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Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 17 Aug 2008, 10:39
by eyestrain92
This never used to happen but this patch, it appears flame turrets have issues attacking. On fire-at-will, they'll usually shoot one jet then roll around. In a group, one will fire and the rest will move about. This is extremely irritating, considering they're one of my favorite weapons.

They only seem to fire-at-will while in a move order.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 17 Aug 2008, 14:39
by Per
Roll around?

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 17 Aug 2008, 20:51
by eyestrain92
The tanks drive in circles and bundle together. It's like as soon as they get within weapon range, during an attack order, they're ordered to retreat.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 19 Aug 2008, 05:36
by Buginator
eyestrain92 wrote:This never used to happen but this patch, it appears flame turrets have issues attacking. On fire-at-will, they'll usually shoot one jet then roll around. In a group, one will fire and the rest will move about. This is extremely irritating, considering they're one of my favorite weapons.

They only seem to fire-at-will while in a move order.

What patch we talking about here?

Got any screen shots of what your talking about?

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 19 Aug 2008, 10:22
by skellr
It's really pronounced when flamers are assigned to a commander. They will head towards the target and then turn around and go bad towards the commander in a circle. Or they will get stuck about halfway between while the turret twitches alot.

Edit: It looks like it happens when you specify a target. When the commander finds it's own targets it seems to be alright.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 19 Aug 2008, 12:13
by Troman
skellr, did you try experimenting with the range? Does it also happen if you switch to short/long range for the flamer units?

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 19 Aug 2008, 13:21
by skellr
Just now a little bit. It still happens, but with long range they will break out of the cycle. It's not consistent every time a target is specified. It's almost like the initial distance from the target has something to do with it, erm, somewhat.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 20 Aug 2008, 00:12
by eyestrain92
I'm playing the stable version where this doesn't exsist atm and missing a couple features... But I only recall this happening in Beta 4. I really feel unmotivated to play with flamers disabled.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 21 Aug 2008, 15:11
by skellr
That sounds right. This shows up at r3312 witch was before 2.1 was branched.

They stop and wait without firing, apparently not long enough, then turn around only to find the target is still there behind them. I wonder what they are waiting for initially when given a command like that?

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 25 Aug 2008, 12:00
by skellr

Code: Select all

never   |000000106853: [moveCalcBoundary] new boundary: droid 162481 boundary (666,-334)
never   |000000106960: [moveCalcBoundary] new boundary: droid 162481 boundary (0,0)
never   |000000106960: [moveCalcBoundary] new boundary: droid 162378 boundary (0,0)
never   |000000107060: [moveCalcBoundary] new boundary: droid 162481 boundary (0,0)
There is a lot of this in the debug output. It's most noticeable with the flamers and the higher level flamers have enough range to fire at the target while they shuffle around. This also happened with a MG turret but to a lesser extent, it just shuffled a couple of times then started firing normally.

There is also something strange when assigned units are arriving to the commander from a factory while this is happening. They will pause every few tiles like they are hopping their way along.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 25 Aug 2008, 17:39
by EVIL386
With regards to the "hopping".
Every time the commander changes location, the new units stop to recalculate the path.

This is a path finding issue, especially if the target is quite a distance away.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 26 Aug 2008, 16:13
by Troman
skellr wrote:That sounds right. This shows up at r3312 witch was before 2.1 was branched.

They stop and wait without firing, apparently not long enough, then turn around only to find the target is still there behind them. I wonder what they are waiting for initially when given a command like that?
I'm not sure how those changes to the txt file could trigger that behaviour. There is probably some bug in the game, will have to investigate that.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 26 Aug 2008, 17:32
by Troman
skellr wrote:That sounds right. This shows up at r3312 witch was before 2.1 was branched.
I have just checked out r3310 version of weapons.txt. The flamers seem to be even more broken than now. I attached flamers to commander and sent to attack a derrick, the way it is showed on skellr's screenshot. They didn't do a single shot, just kept rolling back and forths. I suspect the reason why they don't shoot at all, is that in r3310 flamers were unable to shoot while moving.
The reason for moving back and forth turned out to be orderCheckGuardPosition() routine. It has a pre-defined distance - 8 tiles - and checks whether droids have gone too far away from their guarding position (the commander). I have just made a quick test and unsure now if a bigger distance will fix it without causing new problems somewhere else.

What EVIL386 pointed out (namely the recalculation of the route when flamers are ordered back) is probably the reason for pauses between 'rolling', when there are many units on the map or when you are playing on a slow machine.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 27 Aug 2008, 10:55
by skellr
Thanks for looking into this.

Re: Flame Weaponry Misbehavior

Posted: 10 Sep 2008, 02:58
by skellr
It looks like flamers controlled by the AI behave in a similar way. Stock AI, I haven't looked at this with aivolution. :!!!:

I'll have a truck building a structure close to an enemy base and then a flamer unit will come out to attack. Right when you think it's going to fire, it turns around and heads back into the base area. After a short while you'll see it come back out again only to turn around and head back in. Strange.