Transports.oxp

Post by **Eric Walch** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 5:54 pm

I noticed transports.oxp didn't have a topic by itself. Now it has. It was always one of my favourite ship.oxps. It has always had some bugs. A year ago Kaks removed most of them.

By now it was time to add a new features to it. When shooting the fuel tanker down it drops its tanks with a nice script. Some are even scoopable for fuel.

As discussed elsewhere I added also a very big fuel ship. It is too big to dock, but will fall into pieces near the station and each tank docks separately.

When trying to put it at the wiki I noticed it had no page of its own but three of its containing ships had own pages, pointing to different download versions. I now gave it a page of its own: Transports
And all the other download places point to this page for easier maintenance of download locations. Feel free when you want to improve this page layout.

Ark · Post by **Ark** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 6:09 pm

Great job Eric!!!!!!

This is one of my favorites
I assume that the masty woma escort bug has been removed from both 2.45 and 2.46 versions

Edit:Nice job also in the wiki page. One small mistake: In the update notes you mention about versions 1.45 and 1.46 instead of 2.45 & 2.46

Post by **Eric Walch** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 10:19 pm

Ark wrote:
Great job Eric!!!!!!
This is one of my favorites
I assume that the masty woma escort bug has been removed from both 2.45 and 2.46 versions

I think the bug was in Oolite 1.69 and 1.70. with escorts, but kaks coded it so that it worked with those versions. Anyhow, it now works well with 1.72.

Also thanks for the bug over a pm about the anacondaSW. You were right, I added there a bug. I don't know how it ended there but in shipdata.plist I pasted the word "ups-asteroid" in the middle of the ai_type.

Therefor I just uploaded version 2.47 with this error removed at the previously mentioned link.. For who don't want to download again can also remove the "typo" in shipdata.plist with the anacondaSW.

Post by **Micha** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 10:33 pm

Eric Walch wrote:
Therefor I just uploaded version 2.47 with this error removed ....

Not to be picky.. but the OXP folder is called "transports 1.47.oxp" and the readme starts off with 2.46

Oh, and a couple of systems ago there were no fewer than 5 (!!) Woma Fuel transports on their way to the station. I guess there was a major shortage *g*

Post by **Eric Walch** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 10:51 pm

Micha wrote:
Oh, and a couple of systems ago there were no fewer than 5 (!!) Woma Fuel transports on their way to the station. I guess there was a major shortage *g*

Strange...
The addition script is from Kaks, who translated it from the original legacy version. I only added a check to prevent addition in interstellar space. So this should not have changed in any way.

According the code it sometimes adds a single fuelship when government > 4. It also adds a single fuelship with economy 0,1 or 5. That adds up to a total of 2 maximum.
But there is also a small change that it is added in its role as "trader(0.25)". Still, 5 looks a bit much to me. Do you have accidentally two versions installed?

Post by **Micha** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 12:04 am

Eric Walch wrote:
Do you have accidentally two versions installed?

I had already checked this (as I am also getting some other weird things happening) and the answer is no.

However, I recently added somebody else's code to my Oolite startup script and guess what it does - cd's into the users' Oolite directory before launching Oolite. Just looked at the logfile and discovered that Oolite actually ends up adding all my OXPs twice - once for ./AddOns and once for $HOME/Oolite/AddOns.
Doh!

Svengali · Post by **Svengali** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 12:46 pm

Micha wrote:
Eric Walch wrote:
Do you have accidentally two versions installed?
I had already checked this (as I am also getting some other weird things happening) and the answer is no.

However, I recently added somebody else's code to my Oolite startup script and guess what it does - cd's into the users' Oolite directory before launching Oolite. Just looked at the logfile and discovered that Oolite actually ends up adding all my OXPs twice - once for ./AddOns and once for $HOME/Oolite/AddOns.
Doh!

Yesterday I've tried to make a copy of the one of my oxps and only renamed the folder, so script-names and all other things were exact copies - to test what happens if someone does it by accident/ignorance/.... Oolite crashed. :-)

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 8:02 am

I noticed a problem with the Woma Escorts. Usually they are miles ahead of their mother, yet still in AI-state FLY_ESCORT. Also I met them flying right passed the main station and continuing for 50 kilometers more, before finally turning around, then being in state DOCKING_ABORT.

My guess for the first problem is that they are probably too fast for the (quite slow) transporter? The second one is caused by the first one. By the time the mother goes into dockingAI the escorts just have overshot the station for a long time.

Post by **Eric Walch** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 8:51 am

Commander McLane wrote:
I noticed a problem with the Woma Escorts. Usually they are miles ahead of their mother, yet still in AI-state FLY_ESCORT. Also I met them flying right passed the main station and continuing for 50 kilometers more, before finally turning around, then being in state DOCKING_ABORT.

My guess for the first problem is that they are probably too fast for the (quite slow) transporter? The second one is caused by the first one. By the time the mother goes into dockingAI the escorts just have overshot the station for a long time.

