Trouble with Random Hits

[Turanga Leela]

Hello, fellow commanders! I'm new to this forum, so please forgive my imprecissions & very basic english

I'm currently having a little trouble with the extraordinary Random Hits OXP by LittleBear.

After fulfilling my first mission, getting deadly and having a lot of fun exterminating a certain councillor at Xexedi, i went to the nearest seedy space bar to get a new hit contract. Then, strange things began to happen...

After my next witchjump, messages about the defunct councillor's clan being on my trails started to appear. No problem, i expected that after reading other commander's advices, but they appeared mixed with other messages that didn't get registered at the ship's comms log. For example (approximately):

REVENGE_STATUS: YES TIME_TO_STRIKE:QUITE_SOON JUMPS_MADE:3

Since that looks too serious to be any kind of thargoid transmission, i assume i've come across some kind of code trumble. I haven't experimented any other anomaly apart for the felon's family refusing to appear in my next jump.

I'm running Oolite 1.72.2 (Windows XP) and the latest version of the OXP. I must say i altered the main Oolite shiplist.plist in order to change my ship's name. Now, my trusty Cobra III is christened "Cobra Mark III (Nibbler)"

Can somebody lend me a hand with this? Thanks!

[Captain Hesperus]

Hello, fellow commanders! I'm new to this forum, so please forgive my imprecissions & very basic english

I'm currently having a little trouble with the extraordinary Random Hits OXP by LittleBear.

After fulfilling my first mission, getting deadly and having a lot of fun exterminating a certain councillor at Xexedi, i went to the nearest seedy space bar to get a new hit contract. Then, strange things began to happen...

After my next witchjump, messages about the defunct councillor's clan being on my trails started to appear. No problem, i expected that after reading other commander's advices, but they appeared mixed with other messages that didn't get registered at the ship's comms log. For example (approximately):

REVENGE_STATUS: YES TIME_TO_STRIKE:QUITE_SOON JUMPS_MADE:3

Since that looks too serious to be any kind of thargoid transmission, i assume i've come across some kind of code trumble. I haven't experimented any other anomaly apart for the felon's family refusing to appear in my next jump.

I'm running Oolite 1.72.2 (Windows XP) and the latest version of the OXP. I must say i altered the main Oolite shiplist.plist in order to change my ship's name. Now, my trusty Cobra III is christened "Cobra Mark III (Nibbler)"

Can somebody lend me a hand with this? Thanks!

Hi, Leela, first off:
Welcome to the Friendliest Boards This Side of Reidquat!(TM) This bug is well known on the Random Hits OXP, as it is a debugging tool implemented by the good LittleBear to ensure that the counter-hunter script was working properly. I'm not sure how to 'fix it', but for now let me assure you it is simply saying 'All is well'.

Captain Hesperus

[Thargoid]

IIRC it's because you're running a beta version that is still being worked on, hence you've got debug code in it.

Once the code's finished and LB has got any glitches ironed out of it, the full release version presumably won't have such messages. Either that or just go back to the last stable release until he's done his work.

[LittleBear]

I'll take it out for the next version. It is intended that the player sees this message though as its usefull for bug-spotting. You will need to use the beta version though as 1.2 has a lot little problems and won't work on 1.71 or higher of Oolite. Just have to ignore it I'm afraid.

On the Beta version a group of Thargoids always attack bars (this is so people can check the AIs of the bars and hunters are working OK and they ignore friendly fire). You'll also find ships occasionally send you messages such as "In RandomHitsScavengerAI". Again this is just so that if a ship does something buggy or silly, I know which AI it was using at the time. You will also always he chased by angry relatives when you make a hit (also as a test), in the 1.4 version it'll just be occasional. Shouldn't give you too much trouble though as there're no tougher than a typical group of pirates.

I hadn't meant to leave RH in beta for more than a couple of weeks, but RL has been too busy for me to do much more on it. Been getting by on 3 hours sleep a night since Xmass. Finish my case on Wednessday though, so I'll have time for some OXPing next weekend.

