The Oolite Extended Project - Fork, no oxp

[Lestradae]

Hi Screet,

the idle sitting around must be an AI bug for sure. The Juggernaut Destroyer is supposed to be called by the standard role pirate and is sometimes also called by the role pirate via OSE's own script. So whatever causes the AI hang must be somewhere in the standard pirateAI.plist. There is an AI for 1.73 made by Eric, though. Don't know if you have that one (like me) or the standard core game one?

Did the other sitting duck ships you encountered also have the role pirate?

The other numbers are intended behaviour. For the final OSE version I want to give all pirate ships above 1 million Cr value special bounties - the bounties being tied to what they are worth, and thereby indirectly to what they are capable of. The bounty is 1/10000 of the ship's value. So a 1 million Cr ship has a bounty of 100 Cr if it is encountered as a pirate - and a 106 million ship like a Juggernaut Destroyer has a 10600 Cr bounty if you have the bad luck to encounter such a pirate.

This ship has 3000 energy as a NPC, its recharge rate (as a Destroyer is an "overtuned" ship) is 68. So you will indeed not really dent its "shields" with your puny lasers. You found one of the working strategies against them, though: The cascade missile. They will often successfully flee from q-mines, but photon torpedoes will also work. You will also - in case of really bad luck, a cloaked Juggernaut Destroyer - be able to destroy it with a circle of q-mines if you have a ship fast enough to fly that circle and then escape the blast waves.

Another trick is to hire mighty escorts (you need a high rank for that, and lots of money, but this is not supposed to be easy ) and take such a ship in a pincer movement - then the lasers can be enough to take one down.

The recharge rate would not make any sense in vanilla Oolite, but when OSE is done, this will balance itself out. The Juggernaut Destroyer is supposed to be one of the deadliest ships in game by far. Now you also know what the bounty is for - to win a battle against such a ship, you might have to invest into a lot of appropriate equipment first!

Hope I find a way for the special bounties as they cannot be set by shipdata.plist for the standard roles atm. I know the dev reasoning for this, de facto it means I have to find a way around

Hope the AI bug is found,

L

[another_commander]

So whatever causes the AI hang must be somewhere in the standard pirateAI.plist. There is an AI for 1.73 made by Eric, though. Don't know if you have that one (like me) or the standard core game one?

If you look closely at the log, you will see that the ship is actually using docking AI, not pirate. The trunk version contains for quite a few days now the revised docking AI by Eric. Are we sure that the ship actually hung in that AI state? It could be that it was simply waiting for its turn to dock.
Edit: It looks like the Juggernaught is in docking AI state and awaiting coords, without a target station. Hmm, that could explain things a bit.

[Screet]

If you look closely at the log, you will see that the ship is actually using docking AI, not pirate. The trunk version contains for quite a few days now the revised docking AI by Eric. Are we sure that the ship actually hung in that AI state? It could be that it was simply waiting for its turn to dock.
Edit: It looks like the Juggernaught is in docking AI state and awaiting coords, without a target station. Hmm, that could explain things a bit.

Both my encounters of such ships were alone in mid-space and standing still. They did not react to anything.

Screet

[Lestradae]

I have a suspicion.

Could it be that the Juggernaut attempted to dock with something like a rock hermit and crashed into that station while docking, thereby destroying it and then hanging there with a dockingAI awaiting coordinates from a target station that was no longer there?

In this case this will be repaired when I find a way to stop big police etc. from docking, perhaps similar to the bigTrader role, bigPolice etc.

On a side note, does this mean that the whole 1.73 AI bundle of Eric's has been implemented into the trunk? Because then I can take the oxp out.

Cheers

L

[Cmdr James]

Thats an interesting point, not just for big ships. I guess all docking ships need to be able to handle target lost messages (if they are even broadcast to ships waiting to dock).

[Thargoid]

This is mostly why Eric and I created the bigTrader role, as it does NOT try to dock anywhere (ever) if it is using the AI that is in the OXP.

For bigPolice, for launching issues there should never be a need for anything (use the hunter role instead of the police one). And as for docking of large police ships, then they will need a custom AI analogous to the bigTrader one mentioned above that doesn't try to dock at any point.

The "docking with an entity that's no longer there" is a valid point generally rather than specifically to big ships as Cmdr James says (although they may trigger it), but fundamentally if the big ships have the correct AIs and roles it's not an issue...

[Cmdr James]

but fundamentally if the big ships have the correct AIs and roles it's not an issue...

No, this is not the case. There are many situations which may lead to a station being knocked out while someone is trying to dock. Me shooting it is perhaps the most likely.

[Nemoricus]

but fundamentally if the big ships have the correct AIs and roles it's not an issue...

No, this is not the case. There are many situations which may lead to a station being knocked out while someone is trying to dock. Me shooting it is perhaps the most likely.

Indeed. Off the top of my head I can tell you that there's at least one mission that has you shooting a dockable object, namely Police Action missions in Galactic Navy.

[Screet]

I have a suspicion.

Could it be that the Juggernaut attempted to dock with something like a rock hermit and crashed into that station while docking, thereby destroying it and then hanging there with a dockingAI awaiting coordinates from a target station that was no longer there?

Pro: In both cases there were three boulders around the Juggernaut.
Con: There was no Rock Hermit beacon.

Screet

[Thargoid]

but fundamentally if the big ships have the correct AIs and roles it's not an issue...

No, this is not the case. There are many situations which may lead to a station being knocked out while someone is trying to dock. Me shooting it is perhaps the most likely.

I meant that a big ship shouldn't care about a station being there or not if it's not trying to dock with it at any point...

[DaddyHoggy]

@Lestradae - I'm presuming you now have the Hi-Res Oobay image twice!

[Nemoricus]

I encountered a ship that resembled a purple bar. I couldn't lock on to it, and it did not show up on the scanner?

What's up with that?

[Screet]

I encountered a ship that resembled a purple bar. I couldn't lock on to it, and it did not show up on the scanner?

What's up with that?

The stolen battleship (sometimes police battleship) - it has quite a chance to be equipped with a scanner jammer (MASC). You will require the counter equipment for that in order to see it on your scanner

Screet

[Screet]

Hi,

everytime that I shoot a shreddies box, my happiness drops. In previous versions, the scooped shreddies could be sold as luxury items, but not any longer. Is that intentional?

I think I already wrote that some time ago...the shreddies ship does have mirrored textures, thus the image (and text) show up the wrong way. Sadly, I don't know how this could easily be fixed.

Screet

[Nemoricus]

I encountered a ship that resembled a purple bar. I couldn't lock on to it, and it did not show up on the scanner?

What's up with that?

The stolen battleship (sometimes police battleship) - it has quite a chance to be equipped with a scanner jammer (MASC). You will require the counter equipment for that in order to see it on your scanner

Screet

I thought it was something along those lines, but I wasn't sure. Thank you for pointing that out.