Oolite Bulletins

Ark wrote:

Does anybody know what the above message means?

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[behemoth_carrier]: A behemoth carrier was added in role as hunter without a shipSpawned event. Correcting it.

Nothing to worry about. For some reason the behemoth never runs it startup script when added in its role as hunter. Looking in the code I can't even see how it is possible to bypass this startup script. Now I check if the startup script has been executed when the first escort signs on.
I logged this event to see how often it went wrong but it seems to be always when role hunter and never when role behemoth. The startup script execution is corrected and I just forget to remove the message logging in the final release.

Ah ha, maybe this is the reason I often see Behemoths with a role of Pirate?

Cmdr James wrote:

Ah ha, maybe this is the reason I often see Behemoths with a role of Pirate?

No, not by the Behemoth.oxp itself. I never saw such thing ever. Must be a copy from an other oxp that messes up the whole role system and role logic.

Cmdr James wrote:

Ah ha, maybe this is the reason I often see Behemoths with a role of Pirate?

I did attribute those to RS/OSE. I got the impression that the chance for this to happen is much too high, though.

On the other hand, I recently had to make my version stable, and during the process removed all oxp's and still do not have all back in...and I'm astonished. Several ships and strange sightings which I did attribute to RS were defenitely from a different source.

Example: The Cudgel class battleship (aka Stolen battleship). I believe that ship's an entire bug. It becomes hostile, but it obviously does not have any weapons at all. No missiles, no turrets, no lasers. Same applies for Black monk gunships...

Screet

I did attribute those (Behemoths with a role of Pirate) to RS/OSE. I got the impression that the chance for this to happen is much too high, though.

If you got the ship with the ingame name Behemoth as a pirate, it's neither RS nor the OSE WiP. The Juggernaut is a version of Behemoth, though, and uses its model.

The reason they appear so much in your OSE WiP is that in this, I've not done the ship variants I'm adding in for many ships yet, and started with the biggest and most difficult ships. There are only four really big ships in there, the Dregders, Condors, Juggernauts and Constitutions. But atm, they appear more than ten times more often than they will in the final version because of this.

On the other hand, I recently had to make my version stable, and during the process removed all oxp's and still do not have all back in...and I'm astonished. Several ships and strange sightings which I did attribute to RS were defenitely from a different source.

Sometimes I flinch when every strange ship and also Oolite behaviour is semi-automatically referenced to RS, but then I do understand it a bit. RS consists of more than eighty oxps, has inherited a lot of bugs and I have created quite some of them myself, too.

Sometimes I have the feeling that it gets a bit unfair. I actually repaired many bugs that you would get would you put the eighty oxps in instead of RS, and am working a lot on getting the whole thing better. And I was an absolute scripting noob to begin with. But, well, I'm not complaining.

It just would make sense to not exclusively search for strange behaviours in RS ...

Example: The Cudgel class battleship (aka Stolen battleship). I believe that ship's an entire bug. It becomes hostile, but it obviously does not have any weapons at all. No missiles, no turrets, no lasers. Same applies for Black monk gunships...

The first one is probably no OSE WiP problem, the second one could be. I'm looking into the matter ...

"a copy from an other oxp that messes up the whole role system and role logic" goes a bit far, though. Let's not go there again. There's a line between legitimate criticism and just getting mean, OK?

Good n8

L

Lestradae wrote:

But atm, they appear more than ten times more often than they will in the final version because of this.

Ahhh, thank you for that explanation!

Lestradae wrote:

Sometimes I flinch when every strange ship and also Oolite behaviour is semi-automatically referenced to RS, but then I do understand it a bit. Sometimes I have the feeling that it gets a bit unfair.

To be true, I sometimes had the same impression. I really did attribute some of the stuff to RS/OSE as that was about the time when I noticed these things, and as your previous explanation says: sometimes it's just that RS/OSE brings these problems to more attention without being the cause of them, sometimes not even including the specific problematic model.

Lestradae wrote:

Example: The Cudgel class battleship (aka Stolen battleship). I believe that ship's an entire bug. It becomes hostile, but it obviously does not have any weapons at all. No missiles, no turrets, no lasers. Same applies for Black monk gunships...

The first one is probably no OSE WiP problem, the second one could be. I'm looking into the matter ...

There you did get me entirely wrong! I thought it was your OXP adding those ships with that behaviour, but that report is about those ships with that buggy behaviour without RS/OSE currently being active! Therefore, that impression was wrong. (thought = history, if my english does not fail me. To everyone: really, if I make horrible mistakes in this language, please, PM me...I've got noone correcting me, thus how could I improve?)

That's why I did spend another day playing without it: I did want to see what changes and what stays. The ships from that example (cudgel class/stolen battleship and black monk gunship) do not go away without RS/OSE and still have that behaviour, thus it is clearly NOT an RS/OSE issue, but caused by something else.

Furthermore I am curious wether I am the only one who has these ships behaving like being unarmed. If so...why has noone else noticed and fixed the bug before? If not, why do they show that behaviour with my installation?

I could have reported those ships much earlier, but at that time I was flying a Merlin with MASC and thought they might be missile-only spacecraft and thus unable to fire at me. I am not using MASC and scanner Filtering anymore. With the cloak, they are obsolete anyway. The cloak is the most powerful anti-missile system I know: I hit the key twice and those missiles hunting me are gone, while all other missiles survive!

Screet

To be true, I sometimes had the same impression. I really did attribute some of the stuff to RS/OSE as that was about the time when I noticed these things, and as your previous explanation says: sometimes it's just that RS/OSE brings these problems to more attention without being the cause of them, sometimes not even including the specific problematic model.

