?

Post by **loki1950** » Tue May 27, 2008 1:10 am

But you can't get to it if auto-docking is on you just end up on the planet's landing pad.It should be forced to land as well but i wonder if that has an effect on AI units.

Enjoy the Choice

LukeX717 · Post by **LukeX717** » Tue May 27, 2008 12:58 pm

I'm 100% sure, that I had ships _inside_ planets in VS 0.4.3. Now one possibility why this could have happened is the "evil" time acceleration (F9/F10). I changed the key bindings to get it back in VS 0.5.0...
Anyway: Ships that are too near a planet (center) should try to make some distance.