STATUS_DEAD not always dead

[Eric Walch]

The past weeks I noticed it several times: A ship was killed but was not fully removed. I had it in the target inspector but it didn't clear. The target inspector even kept a reference to the ship after loading a new commander. I never noticed this before. It took sometimes a few seconds before dead ships cleared, but never that long.

Yesterday I had a fight with a thargoid. I killed the mother, but the tharglets kept being live!

When it happened a second time, I inspected the group property of the tharglet. The mother was still part of the group, including all the killed tharglets. ID was cleared, they were not in the universe anymore, but memory was not released. There was something keeping a reference to it. I could open a target inspector for the dead mother and its dead tharglets. And they kept having a reference in the target inspector after loading a new commander.

[Smivs]

Oh no...Zombie Thargoids!

[SandJ]

Oh no...Zombie Thargoids!

I don't think so. The Tharglets might be zombies since they just kept coming, but the mothership was seen to be killed. So the Thargoid mothership must be an undead. It's a Vampire Thargoid-Mothership! And that means...

Exorcism!

Or, of course, a Wooden-Stake Missile added to Armouries.OXP.

[Smivs]

Oh no...Zombie Thargoids!

I don't think so. The Tharglets might be zombies since they just kept coming, but the mothership was seen to be killed. So the Thargoid mothership must be an undead. It's a Vampire Thargoid-Mothership! And that means...

Exorcism!

Or, of course, a Wooden-Stake Missile added to Armouries.OXP.

<Smivs starts work on 'Garlic OXP' >

[SandJ]

<Smivs starts work on 'Garlic OXP' >

Is that the one that keeps them outside laser range?

It might also be worthwhile starting research on silver-tipped missiles, just in case.

[Smivs]

WIP testing

[SandJ]

WIP testing

Is that a Garlic bomb? I thought you were going for a piece of equipment that stayed on board.

Perhaps the individual cloves could launch and target themselves at the Tharglets, too?

[cim]

There was something keeping a reference to it.

Might be the way I implemented defense targets was keeping references around. I've changed the implementation in r4995, so if that was it the problem should be fixed.

[Eric Walch]

Might be the way I implemented defense targets was keeping references around. I've changed the implementation in r4995, so if that was it the problem should be fixed.

Lets hope this was the binary version of the 'Silver Bullet'

[Eric Walch]

Zombies are back

Today I played a bit Oolite and I noticed the dead ships again:

From the 4 ships in the "wolfpack", 3 were dead. (Killed by me, with the help of a trader and a hunter). But after killing it, the trader and hunter are still in attack mode and circling around the last position of the dead ship for several minutes now and trying to kill it. I also could target it as shown in the screen dump. The distance on the dump has no meaning, as it is not changing. Probably the distance to me when it was killed.

Somehow, they never got a lost_target message on death or are were able to target it again.

I jumped to a new system, and all 3 inspector windows kept displaying info, not only the dead one. A targeted a new ship, opened a inspector window, but that cleared itself on the next jump.

Than I loaded a new game. The windows were still displaying content. With the group window I now could even re-open all of the other ships. (None being updated of cause)

[JensAyton]

I also could target it as shown in the screen dump.

I assume that was using the inspector?

[Eric Walch]

Yes with the help of the inspector. But the inspectors even survived loading a new game.

[JensAyton]

It’s a vanilla memory management bug; the ship’s not being released somewhere. It’s out of the universe list (no universalID), so it’s not like “traditional” ghost ships. TARGET_LOST is generally sent as an effect of noticing that the target weakref has gone stale, which won’t happen in this case. Finding under-releases is always Fun, though. :-/

[cim]

Maybe fixed in r5214.

[Eric Walch]

Probably not as I encountered two more ships yesterday.