Mother attacking its own escort bug

Post by **Eric Walch** » Thu May 14, 2009 7:38 pm

There is still a stupid bug with escorts in 1.72.2. Offender escorts can be accepted my clean mother ships when they do a request. This leads to clean ships that get involved in police action while the police is attacking its escorts.

Even worse, a mother can even attack an former escort of an other ship, and at the same time accept him as escort.!!

I saw this before, but I now followed closely the whole event that leads to this:

1) An pirate falcon with kestrel escorts was attacking a clean Josher trader.

2) Than I intercepted and killed the falcon, leaving the kestrel still fighting the Josher. (and the Josher fighting the Kestrel)

3) I fired at the kestrel that was in an intercept.plist. Ships in that plist will not switch targets on laser fire. So after some time I wanted its full attention and fired a missile. On that it reacts with a ECM and an exit, back into escortAI.

4) In escortAI it notices it has no longer a mother and starts looking for a new one. In escortAI an escort will never start an attack on its own, so it would have been an easy target, but I waited.

5) The Joshed responded to the escort request and accepted him while the AI was still in an attack mode against the same escort.

6) When I now attach the escort, the Josher even receives ATTACKED messages with me as attacker. And started to attack me after I killed the escort he also was trying to kill.

Anyhow, most of these problems can be avoided by adding a condition that clean mothers only accept clean escorts. Probably already in the "scanForFormationLeader" command.

Post by **another_commander** » Tue May 19, 2009 7:53 pm

Fixed as per Eric's suggestion. Clean mothers can only accept clean escorts now.

Post by **Cmdr James** » Tue May 19, 2009 9:37 pm

another_commander wrote:
Fixed as per Eric's suggestion. Clean mothers can only accept clean escorts now.

I think that it is still possible for criminals to accept clean escorts.

Not sure if thats ok or not, maybe the AI prevents it from happening?

Post by **Eric Walch** » Wed May 20, 2009 8:27 am

Cmdr James wrote:
another_commander wrote:
Fixed as per Eric's suggestion. Clean mothers can only accept clean escorts now.
I think that it is still possible for criminals to accept clean escorts.

That is not such a big problem, but the other way around leads to clean mother ship coming in fight with police just because they accepted an hostile escort. That just looked bad.

One clean escorts among a hostile group does not affect the groups behaviour against pirates or police, so that does not need a real change.

Post by **Cmdr James** » Wed May 20, 2009 11:16 am

Should a ship which becomes a criminal somehow (mistakenly damaging a police ship perhaps) be evicted from escorting a clean mother?

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Wed May 20, 2009 11:42 am

Cmdr James wrote:
Should a ship which becomes a criminal somehow (mistakenly damaging a police ship perhaps) be evicted from escorting a clean mother?

Good question, especially with Hatchling BoyRacers and clean pirates...however, such a ship could really be fatal for the whole group.

Maybe a different approach would help: a clean mother could accept those ships but would not help them (or in general would not help) if the escorts are attacked by other clean ships?

Screet

Post by **another_commander** » Wed May 20, 2009 11:48 am

Why complicate things so much? In theory, a clean ship that became offender because it took an accidental shot at a Viper should still be accepted as escort, but what does it really matter at the end? The chance of this happening is so small, and the changes in AI required to handle it properly so many, that I don't think it is worth the hassle at all.