[Release] Spicy Hermits

[Fritz]

Ok, now it is really crazy.

I've now removed almost all OXPs, even my engine sound (the game really feels strange now!). Remaining OXPs are ReverseControl, Basic-debug, LogEvents, my ship, and of course Spicy Hermits. And I increased the model_scale_factor to 50. I probably shouldn't have done that...

Battling some Vipers, trying to produce metal fragments, I hit one, and the explosion was impressive - and so was the number of fragments:



Most, if not all the white dots are remains of the poor Viper, or, more probably, the remains of some of the giant plates I hit.

The log looked like this:

Code: Select all

01:23:44.605 [LogEvents]: Player killed GalCop Viper 13127 with energy damage
01:23:44.689 [LogEvents]: Player killed Metal fragment 4648 with energy damage
01:23:44.723 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 11111 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.724 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 32656 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.724 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 6345 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.724 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 30588 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.724 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 1804 spawned at 5 km
01:23:44.835 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 18429 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.835 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 24944 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 6801 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 30104 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 23365 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 32109 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 21191 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 13224 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 4752 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 23570 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 4898 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 21327 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.836 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 21812 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.889 [LogEvents]: Player killed Metal fragment 3714 with energy damage
01:23:44.968 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 12260 spawned at 4 km
01:23:44.968 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 23791 spawned at 4 km
...
... (around 300 similar lines)
...
01:23:46.125 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 5290 spawned at 4 km
01:23:46.226 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 1483 spawned at 2 km
01:23:46.227 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 1332 spawned at 3 km
01:23:47.196 [LogEvents]: Player VIEW_AFT

Shortly after I made the screenshot, the frame rate went down into the one-digit range, and the log showed thousands of new metal fragments and wreckage being spawned outside my scanner range. The cause was probably that many of the pieces hit the planet and broke up into more pieces. It looked like a nuclear war going on!



I stopped the madness and changed the scale factor back to 25. I again attacked vipers, this time only producing escape pods and a small plate. But when I shot at the latter, it spawned a big plate! How can a metal fragment spawn another one? If this isn't a new feature of version 1.83, it's very strange.

I'll stop for today, but it seems that the internal data structure for the metal plates is affected in several ways (size, scoop behaviour, debris) by simply using a plate as a hermit door. When I remove the abandoned hermit part from Spicy Hermits, everything is normal.

Just another idea, not verified yet: Perhaps all big plates result from destroying small ones?

[spara]

Some sleep and my brain starts working again . The problem was so trivial . Version 1.0.2 uploaded to the manager fixing the gargantual plates problem.

The problem was that I was like_shipping alloy template, but not giving it new roles. So it pulled the roles from core and as a side product defined new "slightly" bigger alloy plates. An oversight from me. Often subent roles are meaningless since they are attached by their data keys. Unless the model used is actually being used somewhere elsewhere, like in this case.

Thanks Fritz for vigorous testing .

[ocz]

It looked like a nuclear war going on!

+
Your screenshot.



It's good to start the day with a good laugh. Thanks Fritz.

[Fritz]

The problem was that I was like_shipping alloy template, but not giving it new roles.

That would be a simple solution for a big problem! I actually started to think in this direction after I shut down my computer and went to bed yesterday, but I wasn't really convinced of the idea because this wouldn't explain, why
- the small ones are difficult to scoop,
- metal plates break up to produce new metal plates,
- there were some strange things going on I didn't mention in my previous post,
- I was the only one affected. If two types of fragment are present, one in two plates should have been big, so it wasn't something rare to happen.

But your change will probably solve the main problem! Sadly I can't try it in office - the co-workers would stare...

[spara]

- I was the only one affected. If two types of fragment are present, one in two plates should have been big, so it wasn't something rare to happen.

This puzzles me too. It should have been quite a common sight. Maybe there are only miners and traders around?

[Fritz]

It is probably rarer when Griff's Wreckage is installed. But even then, I didn't take too long to notice. Perhaps my fighting style produces more debris!

[Fritz]

It's good to start the day with a good laugh. Thanks Fritz.

You're welcome!

I actually started to think how we could have these nice cascading explosions in a normal game. The reason is probably that the game calculated a huge mass for those debris (50x50x50 = 125000 times the mass of an ordinary metal plate). I don't know the normal size of the plates, but this should be at least in the order of magnitude of a space ship. The number of plates during destruction probably depends from ship mass, so these huge things produced many debris.

But, as I said, I wonder that normal sized plates could produce plates too - one of the strange incidents I didn't mention yesterday was a small plate that was kind of indestructible: Every shot killed it immediately, but it always spawned a new plate.

[ocz]

I'm just guessing here, but alloys can be spawned by every kind of ship you blast to shreds. Maybe the wreckage calculator takes in certain properties (, that asteroids don't have. Maybe they are opted out.) and then takes the size of the model into consideration for the amount of spawning. The rest is a nuclear disaster.

Even though I haven't seen the ginormous plates I kinda did have problems scooping stuff. I don't know, if that only happened to alloys only, that I tried to scoop, and I also blamed it on the Adder-model I fly (instead of the mkIII), but maybe it's the same bug. (I believe I still have Spicy Hermits 0.8 installed). Maybe some of the properties of the different kinds of debris (like the hitbox of the bigger model) are mixed and therefore the distance (calculated/used by the scooping algorithm) to the model is calculated wrongly. This would explain, why the scoops aren't kicking in.

