broadcastDistressMessage has a bug

[Eric Walch]

The AI command broadcastDistressMessage has a bug. I found an offender ship with route1TraderAI. (This can happen by wrong ship definition, by clean traders accidentally hitting a clean ship, of by a pirate that turned into trader after its hold was full)

I saw some police arriving in scanner range but still went for the shot at the trader with bounty. Because of its traderAI it did send a distress message. I was clean but after the message I had a bounty on my head and police at my tail.

Looking in the broadcastDistressMessage I don't see a check for being clean with the sender in this part of the code. I think that is a bug. Sending out the message itself is cool and can stay in but ships with bounty should not alert Stations, police or hunters in my opinion. I should be able to kill an offender without getting an offender myself.
(Just strange I never noticed this before. This code has not changed since 1.65)

[another_commander]

This is now fixed in SVN2193. The distress calls are still going out, but they are being ignored by stations, police and hunters.

Edit: It seems to be a good idea that police and stations ignore distress calls from offenders, but maybe it would be cool if hunters had a (very) small chance of actually feeling sorry for the crybaby and assisting regardless. What do you think?

[Disembodied]

It seems to be a good idea that police and stations ignore distress calls from offenders, but maybe it would be cool if hunters had a (very) small chance of actually feeling sorry for the crybaby and assisting regardless. What do you think?

Unless such aberrant behaviour was explained in-game, I think people would mistake it for a bug when it happened. It might be a bit annoying for the player. If the bounty was tiny, then there might be some justification (it might seem harsh to kill a guy for an overdue library book, or if someone is one jump from being Clean again), but if they took pity on someone with a substantial price on their head it would be very odd.

I think any hunter intervention in favour of a criminal should be restricted to verbal only. If the offender pleading for mercy is a very low-grade criminal, they might advise the player to let him go: "Sheesh, man, leave that poor creep alone, he's not worth the effort", or something similar. Leave it up to the player's conscience.

[Eric Walch]

I also had my mind wandering off about this. I had just opposite thoughts:

Hunters are bounty hunters. Their goal in game it to shoot down offenders to collect their bounty. When such a hunter receives a distress call from an offender, attacked by a clean person it would react on the call. But not to attack the clean ship but by attacking the offender that attracted his attention by the distress call.

For me I would not mind if an hunter did occasionally went for the clean attacker as long as the attacker stays clean. And when I remember things well, only police and stations can fine ships with a bounty, so hunters already let the attacker stay clean.

But I ruled out those thoughts. First because the hunter can find the offender on its own and mainly because no player would notice what is happening. It will just look normal behaviour, so why bother in code with extra checks.

[Screet]

And when I remember things well, only police and stations can fine ships with a bounty, so hunters already let the attacker stay clean.

I thought it was you who mentioned a few weeks ago that every NPC ship does increase the bounty on a hostile ship if the player attracts that target and thus rescues the original victim.

I've seen two clean ships fighting each other and when I selected one to help, it did increase the bounty (previously 0) on the attacker, thus causing it to become an offender - and I had that experience more than once, especially with the many "clean" pirates that exist when playing the trunk version.

Screet

[another_commander]

Where did you see clean pirates on the trunk version? This is 99% OXP result. To be sure, play without any OXPs for a few days and see if this repeats.

[Screet]

Where did you see clean pirates on the trunk version? This is 99% OXP result. To be sure, play without any OXPs for a few days and see if this repeats.

IIRC the trunk version has the intended feature to ignore default-bounties that oxps can provide and thus result in most pirates being clean?!?

Screet

[another_commander]

IIRC the trunk version has the intended feature to ignore default-bounties that oxps can provide and thus result in most pirates being clean?!?

I just turned an Adder to pirate role and AI, gave it a bounty of 69 credits and generated it with the debug console. The result was an Adder with bounty of 69 credits and fugitive status and behaviour. So I don't think this is really a problem. If you have a differently working test case, please send it over to me.

[Lestradae]

IIRC the trunk version has the intended feature to ignore default-bounties that oxps can provide and thus result in most pirates being clean?!?

I just turned an Adder to pirate role and AI, gave it a bounty of 69 credits and generated it with the debug console. The result was an Adder with bounty of 69 credits and fugitive status and behaviour. So I don't think this is really a problem. If you have a differently working test case, please send it over to me.

So set bounties for NPC ships called by the standard pirate role result in them having the shipdata-set bounties again under the "1.73" trunk?

That would be great news, instantly solve one of my future OSE to-do problems - and if the OSE WiP produces the clean pirates because of that, rest assured that OSE V1.0 will not have any clean pirates



L

[Screet]

So set bounties for NPC ships called by the standard pirate role result in them having the shipdata-set bounties again under the "1.73" trunk?

That would be great news, instantly solve one of my future OSE to-do problems - and if the OSE WiP produces the clean pirates because of that, rest assured that OSE V1.0 will not have any clean pirates

I still have clean pirates, especially flying through anarchy systems...but I don't have a save file at hand where it's reproducible

Screet

[Thargoid]

Not sure if it's relevant, but quite often if you just spawn a pirate by that role using the console they appear clean. Indeed they aren't even initially hostile, but only turn red if you fly away from them and then turn back towards them (depends where they appear from the spawning, as i usually spawnWithinRadius).

[Eric Walch]

Not sure if it's relevant, but quite often if you just spawn a pirate by that role using the console they appear clean. Indeed they aren't even initially hostile, but only turn red if you fly away from them and then turn back towards them (depends where they appear from the spawning, as i usually spawnWithinRadius).

Correct, you just can't spawn the role of "pirate". It has always been that way. When I started UPS under 1.65 I used clones of all pirates to be able to add them with bounty.

- The populator ignores the bounty in shipdata and generates its own
- legacy_addShip don't mess with bounties and just use the one defined in shipdata

For me I would welcome it when the auto_ai key also would set bounty for the pirate role.

To add pirates with bounties as I do now in deep_space_pirates, involves a lot of extra scanning for added pirates and correcting their bounty afterwards.