Thanks for the empathy

The remark was not in your direction, though As you are beta-testing the OSE WiP, I am happy about any information that has even slight chance to be an OSE bug. Actually, I am happy if anyone gets me anything useful bugwise about RS/OSE - because only then can I repair it.

It's just that sometimes criticisms went overboard in the past and did no longer contain any useful information any more because of that, but I would let that topic stay in the past and not open that can of worms again.

It's good to have beta-testers now - people who find errors in my oxp before all the players find them

That's why I did spend another day playing without it: I did want to see what changes and what stays. The ships from that example (cudgel class/stolen battleship and black monk gunship) do not go away without RS/OSE and still have that behaviour, thus it is clearly NOT an RS/OSE issue, but caused by something else.

Ah, I understand. It will still also be an OSE WiP problem (none of RS, as this content is not in there) because while the Black Monkship variants outside the shady black monks oxp have designated standard AIs for their additional roles (mostly BM pirates) the additional variants are also used by the shady Black Monks oxp if you happen to have this and OSE in at the same time. And they use Little Bear's AI from shady Black Monks.

So if there is a problem with the BMS AI's (leading to them not reacting to outside attack), it would also appear with the new conjunction versions of OSE. Perhaps you could PN Little Bear about your observations (those without OSE in)?

Cheers

L

The Shady Monks are less aggressive than the orginals, although this is not so much an AI problem (both have the same AI), but that their weapons have been downgraded to make them less uber. The non-shader monks sport three militray lasers (nose + one on each wing), but the shady monks just pack a beam laser on each wing. With 3 Military lasers they can strike any target on the scanner as the Military Laser has a 25km range. Also with three the lasers cover a wide area, so basically a monk with military lasers can slice you up at a great distance. Beam Lasers have a range of only 10 km. So when a Shady Monk tries to attack you it can't until to closes to 10km. Its wing monted beams also leave a big space in the middle, so even when it gets in range the beams will often miss you. Their AI needs updating really to get them to close before attacking.

I think something may be up with performAttack in the Oolite native code though, as this ships not keen on attacking also seems to happen with native pirates.

LittleBear wrote:

I think something may be up with performAttack in the Oolite native code though, as this ships not keen on attacking also seems to happen with native pirates.

The strange thing is, that the Black Monk Gunships /never/ fired at me a single shot, nor have I ever seen them fire at someone else.

What you say about the attack code appears to be true. I did run into ds-pirate clouds several times, just to find out that they did not turn hostile on me, but moved away into different directions until I began shooting.

Furthermore, many ships are trying to perform "FORMATION_FORM_UP", "FLY_TO_TARGET_SIX", "FLY_TO_TARGET_TWELVE" and so on without ever shooting back. Sometimes a hostile ship just sits in front of me and does nothing. Others attempt to fly towards a witchspace entry which isn't visible on the scanner (does it exist at all? they would not be able to reach it, if it's somewhere so distant!) without ever turning or shooting back at me.

Even worse: Some pirates are so busy lasering a single victim down that they keep yellow while I shoot them apart. They don't even turn hostile on me. Ships which do react are sometimes inactive when being shot at by multiple ships: With each hit, they try to attack the next target, and before they get it into their sights, someone else did hit them.

Screet

All of that does sound as if something was wrong with Oolite's standard AI's or with the handling of their actions, or am I mistaken?

If ships from different oxps start exhibiting the same new broken behaviour after a new test version release, that's not implausible?

Was something changed in the way the AI's are written recently?

The AI can only say performAttack, but its the Oolite Native Code that actually handels the attack. So if something is wrong with the way Oolite is handeling attacks, then its not fixable by AI it may be a bug in the latest test release.

The Monks aren't pirates and don't attack ships willy nilly. The only ever attack debtors who have defaulted on their loans. If you don't have a loan or your up to date on your repayments they'll ignore you unless you fire on them first. To be honest when Griff updated them to use shaders the models look so nice I wanted to get a new version out, but used all the same AIs and code (its only the Grpahics that are different between the two versions). I gave .em a quick test and the do fire, but there're not really as aggressive as they should be.

Just for the record LB the minesweeper inside the shady black monks uses the minesweeperAI.plist that is not in the AI folder of that oxp. The only reason that is still working is that most of the players have the assassins oxp installed. In the AI folder of assassins is a duplicate of the minesweeperAI.plist. That makes Black monks to have a depentecy with assassins. Is that intentional?

Screet wrote:

The Cudgel class battleship (aka Stolen battleship). I believe that ship's an entire bug. It becomes hostile, but it obviously does not have any weapons at all. No missiles, no turrets, no lasers.
...
Furthermore I am curious wether I am the only one who has these ships behaving like being unarmed. If so...why has noone else noticed and fixed the bug before? If not, why do they show that behaviour with my installation?

The Cudgel Class Battleship (as the police variant of the same ship) is part of Amen Brick's Megaships.oxp. Their bugs (and quite some others) have been reported here on the board and directly to the OXP author a very long time ago.

Unfortunately Amen Brick was gone for a long while, and obviously hasn't found the time yet to correct his OXP.

Incidentally, this weekend I noticed some more problems with this OXP. Specifically, the behaviour of both Supercargo and Superlifter does not match their backstory as given in the readMe. (They are simply added as traders, which none of them are.) Both of them would at least need a custom AI. The Supercargo would also need some clever scripting to make it appear only in the systems mentioned in the backstory. And the Superlifter would probably need some clever scripting as well, in order to make it appear only in connection to a stranded bulk ship, again following its backstory. Haven't written Amen Brick yet.

Now the wiki is on-line again, I finally got the chance to edit the link to the corrected Behemoth 2.5.1 version. Same as 2.5.0 but now with corrected dockingbay for the type-2 Behemoth. Behemoth download page