Dictators 1.2 cripples station behaviour.

[Eric Walch]

Dictators from Ramirez is one of of my fafourite oxp's that I have installed a long time ago. Never noticed a problem until last week.

During testing the launched of the GRS station I noticed that no ships launched. I shot down the buoy and checked that the launch instruction was given. There was also debris near the station and with the debugging tool I noticed that the station gave every ten seconds a new launch command for scavengers. (without result). This is normal behaviour when some ships are scheduled for docking but no ships launched even after all visible ships docked.

I started to see the cause of the problem when "imperial tankers" from dictators arrived at the GRS station and docked there. According to their AI they should only head for the Astro-Factory. There I found an easy made bug with the waypointAI.plist.

On startup the ships target a point near the astro factory. Then they check for a free path. When yes they go ahead, when no the go into waypointAI.plist. to get a new flight-path without risk of collision. This AI sets new destinations. When returning to the original AI this should reset the destination in his update event. This is omitted and now the "DESIRED_RANGE_ACHIEVED" message come much to early. The AI reacts on it to go into dockingAI thinking it is near the astro factory. But actually it is just going to the nearest station. And that is sometimes the station around the planet. Main station or in my case the grs station. It claims a docking slot in the schedule and all scheduled launches after this have to wait till this ship is docked.

Partly this is also an Oolite bug that allows ships to claim a docking from the other side of the system. So early docking orders are okay but they shouldn't block launches. In my case it took more than half an hour before my ship with replacement buoy launched. At least the launch order was not lost in the following hundred launch orders for a scavenger.

I had the problem with my grs station but the same ploblem must have always been there with the system station. An other result of this early docking is that the ship does not react on attacks anymore and also the escorts are send away for an separate docking.

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This is easy solved by copying the content of the ENTER message and adding that to the UPDATE message. On doing that the ships will also be able to evade obstacles that come in their path after system start. But keep the update interval of 10 seconds.