Also I believe the tractor beam of the scoop and the ability to take in cargo, are created by two separated algorithms. (I also picked up stuff without the beams sfx.) This alility might be turned on around the clock.

EDIT: I saw you took a screenshot of an explosion backwards. (This indicates you destroyed that target with a backward mounted laser.) This is a bit far fetched, but if you do blow up stuff that way on a regular basis, could it be that the perspective does play a role in spawning the different models?

[Fritz]

I think, version 0.8 didn't have the abandoned hermits yet.

I saw you took a screenshot of an explosion backwards. (This indicates you destroyed that target with a backward mounted laser.) This is a bit far fetched, but if you do blow up stuff that way on a regular basis, could it be that the perspective does play a role in spawning the different models?

I can't imagine the game engine to take into account the perspective! And I use both lasers regularly, probably the front laser even more.

The big plates definitely could appear when using the front lasers. In fact, flying through the cloud of debris was potentially deadly, because the metal plates were big enough to kill you. Considering this, their mass must have been at least in the order of magnitude of one of the bigger ships, even when using the scale factor 25.

[Fritz]

As I feared, the new version did remove the size issue, but not the scooping and debris issues. Just one example: I failed to scoop a plate, and eventually hit it. Actually the plate hit me from behind because it was faster than me, so the collision speed was very low:

Code: Select all

19:14:16.443 [LogEvents]: Player taking shield damage from Metal fragment 17516 384+377 shield and 450 energy left
19:14:16.443 [LogEvents]: Player lost lock on Metal fragment 17516
19:14:16.444 [LogEvents]: Player target Metal fragment 17516 is destroyed
19:14:16.444 [LogEvents]: Player killed Metal fragment 17516 with scrape damage
19:14:16.459 [LogEvents]: Player collided with Metal fragment 17516
19:14:16.576 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 16376 spawned at 0 km
19:14:16.576 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 32337 spawned at 0 km
19:14:16.576 [LogEvents]: Metal fragment 2530 spawned at 0 km
19:14:16.576 [LogEvents]: Wreckage 519 spawned at 0 km
(20 more wreckage spawnings)

Not only the wreckage count seems very high, the collision also created two new plates. I shot at one of them, and it created a spectacular explosion (I was to slow to make a screenshot). It spawned even more wreckage than the first plate (43 entries in the log file), but no new plates. Griff's Wreckage is NOT active, so no easy way to blame something...

I'll try to remove the "like_ship" completely, but it seems that the connecting link between door and metal fragments is the model: I'm not absolutely sure yet, but at least the scooping issue only seems to occur when oolite_template_alloy and spicy_hermits_abandoned_door are using the same model: I had the same effect with Oolite 1.82, when I changed the model for the hermit door to alloy.dat!

[Fritz]

I love those explosions...

.. but this was only a metal fragment! And you can see that it spawned at least one new fragment. But the total number of debris created in this explosion was about 200, including about 10 new plates...

I had some fun trying to destroy the remaining plates, but it was difficult to reduce their number. Not all of them produced really big explosions, but then I hit this one:

This explosion increased the entity count from below 300 to more than 1000 for some seconds, as you can see.

Back to Spicy Hermits: Before this flight I had removed like_ship completely, so the only remaining connection between the door and the fragment is the model.

Off testing again...

[ocz]

Are you sure it is related to Spicey Hermits? The plate definitly was, but those explosions.

I know I'm likely to go on your nerves, as you most certainly already have done this, but just for the heck of it: They don't occure without SH OXP, right? I guess you also have renamed the oolite\Addon and oolite\oolite.app\GNUstep\Library\ApplicationSupport\Oolite\ManagedAddOns folders so that no OXP can be found and than created an empty Addon folder and put only the SH OXP into it. (Quickest way I know to remove everything and return it afterwards.)

I for my part go plate-hunting now.

[Fritz]

That's the strange thing about it: I'm quite sure! Most of the strange effects (e.g. the nuclear war!) could be observed while I was testing with very few remaining OXPs (see this posting).

But I don't blame spicy hermits, I blame something else. But I don't know yet, what it is...

The next test will be with changing the door model to the old alloy.dat. Testing is a bit time consuming because I tend to getting attacked while "producing" metal plates...

[ocz]

Does system.addShips("alloy",30,player.ship.position,1000) also spawn multipling plates for you? (It doesn't for me. I also don't have your spectacular explosions.)

Do you have any shader enhanced models installed? Or OXP ships or stations. Anything that does contain a shipdata.plist. Maybe in their shipdata.plist is another corrupt "alloy" entity. Could you have edited by mistake the original game shipdata.plist in the resources folder? (I always have it opened for reference reasons and I have to confess that I do edit the wrong tabs in Notepad++ from time to time. )

Also. Have you modified and compiled the source....you have the same error in different versions. You won't have modified every of them.

I'm off for today, but could you give me the complete list of all off your OXPs. If it isn't SH and the source and binaries are the same as for everyone, other OXPs are the most likely reason. You could also try another commander (not our mod, another game career).

[spara]

Fritz, now that you're testing. You could copy the core plate model into Spicy Hermits, change it's name and update the shipdata accordingly and see what happens. That would break the direct model link.

Other thing you could test, is to remove the scale_factor to see, if that has something to do with it.