This looks more like a oolite problem. They have just a plain escortAI. That escorts fly a long time in front of their mother happens to other ships also. Very often they do return to their mother at some time. It is not like the bug in 1.69 & 1.70 were they lost their mother completely and switched to a route1patrolAI. In the last version from Kaks he gave the escorts a follow AI (copied from the special player escorts in ups-courier). But with that AI they didn't fly formation but just followed. And since 1.69 & 1.70 are not in use anymore, it didn't make sense to give the escorts a custom AI to bypass an escort bug in those versions. Therefor I switched back to the default escortAI.

About the speed you are right. The escorts always waggled a bit because they could not fly so slow in a neat way. In this version I increased the cruise speed of the woma from 65% to 95%. (Max speed is unchanged at 100). This speed increase of the mother solved the waggling escorts.

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 10:21 am

All Womas I met had a speed of 65 only (and I have Transports 2.46 installed).

Alternatively you could reduce the max_speed of the Sidewinder Escorts, to make them comfortable with the slow speed of their mother.

Post by **Micha** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 10:58 am

I fail to see why any (faster) ship cannot match the speed of another (slower) one - as a player I can do so quite easily.

Perhaps a 'match speed' JS method is needed? It seems odd that escorts cannot fly formation with any slower-than-them mother ship.

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 11:32 am

I would guess it's going to be how the AI for the escorts is set-up, as it won't have easy access to the speed of the mother ship it's escorting. All it has is the range it should be keeping from the mother, hence it will need to keep recalculating based on its speed and the location of both itself and the mother ship. Presumably in this case as the speeds are so different, we've got continuous over and under shooting.

It won't be anything to do with JS methods, unless someone is feeling like writing an exceedingly complex AI/script pair that improves the I in the AI

McLane's suggestion in this specific case is probably the most sensible, but it's going to be specific for this application, or at least ships of roughly this speed. But then a "slow ship escort" AI probably would be quite useful in a number of cases.

Post by **Eric Walch** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 12:34 pm

Micha wrote:
I fail to see why any (faster) ship cannot match the speed of another (slower) one - as a player I can do so quite easily.

This is all handled within oolites code. AI can't do anything at it.

When I remember well, escorts fly at maximum speed when far away. When close to destination they get their mothers speed + a few percent. This way they slowly catch up the last part. At some point they go to far and they reduce speed to that of the mother. But at slow speed they overshoot the target more easily. (Maybe frame rate also has influence on overshooting)

When you look in the code there is nowhere programmed explicitly they escort in a V-formation. They are programmed to go as close to the mother as they can. Anti collision detection however forces them to keep a certain distance. And when position 1 is occupied they go at double distance. When the mother has more mass, the distances between escorts also grows. And when the mother flies faster, the V-shape gets more stretched. And when flying as slow as a woma it gets almost flattened. (with as result the waggling ships)

When you replace the 0 distance in the escort AI by an larger number they will follow at a greater distance and the V-shape disappears. I the slave mission of ups-courier there is a target ship with such escorts on distance. They just look like a chaotic group of ships. But they will reassemble after an attack.

McLane wrote:
All Womas I met had a speed of 65 only (and I have Transports 2.46 installed).

Strange. They fly at 95% to the planet and 65% to the station. Which state had they?

Captain Hesperus · Post by **Captain Hesperus** » Mon Nov 17, 2008 1:10 pm

I always saw the Sidewinders' 'Woma Waggle' as a kind of nervous energy thing. I know that Quirium is terribly safe to transport and all that, but still, it's hard to be comfortable when you know the stuff also fuels Q-bombs....
Besides, aren't Sidies faster than Anacondas too?

Captain Hesperus

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Tue Nov 18, 2008 5:57 am

I am not talking about a 'waggle'. And I am not talking of overshooting a little. I am talking of escorts that fly between 50 and 75 kilometers in front of their mother! There are two or three complete scanner ranges between the escorts and their mother!

That's why when I first met them, I thought that the escorts may have been fighting with an attacker, and after finishing him off, they fly fast in order to catch up with their mother. So I flew in the direction of their orientation, but never reached their mother. Then I turned around, passed by the escorts and flew for a long time in the direction they were coming from. There finally I met their mother, about 50 kilometers behind them! It was somewhere between witchpoint and planet, so I guess it was still in the approach-planet state (althou I don't recall exactly). However it flew with a speed of 65 (this one I remember positively), while the escorts, while all in state ESCORTING and with action ESCORTS_FLY_FORMATION (or whatever that is called), had a speed of 240 or so, and therefore brought more and more distance between them and the mother with every second they continued. Still they called this behaviour 'flying escort'.

And that's why I thought that something's simply wrong here. Generally no escort should fly with four times the speed of its mother, while it is supposed to escort the mother, and according to its AI-dump it does.