cascading

[Commander McLane]

A very good point, DH!

So in my opinion anything that explodes in a quirium blast and has quirium in it should cascade.

This excludes (ordinary) asteroids (which only cascade in 1.72.1 due to a bug; haven't done it before), alloys, cargo (all of these don't have quirium in them—apart from fuel tanks, of course—things are getting complicated again :sigh:; perhaps for the sake of simplicity we should pretend fuel tanks don't exist), and main stations (these don't explode in a quirium blast).

Everything else should cascade: ships, derelicts, dockable objects other than main-stations (as far as they explode in the first place; there may be non-main-stations with a high enough energy to withstand a quirium blast; most of LB's stations come into mind).

Still one can argue about the derelicts. Everything else seems pretty straightforward to me.

As far as I think, these are quite complete lists. Now the question is how to code the distinction.

[Cmdr James]

OK, so as far as I understand the main change for me, is to modify code such that rock based stations cascade.

Not sure about fuel cargo, but it might be possible to have a special case for that. Any anyway, the code doesnt have to be perfect, even with it the way I changed it yesterday, it should already be better than it was, and if more changes are needed we can work on those too.

[Lestradae]

Are you actually having a look into the poll that is up and running in the suggestions forum or are you going to simply ignore any objections and decide without asking anyone besides Cmdr McLane?

No offense meant, just asking.

[Cmdr James]

To be honest, Im hoping that everyone will agree that what I already did was right, and then I dont have any more work to do

Thats not quite true, but so far the discussion is mostly over in this thread, so I am trying to elaborate on the ideas people have expressed.

If/when anything interesting comes out of the poll, of course it can be discussed.

The poll, as it stands now (early datys, I know) is spilt evenly between anything containing fuel, and only things with reactors. So we are pretty much on the same page anyway.

It isnt clear what your poll options have to say about Rock Hermits, so I think we need to have that discussion anyway.

Also, Ive just realised, Rock Hermits et al. tend to contain ships which will of course cascade....

[Eric Walch]

Besides all scanclasses and other exceptions, I think that anything that has the fuel property set should cascade.

That would than also include containers. Currently the fuelpods I know of have not set fuel and just award fuel when scooped. Currently they would do nothing but in a future release they probably should have fuel set. Than would also frame's fuel collector be able to scoop up that fuel.

And it would affect derelicts only when they had fuel left.

For a ship a normal player can not know if it contains fuel and therefor it should always cascade for the better continuation of cascading.

The cascading of asteroids was very impressive when doing the AsteroidStorm.oxp. When I rewrote a bit for 1.72 I had also to test how the asteroid behaved when killed with a q-bomb. In the original version a asteroid had death_action that re-spawned a new asteroid near the station. From an other report I already read this could cascade for ever. But that was probably only true for playing it with 1.72.
I never realised this was a bug and rewrote it a bit that only 50% was re-added near the station and the other 50% was added further away in direction witchpoint. Now you saw it cascading in direction witchpoint but it faded out in a reasonable time.

But rewriting this part I had a interesting problem. A script can't see if it was killed by a Q-bomb. It only sees the entity that fired the bomb. Without further tests it would just look like the player had killed the bastard and was awarded for saving the station. To easy for a player, so I now added code in the asteroid to remember its energy level of the last attack. If the energy drop is very large, I now just assume it was a Q-bomb and also blow up the station by script. It just would be easier when this q-bomb death could be detected by script. e.g. through the "cause" that now only reads "energy damage". I just see no easy way to let this read "q-bomb".

[Commander McLane]

Are you actually having a look into the poll that is up and running in the suggestions forum or are you going to simply ignore any objections and decide without asking anyone besides Cmdr McLane?

No offense meant, just asking.

Well, basically this is about a bug report and a bug fix. And those are usually not debated at all. If it is broken, fix it—and don't wait for everybody's opinion on whether or not and how they want it to be fixed.