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SPEC going absolutely haywire

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2012 10:04 pm
by spckk
I have Windows 7. Played Vega Strike since 0.3.1 or something, but that was on an XP I think. Anyway, now, whenever I'm in SPEC I slowly reach a good speed, then go an immeasurable amount of speed. Something like -e.176283tr shows up and all I see is my target zoom past me, only to have my ship turn around, and boomerang right past it again, only speeding up. The numbers are stuck, but I am just going back and forth at a ridiculous speed past the target, never really reaching it, I've had to auto-SPEC everything and that is not an easy task at such high speeds. I have no clue how to gather my information but I'm on the latest build and I've been running as Administrator, don't think I've changed anything around, I think I hid OpanAL once but I've put it back since then, it was bugging out before I did this, however, after it took long to get it to run at all. What gives? :P

Re: SPEC going absolutely haywire

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2012 10:11 pm
by klauss
You probably are targetting someone very very very far away from the star... right?

Re: SPEC going absolutely haywire

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2012 10:14 pm
by spckk
Yes, something a few light years. Should I slow down manually? I'd have thought it would do it for me, but I guess I'm just used to Freelancer luxury.

Re: SPEC going absolutely haywire

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2012 10:22 pm
by spckk
Nevermind. Not bad this time around. Don't know what happened. Whoa.

Re: SPEC going absolutely haywire

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2012 10:23 pm
by klauss
It's a known issue, SPEC is really hard to manage at those distances, and ships don't create a strong enough gravity well to slow you down on approach. We've discussed making the autopilot do it for you (you can't throttle SPEC manually).

Re: SPEC going absolutely haywire

Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2012 2:31 am
by maze
There's things a few light-years away from stars in this game?

Re: SPEC going absolutely haywire

Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2012 2:44 am
by klauss
Some stray ships sometimes.

He probably meant "0.something ly". If it were an integral part, it would take you about a day to reach them, since SPEC is capped at 100c.

Re: SPEC going absolutely haywire

Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2012 9:42 am
by CLoneWolf
Take this with a grain of salt as I didn't really test this, but I found overshooting SPEC targets happened more often when flying fast ships, whose base top speed was also increased by best overdrive (e.g. Franklin, Lancelot). So try to come to a full stop before going SPEC in case current normal speed affects SPEC math somehow (it might be, since normal vector is preserved after leaving SPEC, but then again its impact might be negligible), and see if it lessens the problem.

Re: SPEC going absolutely haywire

Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 9:43 am
by Ajezla/NightOwl
I have a similar issue sometimes when trying to track down a ship, or even flying to point (planet, base, jump, w/e) in a sector that has A LOT of traffic. This might be more related to framerate though.

Jump points right by planets also screw up my SPEC, because they pull you a bit and keep the SPEC from reaching travel speed effectively. Sometimes I have to wait as much as 5 mins for things to even out if I come out of a jump point that has a planet right next to it (and I mean a planet so close, it looks like the jump is sitting on the planet). There's at least one jump like this in one of the rlaan systems. Its annoying as hell to get away from the planet/jump.

Also, I've noticed that ship targets that you have to find or dock w/ for some cargo missions, will SPEC jump, go back to a target, SPEC, come back, over and over. If you wait to get close enough, you'll be chasing the damn thing for forever. If you request docking clearance though, this tends to make a ship STOP completely and wait for you. Just keep spamming the docking command though, because many will jet off again w/o warning.

Not sure if the planet/jump point and SPEC drive lag is a bug, or an unfortunate side effect of having a jump so close to a planet's gravity well.