Legal status plus two

[Commander McLane]

Unfortunately I don't have any post-1.65 version left on my HD, so I can't run any tests. But I'm reasonably sure that these huge bounties and bounty increases didn't exist before 1.75 (or perhaps 1.74). The only thing I remember is that NPC bounties got a bump when they attacked the police, just like for the player.

BTW: without police being present and watching the offence there should be no bounty at all, just like for the player. Therefore a pirate getting bounty increases while switching between a trader and a hunter seems especially wrong. Only the police can hand out bounties. If they're not watching, there can't be any bounty increase.

On a related note: bounty scoring should be the same for everybody, including the player. You attack a trader in front of the police, you get 7 credits bounty (according to route1patrolAI). You attack the police ship afterwards, your bounty bumps to 79. And there it stays. I just tested it with a trader, two hunters and a lot of police. I attacked the trader: bounty = 7, police ships attacking me. I landed a hit on one of them: bounty = 79, everybody still attacking me. From then on I could switch targets as much as I wanted, I could fire at whom I wanted, I could kill whom I wanted: bounty = 79, period. And this is what I also remember for NPCs prior to 1.75 (or 1.74; I'm not sure which one). I don't recall ever-increasing bounties for NPCs, and I find them irritating.

[Switeck]

I can't remember what OXP had it, but there's an NPC ship with like 6 forward-facing lasers. It makes one pass on something...that something DIES unless it's very hard to hit or very tough. That 6-laser ship is not likely to change targets till the current target is dead.

Another NPC ship is armed with a pulse laser. It will likely get distracted many times before it kills anything.

Same outnumbered situation for both of the above ships. The weak pulse laser ship may soon rack up a killer bounty. The vicious 6-laser ship...not so much.

Destroying a trader, bounty hunter, scavenger, miner, police ship, or important station is immensely worse than just shooting them once. And shooting something is worse than just targeting it. Bounty is not based off a good metric.

[Commander McLane]

I found Oolite 1.74.2 on a backup-HD. There the behaviour is clearly there. It's a shame that I don't have any older versions. I do still have Oolite 1.65, but it's impossible to test anything on it, because it doesn't work correctly on my 64-bit system.

Come to think of it, it is also possible that the bounty-increasing behaviour was already present since 1.65 and I didn't notice it, because I don't tend to sit back and watch long fights between criminals and the cops. So maybe I only ever saw the first increase before I killed the pirate.

It still feels odd.

[Eric Walch]

I do still have Oolite 1.65, but it's impossible to test anything on it, because it doesn't work correctly on my 64-bit system.

Oolite 1.65 should still work on your new 64 bit system under OSX 10.6. The main problem are the oxps. Most authors still refuse to add a requires.plist to their oxp. I know I had to add them manually to a lot of the new stuff to make sure I still can run old 1.65. One of the problems are ships with to many vertexes. Oolite 1.65 can't handle them and crashes. No problem at that time as developers noticed themselves that Oolite would crash. But many of the new stuff with high vertex count doesn't add a minimum requirement.

Come to think of it, it is also possible that the bounty-increasing behaviour was already present since 1.65 and I didn't notice it, because I don't tend to sit back and watch long fights between criminals and the cops. So maybe I only ever saw the first increase before I killed the pirate

Im am pretty sure almost the same in the old days. I have seen the behavior since Frame released his bounty scanner.

There was a change in 1.75 but that was to exclude some ships from this mechanism. I noticed a few times a clean trader in fight with pirates, and suddenly the trader had a bounty. It took me a while before I realized that this mechanism was responsible for it. That is fixed in 1.75. Clean ships don't get a bounty raise, unless they were attacking a clean ship themselves.

[Commander McLane]

I do still have Oolite 1.65, but it's impossible to test anything on it, because it doesn't work correctly on my 64-bit system.

Oolite 1.65 should still work on your new 64 bit system under OSX 10.6. The main problem are the oxps. Most authors still refuse to add a requires.plist to their oxp. I know I had to add them manually to a lot of the new stuff to make sure I still can run old 1.65. One of the problems are ships with to many vertexes. Oolite 1.65 can't handle them and crashes. No problem at that time as developers noticed themselves that Oolite would crash. But many of the new stuff with high vertex count doesn't add a minimum requirement.

It does kind of work. There are just no textures drawn. At all. You see flashers and bodiless exhaust plumes, that's it. Not even the planet is visible.

Ahruman knows, but it's very low on his priority list.

[JensAyton]

It does kind of work. There are just no textures drawn. At all. You see flashers and bodiless exhaust plumes, that's it. Not even the planet is visible.

Ahruman knows, but it's very low on his priority list.

It’s not on my priority list, or anywhere near it. 1.65 is abandoned. None of us would even know where to start trying to fix it.

As for the issue at hand, NPCs certainly should be treated the same way as the player as far as bounty assignment is concerned (i.e., police bounties should be ORed in). But I don’t know that it’s ever worked that way.

