Oolite Bulletins

Last night while I was involved in a dog fight I noticed a blib on the radar that was flashing yellow and white. I thought nothing of it; I've seen this before when a ship snags a cargo can. But after I finished off the dog fight I noticed the yellow/white blip was still there. So I investigated it. A Cobra III looked like it was tumbling in space. No engines, it was just tumbling around. I ID'ed it and it was an offender!? So I blasted it. Got the bounty and there was a cargo can just sitting there. So I tried to scoop it and missed? Ok, I tried again. No scooping it. This time I was sure I didn't miss. It could not be scooped up. Falling back on general rule #1: if all else fails, blast it! I tried to shoot the cargo can. It was Mil laser proof! I need a ship made out of this stuff. All efforts to interact with the ghoast cargo failed. I could see it and it was on the radar as a white blip.

Jar

What version of Oolite are you using, and on what platform?

It's a known bug, in the sense that I have reported it previously.

By any chance was the container a yellow and black one?

Ahruman wrote:

What version of Oolite are you using, and on what platform?

OOlite 1.65 running under Ubuntu Linux 7.1 AMD64 bit. And a variety of oxp's.

It's just a bug.. ':('

Oh well.

Jar

davcefai wrote:

It's a known bug, in the sense that I have reported it previously.

By any chance was the container a yellow and black one?

Nope, just a normal looking cargo can. It floated there for the longest time. I went back to the station and refueled and came back and it was still there.

Jar

ghost cannisters and ships were known bugs in 1.65, you should upgrade to 1.71. Happy travels

Nope, just a normal looking cargo can. It floated there for the longest time. I went back to the station and refueled and came back and it was still there.

Ghost cargo is a bug that is their around for ages. I think it is still not solved. At least it was still present in 1.70. Often it is triggered when two ships crash into each other fighting for scoopable items. Sometimes these items turn completely unscoopable.

Eric Walch wrote:

Ghost cargo is a bug that is their around for ages. I think it is still not solved. At least it was still present in 1.70. Often it is triggered when two ships crash into each other fighting for scoopable items. Sometimes these items turn completely unscoopable.

Hmm, that particular context sounds as though there may be an actual comprehensible reason – cargo pods in a tractor beam are taken out of collision handling, and possibly not put back when the tractoring ship dies. See? It’s useful to point out the context in which a bug occurs. :-)

TGHC wrote:

ghost cannisters and ships were known bugs in 1.65, you should upgrade to 1.71. Happy travels

Yes, I would like to upgrade. The random hits oxp will not work on mine. But 1.65 is what's available for Unbuntu. It is beyond my skill level to get the source to compile on an AMD64 system. I'm stuck with what's prepackaged for my system. Eventually, one day it will get updated.....
Jar

You can always remove random hits and put it back when LB has updated it to work with 1.71, he says in a couple of weeks or so.

Ahruman wrote:

Eric Walch wrote:

Ghost cargo is a bug that is their around for ages. I think it is still not solved. At least it was still present in 1.70. Often it is triggered when two ships crash into each other fighting for scoopable items. Sometimes these items turn completely unscoopable.

Hmm, that particular context sounds as though there may be an actual comprehensible reason – cargo pods in a tractor beam are taken out of collision handling, and possibly not put back when the tractoring ship dies. See? It’s useful to point out the context in which a bug occurs.

I have put in a fix for that problem a while ago (I guess its in 1.71). It should now be impossible to get a pod stuck thinking its being tractored.

Unless you do something really funky like create a pod that can tractor, then I guess you can still get a pair of them dancing

Hey, its a reference counting problem, lets solve it with mark/sweep nicked from Java gc process

I run 1.71 on Linux (nightly builds) and the problem is not *completely* solved.

Any type cannister can be unscoopable - but nowadays rarely.

However there is one, black and yellow, which about half the time is unscoopable but collidable with.

Can anyone identify what this pod is (like which oxp it is from, and what its name is)?

If I can get enough information to work out what it is, then I can probably find out why it is unscoopable, and fix it. My guess is that its being created with the wrong ai, but Im not certain

Is it this one?



This is barrel_ah, from the Cargo & Wrecks 1.3.1 OXP. I haven't encountered any scooping problems for a while now (I've only got a 20-ton bay, so a lot of stuff goes to waste...).

Edit: looking at the shipdata.plist for Cargo & Wrecks, I see that sometimes the model called is named "barrel_ah.dat" and sometimes "barrel_AH.dat". Of course, I'm too ignorant to know if this capitalisation of "AH" will make a difference...

Also, the barrel is sometimes used as a missile pod, which on scooping awards a missile to the player. If all pylons are filled, though, then maybe this is why the pod is unscoopable, but "real" enough to collide with?

Disembodied wrote:

Edit: looking at the shipdata.plist for Cargo & Wrecks, I see that sometimes the model called is named "barrel_ah.dat" and sometimes "barrel_AH.dat". Of course, I'm too ignorant to know if this capitalisation of "AH" will make a difference... :?

Depends. On case-sensitive file systems (as used on Linux, and sometimes Mac OS X) it will fail to load if it doesn’t match the file name.

Disembodied wrote:

Also, the barrel is sometimes used as a missile pod, which on scooping awards a missile to the player. If all pylons are filled, though, then maybe this is why the pod is unscoopable, but "real" enough to collide with?

That could be a lead.