[Solved] Possible Bug in Anarchies OXP

[Garrett]

Greetings fellow Ooliters,

After a long time away from Oolite, I'm pleased to come back and find that the main development and OXP development are both going strong. However, I may have found a bug in the Anarchies OXP.

When travelling to Maesin in G1, I noticed that the Sentinel station has been over-run and is now a Renegade station. I cannot take it out with Military lasers, so resort to a Quirium Torpedo, which nicely gets rid of it. However, the renegade station seems to resurrect itself every time I visit the planet! Is this meant to be, or has the method of determining whether the Sentinel station should be rebel "got stuck"? I would have thought it should re-calculate the probability each time the station is re-spawned.

As an aside, my Caduceus Omega also seems to not have the Damage Control Node, but that is probably a bug created when moving my save-game from one Oolite version to another (or possibly the OXP), I think I can manually fix that with editing the save-game.

For reference, I am using Oolite v.1.76 on WinXP, and Anarchies is v.2.5. My stderr and stdout logs are both empty.

Thanks!

Edit - the Caduceus error was fixed by adding EQ_DCN to the list of equipment in the save-game file, as suspected it was not present. I have not found this problem on my other computer when using the Caduceus, so I think it was a one-off bug when moving a save-game between versions.

[cim]

When travelling to Maesin in G1, I noticed that the Sentinel station has been over-run and is now a Renegade station. I cannot take it out with Military lasers, so resort to a Quirium Torpedo, which nicely gets rid of it. However, the renegade station seems to resurrect itself every time I visit the planet! Is this meant to be, or has the method of determining whether the Sentinel station should be rebel "got stuck"? I would have thought it should re-calculate the probability each time the station is re-spawned.

It uses

Code: Select all

system.scrambledPseudoRandomNumber

which always gives the same answer for any system, so it looks intentional that any particular Anarchy has either a sentinel station, a renegade station, or nothing and that's the same each time you visit.

Given how tough the stations are, the assumption is presumably that they won't normally be destroyed, so being the same each time rather than randomly appearing, disappearing, and changing hands makes sense.

[Garrett]

That would make sense - I did have to use one of the Nukes OXP weapons to get rid of it.

Anyway, a PC reboot with a re-initialisation of Oolite (Shift-start) seems to have fixed the problem, so this should be flagged as Solved. Thanks for the help.

[Commander McLane]

Thanks for the bug report, Garrett!

The reason for the mystically re-appearing station is that Anarchies simply does not keep track of events like the destruction of one of its stations. This applies for all types of stations created by the OXP, from Salvage Gangs to Renegade Stations. Stations are created in some systems using a pseudo-random algorithm, which means that always the same type of station (or none at all) is created in any given system, regardless what happened during the player's last visit in that system.

Of course it would be a nice idea to keep track of all sort of events and make the Ooniverse more dynamic by not replacing a station once it was destroyed. However, it would also take some effort to do so. When I wrote Anarchies (or when any of the flavor OXPs and station-adding OXPs were written), there was no way this kind of track-keeping could be achieved with a reasonable amount of effort. In this respect all the flavor OXPs are somehow flawed. (You can also kill for instance a SLAPU in a communist system, and next time you visit the system it will miraculously re-appear as if nothing had happened. Or a Black Monk monastery. Or a Seedy Space Bar. Or a Fuel Station.)

A while ago Ahruman introduced a way of saving dynamic information in a save-file without taking up a ridiculous amount of space. So in principle it would now be possible to keep track of things like destroyed stations. The question is: is it worth the effort? How often will a player actually destroy a Renegade Station or a Seedy Space Bar and then return to the same system a couple of jumps later? I guess not very often. The fact that you're the first one to report this odd behaviour is an indication that it's extremely rare. So for the time being I'm willing to live with that small flaw.

I discovered however another problem with Anarchies 2.5 in Oolite 1.76, which has to do with some changes to escort handling in Oolite. As a result Hacker Outposts are no longer protected by Sentinel Asteroids. I'm trying to understand the problem and to fix it. So there will be an Anarchies 2.6 at some point. Who knows, maybe I can persuade myself to do something in the track-keeping department as well while I'm at it?

[Killer Wolf]

welcome back bud.

[Switeck]

(You can also kill for instance a SLAPU in a communist system, and next time you visit the system it will miraculously re-appear as if nothing had happened. Or a Black Monk monastery.

I've actually tried HARD to kill a Black Monk Monastery. Everything from Q-bombs, missiles, Energy Bomb, and even tricking it into hitting my clean ship while shooting a pirate near me with police around to fine it -- it ended up getting >60k bounty and killing EVERYTHING that shot at it.

But I did see one Monastery finally die...to an injecting pirate Fer de Lance of all things!

Even if stations get destroyed, presumably they would get replaced over time...maybe even within 6 months. So keeping track of only the Galaxy Chart you're in might be an acceptable workaround to prevent savegames ballooning in size.