Edit: to clarify, while I’d like to see a bounded and consistent approach for 2.0, I don’t want to do this kind of rebalancing for 1.76 unless someone can demonstrate that it’s a regression.

[Tony Montana]

Let's put it like this: 50Cr is more profit than you'd get trading a single TC of Computers from a Rich Industrial to a Poor Agricultural system. It's a lot,
<snip>

If you want to look at 50cr killing someone vs. trading goods approach from time invested point of view, I’d say the reality doesn’t support your accretion, especially if your goal is to make money as quickly as possible and thus you take routes outside witchpoint-station corridors. I’m also not sure why you compare 50cr from killing to a profit from trading a single tone of computers, why not 35t of narcotics or even 99t (or more if there are other goods) if you have bigger ship? Killing also depends on your combat skills and …. how drunk you’re when playing.

<snip>
... although not as much as I've seen on some Fugitive ships with Bounties in 200 to 500-odd Credit range (when they sometimes attack a Seedy Bar from the Random Hits OXP). Liberators make such appetising targets in those circumstances...

this is interesting (including the rest of the discussion), I’d pay more attention next time I see fights around Seedy Bars (just installed bounty scanner for this), though Random Hits already put me on a fence where I’m not sure if this is cheating or not – I went fairly quickly from 40k credits to now over 320k. I’m thinking maybe I should take turns between doing missions (29k in repairs from the last one) and trading.

[Switeck]

If you don't have some pirate/Thargoid adding OXPs, finding a lot of pirates to kill can take some time. Even the average anarchy system might only have 5-10 pirate groups of 1-10 pirate ships each (usually about 3 in my experience.) Their average bounty might be 20-30 credits. So a single system is likely to only give you about 500-2000 credits from bounty alone for killing all the pirates along the space lanes. Assuming someone else doesn't kill them first. And that's with a risk of dying from fighting multiple ships at once. In-and-of-itself, the bounties are not highly profitable.

But that changes once you start scooping their escape pods and cargo canisters. (Or if you salvage their ships using salvage missiles from Dredgers OXP.) Then, bounty hunting can be pretty profitable but still somewhat time-consuming relative to fast trading between Rich Industrial/Poor Agricultural pairs where you're doing torus dashes to the main stations.

Or just skip the bounty hunting and salvage the escape pods and cargo canisters after police, traders, and bounty hunters have probably cleaned the space lane of pirates. After ~1 hour of being in-system, usually random arriving traders alone have killed off the pirates along the space lane.

[Gimi]

I found Oolite 1.74.2 on a backup-HD. There the behaviour is clearly there. It's a shame that I don't have any older versions. I do still have Oolite 1.65, but it's impossible to test anything on it, because it doesn't work correctly on my 64-bit system.

I have 1.70 and 1.72.1 and above if it's any use. Just need to dig into the dark depths of my server and find them.

[Eric Walch]

I found Oolite 1.74.2 on a backup-HD. There the behaviour is clearly there. It's a shame that I don't have any older versions. I do still have Oolite 1.65, but it's impossible to test anything on it, because it doesn't work correctly on my 64-bit system.

I have 1.70 and 1.72.1 and above if it's any use. Just need to dig into the dark depths of my server and find them.

The code of all this versions is still on berlios. So you can compile the old versions at any time when you would want.

But as said, this behavior already existed at least since 1.65. I just choose a random revision 170. That was code before the 1.55 release. Even then it was already pressent:

Code: Select all

- (void) interpretAIMessage:(NSString *)ms
{
	if ([ms hasPrefix:AIMS_AGGRESSOR_SWITCHED_TARGET])
	{
		// if I'm under attack send a thank-you message to the rescuer
		//
//		NSArray* tokens = [ms componentsSeparatedByString:@" "];
		NSArray* tokens = [Entity scanTokensFromString:ms];
		int switcher_id = [(NSString*)[tokens objectAtIndex:1] intValue];
		Entity* switcher = [universe entityForUniversalID:switcher_id];
		int rescuer_id = [(NSString*)[tokens objectAtIndex:2] intValue];
		Entity* rescuer = [universe entityForUniversalID:rescuer_id];
		if ((switcher_id == primaryAggressor)&&(switcher_id == primaryTarget)&&(switcher)&&(rescuer)&&(rescuer->isShip)&&(thanked_ship_id != rescuer_id)&&(scan_class != CLASS_THARGOID))
		{
			if (scan_class == CLASS_POLICE)
				[self sendExpandedMessage:@"[police-thanks-for-assist]" toShip:(ShipEntity*)rescuer];
			else
				[self sendExpandedMessage:@"[thanks-for-assist]" toShip:(ShipEntity*)rescuer];
			thanked_ship_id = rescuer_id;
			[(ShipEntity*)switcher setBounty:[(ShipEntity*)switcher getBounty] + 5 + (ranrot_rand() & 15)];	// reward
		}	
	}
}

It is part of the special AI message 'AIMS_AGGRESSOR_SWITCHED_TARGET' and the bounty is raised in the last line. But I don't see it as a real problem as it are only rare occasions that bounties keep increasing. I only remember one occasion were I saw it going over the 200. On the other hand, I rarely have the bounty scanner installed, so I probably don't notice the bounties that often.