The debug message means they are tracking you, but it will take some time for them to find you. Sooner or later though you'll get jumped. It won't necessarily be the next jump though. When they are actually in your system you get another debug message saying "Adding revenge ships at pwn [co-ordinate numbers]". You may or may not actually cross paths though. If you keep missing them, they'll eventually hit you at the jump point. Once dead they don't come back. The debug message does spoil the surprise a bit though!

[Turanga Leela]

Thank you for your quick answers!

And, LittleB, thanks again for sharing your knowledge. I'll ignore the messages and wait for that b'stards to appear... My cyclopean eyesight will help me with that, no doubt

BTW, the detail of other bounty hunters warning you is really great and gives a lot of additional depth to the ooniverse!

See you at the nearest seedy space bar.

[HueijRevisited]

I have another problem with RH.

On my first mission I destroyed his ship, got a message to shoot the resulting pod, killed it and was informed that someone else finished the job. I started over with the same results. Trying again I noticed a Q-mine explosion some distance away (before finding my target) and was congratulated with my(?) kill.

Just now, after finishing my second mission I once again was told that someone beat me.

Anyone knowing what's going on?

[Screet]

Anyone knowing what's going on?

That almost reads as if you get an inverted success report?!? Now that's strange.

However, since I was doing most RH mission while the buoys were stolen by the commies, I had some trouble to find the targets soon...and at that time it was a pretty frequent sight that the victim got killed by a freak accident.

Once I had the "someone else" as a result of missile action and ECM use. Exploding missiles sometimes can cause damage, it appears, and sometimes NPCs using ECM end up using a Q-Bomb directly as a follow up, probably because they did drain their energy banks too much. Could that have happened?

Screet

[HueijRevisited]

Anyone knowing what's going on?

That almost reads as if you get an inverted success report?!? Now that's strange.

However, since I was doing most RH mission while the buoys were stolen by the commies, I had some trouble to find the targets soon...and at that time it was a pretty frequent sight that the victim got killed by a freak accident.

Once I had the "someone else" as a result of missile action and ECM use. Exploding missiles sometimes can cause damage, it appears, and sometimes NPCs using ECM end up using a Q-Bomb directly as a follow up, probably because they did drain their energy banks too much. Could that have happened?

Screet

No, I didn't use any missiles on either mission, and the Q-mine thing happened before I even noticed the target was in the vicinity.

[LittleBear]

You need to use the lastest version (1.3.275) of Random Hits and 1.72.2 of Oolite. On lower versions player kills are not recognised by Oolite due to a change of command name. If a victim blows himself up with his own q-mine (or gets killed by an NPC q-mine), this will count as an NPC kill rather than a player kill, but thats pretty rare. Credit is always given to the ship that fired the fatal shot. If you soften a victim up, but a police viper fires the shot that kills him the Cop would get the credit.

[HueijRevisited]

You need to use the lastest version (1.3.275) of Random Hits and 1.72.2 of Oolite. On lower versions player kills are not recognised by Oolite due to a change of command name. If a victim blows himself up with his own q-mine (or gets killed by an NPC q-mine), this will count as an NPC kill rather than a player kill, but thats pretty rare. Credit is always given to the ship that fired the fatal shot. If you soften a victim up, but a police viper fires the shot that kills him the Cop would get the credit.

I have RandomHits261.oxp in my AddOn folder. Should I upgrade? And if so, where? I have version 1.72.2 of Oolite installed.

BTW, although I was't properly rewarded I stil had a lot of fun playing these two missions. I followed a ship through witchspace for the first time in my Oolite carreer

[LittleBear]

I'm pretty sure your hitting a known bug. Can you try the lastest version of Random Hits? It (should) only report an NPC kill if an NPC actually did the dead. V1.3.275 is desgined to run on 1.72.2 of Oolite onwards, you can get it from the Wiki Page by following the link on my signature. The version you are using won't work properly on the new version of Oolite.