I'm not seeing this. I'm also not seeing the "Tailing Predictions" menu option anymore; don't know if that's relevant to this or not.
Where is this appearing? Just on the background? Only during the Movement Phase? Between Phases? Right now in Combat phase?
That's weird... The error message is gone now, and I was able to access turn 12 CP. It appeared right after submitting my orders for MP, then going back and trying to open Game 4's menu screen. (It would let me go to the Phase 5 page, but threw the above message right after clicking on Game 4.) Zeta 2 had an empty "Orders" button this CP. And Sierra 1's tailing somehow went wrong, or I misinterpreted the way WCTOO does these predictions... I expected him to turn up right in Zeta 1's sights.
Found the problem, hopefully it is fixed. that's because it will only appear during turn processing, that happens once. A lot of these errors messages have a single chance to be shown before it moves on, so you guys are really helping when you relay them to me! Well logically I see no valid moves for Zeta 2, so the real question is, why didn't the turn predictor at the end of the movement phase decide you didn't need to put an order in? Ultimately this is a minor issue so I'm going to shelve it for now in favor of the other bugs we're finding. Okay, so their explosions again somehow made it into the -1 value. Not sure how. I've set them back, again to the 1 value, so they should decrement to 0 and vanish. I also made another small update to the end phase engine code to explicitly remove and filter out nulled objects (aka out of the game). Hopefully this will address the overall problem. Now we wait for the EP.
Not at all! It said Sierra 1 would move 1 forward and turn 1 left. I translated this into "speed 1, turn 1 to port," when it actually was "speed 2, turn 1 to port." You can see in Sierra 1's info screen that its speed is 2, so I guess that's what Skanks intended to do... Either I misinterpreted based on the prediction given, or the prediction should have been more precise. According to the rules, it should have either said "speed 2, turning to port" (without detailing how much Sierra 1 will turn) or "speed 2, turn 1 left." (Seeing I rolled a 9, it probably should have been the first.)
Yeah...I agree with you, Ironduke; on a nine, you were only entitled to speed and direction (with no info on how much Sierra1 turned). On the bright side, though, we did get a successful tailing test...
Turn 13, movement phase: Question - did Zeta1 not get a chance to shoot at Sierra1 in Turn 12 CP? He should have had one...he was in the peripheral firing line for Zeta1's guns, if I'm reading the rules correctly. I'm also not sure if missile hit determination is working correctly or not. How hard would it be to put something in that reports the result of the missile hit check? I mean in the situation where the game determines that a missile has not been shot down, spoofed or evaded, the procedure on page 10 of the rules should kick in: "To determine if a missile hits its target, use the target’s Target Roll, add the missile’s Guidance rating, substract the target pilot’s skill level and apply the speed modifier, taking only the target’s speed into consideration. The missile’s own speed is irrelevant, as is the distance between missile and target". So, there should be a dice check there; would it be difficult to have the game report the result of that check?
Great catch! First off, including that in a report would be trivial.... until I looked into it and realize that all missiles auto-hit once they make it past point defence and chaff and evasive action! This brings up another point, which is that missiles don't remember who fired them currently. So, for everything but a DF, the fix is really easy, and already in place. For DF's it'll take me probably an hour to rebuild the missile class to have room for an originating ship, and then put in all the important database tracking info for that, etc. so that we can actually use the correct pilot's skill on firing. edit: I just found what I consider to have been a simple, yet serious coding error. While checking over the weapon fire code (so I could implement missile hits the same way) I realized that the $weapon->weapon_fire_at($target, $refires) function had a serious error! Check this out: Code: $TR = calculate_TR($this->target, $target) There are 2 flaws with this: The calculate_TR function has the form ($attacker, $defender), and this sure looks like I'm trying to feed it the defender twice! $this->target (in this context '$this' is a weapon on a ship's rail) doesn't exit. Weapons don't remember their own targets, their ships do! So I've changed it to: Code: $TR = calculate_TR($this->ship, $target) This means that, for Alpha Games 1 through 4, there have been no Attacker-side TR penalties OR benefits. The Attacker speed hasn't mattered, if the attacker was rolling, it was ignored, etc. I'm shocked this wasn't crashing or something. The good news is that the defender was getting any benefits of moving fast, rolling, etc. So.... expect hitting to be slightly harder now, as, on average, I expect required TR-to-hit to increase. edit2: I haven't put any of the above online, so while the next movement turn is safe to take, if you guys are reading this, please don't post the next combat phase orders until I post again here that it is ready for testing.
Okay, new missile hit code in place. Note: DFs that miss currently vanish. This is because, to make the DFs keep traveling and hit secondary targets really would mean I finally get line of travel collision detection working. The best way to do that is a reworking of the movement system, and then a test with asteroids first then come back and just tell DFs they are now collidable objects with everything, and go from there. So for the short term/foreseeable future, DFs vanish after missing a target. Someone remind me when I start talking about collisions and asteroids (Probably around Game 6) to go back and do DFs. Anyway, weapons free, fire away in CP again!
I'm on a seminar from now until Monday night, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to issue orders in WCTOO (taking only my tablet with me). At the same time, though, it's a great way to see if and how WCTOO works (and displays) on a tablet.
Turn13, EP: Wow. And I thought I had rotten luck... OK...and I'm the one holding up the game. Asking me to tail my own guy again...why not, let's see exactly what happens. On to turn 14!
Since it's all browser-based, I can't see why it wouldn't work just the same on a tablet, assuming there's enough resolution to view the whole board (and even then, you should be able to scroll around). Please let us know if you do encounter difficulties or oddities.
Turn 14, combat phase. Game seems to think Dark Archon could do something; we've got another one of those situations where I have nothing to do besides order Archon to do nothing. Should I hold off on giving the order? It occurs to me, though, that Zeta 2 would be in a position where I could shoot a Heat-Seeking Missile at him from Dark Archon's position, if Dark Archon still had one... Just a thought. Might be something to check that could explain why situations like this keep cropping up. I suppose, though, it doesn't explain Wandering Soul. Same position, should still be within the firing arc, but the game (rightly) said that Soul had no valid target...
Put the order in. I have to diagnose these on the previous turn's processing stage, so we almost need to try and predict when it will happen to fix it. As I said earlier, this problem is low priority 'cause I'd rather the game thinks you need to put an order in, and predict wrong, than the other way around, and not let you put in valid orders when you should! Yeah... it could be something like that, but usually when I check if you can fire weapons, I check actual on-board weapons, not the template (default) weapons... but who knows? Sadly not me, and I should!
Alright then...onto the End Phase... Turn 14, end phase: I think I might need to wait a little bit...right now, I'm getting the message "Error Finding Pilot Data" when I try to access the site. I did just put in the final order for Turn 14 combat phase, so that might have something to do with it. Just thought I'd report it, though.
No......something's broken; it's still doing the "Error Finding Pilot Data" when I click on the link to Game 4.
Whoops, I take one day away from the forums and it blows up. Likely this is because of some new pilot-missile relationship stuff I put in a few days back. I'm guessing someone fired a missile. I'll try to look into this later today.
Okay...I can get into the site at this point. Looks like we're up to Turn 15, movement phase. I still get the same message when I try to look at Turn 14 end phase, though, and it doesn't go away unless I back out and select a different turn/phase. BTW, there was a missile launch in Turn 14: Zeta2 fired a missile at Sierra1. Apparently it hit, but it didn't report the die result for the hit; I don't remember if that had been implemented or not... I have to wonder if the game skipped ahead to 15MP on its own; Skanks had plenty of options for evading the thing...