I sooner would think that there are other reasons that increase bounty. e.g. Random Hits deals great bounties. I reduced some values set by little bear, but didn't want to change his decisions to much so they are still high.

[Switeck]

Lone pirates against a small number of traders are the most likely to get ridiculous bounties, especially if the traders are in slow ships relative to the lone pirates. It's uncommon that I see a pirate go over 100 credits bounty...but there's no upper limit if they do. Strangely, Thargoids seldom hit 200 credits bounty. This despite even regular traders attacking them on sight. Anyone have ideas why that might be the case?

Random Hits bounties, despite being way beyond typical bounties, comes with so many strings attached that they're hardly worth their pay. If you have to travel potentially >3 jumps from where the Space Bar is just to get to the bounty target's system, then you've already paid a huge opportunity cost to do so. At the least, any timed cargo/passenger contracts are probably screwed. If instead of doing a random hit, you traded between 2 close systems, the amount of credits that could be earned in the same amount of time would likely dwarf any bounty payout even using a Cobra 3 ship. On top of that, the fight is likely to be costly and difficult...with no reward given at all if you kill the target using a q-bomb or energy bomb. You can even kill the target but be denied the bounty due to a "freak accident". That's like insurance covering everything except...multiple pages of circumstances. The simple solution I did in my version was make the travel distances generally much lower, vastly reducing the opportunity costs.

[Commander McLane]

It is part of the special AI message 'AIMS_AGGRESSOR_SWITCHED_TARGET' and the bounty is raised in the last line. But I don't see it as a real problem as it are only rare occasions that bounties keep increasing. I only remember one occasion were I saw it going over the 200. On the other hand, I rarely have the bounty scanner installed, so I probably don't notice the bounties that often.

Lone pirates against a small number of traders are the most likely to get ridiculous bounties, especially if the traders are in slow ships relative to the lone pirates.

As a summary to what I want to say: I think I have two main isues with the bounty raising behaviour, and both are due to its internal inconsistency. They can be summed up in a third issue. If the same behaviour already existed in 1.65, that doesn't make it any better.

1. Bounties should only be dealt by the police. Therefore the case of a lone pirate against a small number of traders (without presence of a police ship!) should not happen at all. The engine does not raise the player bounty if no police (or station) is in scanner range, period.
   
   It is inconsistent that the engine does raise an NPC's bounty all on its own, without using the police AI mechanism, while it doesn't do that for the player.
2. Raises of player bounty are OR-ed (or XOR-ed; I'm not sure which). Therefore there is a ceiling. The bounty calculated by the game engine during fights with the police (or traders under the police's eyes) can never exceed a certain value. One usual progression while fighting inside the station aegis goes like this (if I recall correctly): hitting a trader = 7; hitting a police ship = 79; hitting the station = 111. I think there is a fourth step (or a slightly different progression) where you can end up with a bounty somewhere in the 120s, but that's the end of the line. You'll never get more.
   
   It is inconsistent that there is a ceiling for the player, but no ceiling for NPCs.
3. Lastly, and following directly from the other points: The whole switching-of-target-gives-a-higher bounty-mechanism only exists for NPCs in the first place. The player never gets a higher bounty for switching to another target, whether the police are looking or not.
   
   It is inconsistent to have a special bounty raising mechanism that only applies to NPCs, not to the player.

And yes, I know that OXPs can add ships with even higher bounties in the first place, and I am an advocate for sensible restraint on the part of OXPers. But even then the engine should handle bounties of NPC and the player consistently.

My simple suggestions are:

1. All bounty dealing to be triggered only by the relevant police AIs and the code parts relevant for police ships and GalCop stations.
2. Therefore no bounty dealing at all if no police and/or station is nearby.
3. Therefore no bounty dealing for target-switching NPCs outside the police entity code.
4. Generally player and NPCs to be treated equally with regard to bounties.

[Fatleaf]

There isn't an OXP to display the players bounty (aside from the built-in display of clean/offender/fugitive), although coding one would be very trivial to do. If you want it I'll code one up for you (or I'm sure one of the other scripters could also do it). It's not been done as for most people the c/o/f levels are sufficient.

I would really appreciate if you would do this.

You could even add it to your log oxp.

[Staer9]

There isn't an OXP to display the players bounty (aside from the built-in display of clean/offender/fugitive), although coding one would be very trivial to do. If you want it I'll code one up for you (or I'm sure one of the other scripters could also do it). It's not been done as for most people the c/o/f levels are sufficient.

I would really appreciate if you would do this.

You could even add it to your log oxp.

that would be great as I would truely be able to brag about the amount of bounty on my head in the seedy space bars... before I get thrown out with part of my equipment damaged.

[Cody]

[wiki]BountyStatus_OXP[/wiki]