Bug/Error report. (Sort of long, but not flaming)

[Acimus]

(ECM can't be turned off and drains no power)

Oddly enough they can, and do. To keep it close to the original, the power drain is negligable, and it could be that there is no key bound to turning them off. If anything, it is a difference in the game from the original, and not a manual inaccuracy.

Well I can't turn ECM off either and there's certainly keys binded for that (alt-e). When I press Alt-e, text "ECM disabled" etc. just flashes there where it says "ECM activated" all the time. But because the power drain doesn't seem to be noticeable, it doesn't matter too much...

 

[hellcatv]

hmm thought I made it pretty noticable--then again that was long before mamiya balanced the power output as per constants measured from game

 

[MamiyaOtaru]

It's some small fraction of a unit per second now to keep the balance as close as possible to the original.

 

[fyodor]

I'm seeing a few bugs in here, but mostly a lot of things that are simply different from the original, and thus not exactly bugs. Bugs are things that are broken

F9 for speedmatching doesn't work unless you kill your speed. I.e. if you're going at your own max speed (and who isn't, under normal circumstances), matching the speed of another vessel by pressing F9 has ZERO effect. However, if you kill your engines (backspace), speed is reduced to match vessel.

90% of all sounds don't fade. I.e. all shield, armor and hull impacts of every ship, all missiles fired are at max sound, making it completely impossible to tell (by sound) if you're the one being shot to pieces or if it's someone all the way across the system.

If you accidentally eject your Artifact it becomes Space Salvage when you tractor it back in (odddly enough, it is called "Mission Cargo" while floating around).

There are still some mission issues, possibly due to conflicts with other missions. E.g. I took a cargo mission to New Constantinople from a merchant in a bar and another cargo mission to New Constantinople from the main computer. It turned out that both needed to be delivered to draymans (two different ones). When I docked with the first, that mission was not completed (it kept saying that I needed to visit the drayman), the other worked fine (the first one didn't work afterwards either and jumping out of the system and back in didn't solve the problem).

[afterburners]They do here too. If you don't have enough energy, it isn't possible to continue at max speed. Since inertia has more of an effect in vegastrike than it did in privateer, you can maintain speed a bit better than in the original, but the sputtering is still there (though it could be that the sound doesn't skip)

Speed at max is maintained completely. Could be that the inertia simply overwhelms the effect and even a stuttering afterburner is enough to maintain max.

[selected cargo missions disappear when not enough cargo space]There is indeed feedback, but it often gets lost as more messages scroll by in the messages display. Pageup to see the old messages, and you will see something telling you there was not enough room in your hold and you were thus unable to complete the mission.

There is no msg displayed at the time, since you are on a base when you select (or try to select) a mission. The reason for the failure isn't accessible until you launch into space - and use pgup to get the old msgs.

 

[LameLefty]

Is anyone else having problem with in-game stats? My kills and relationships with the various factions haven't been updated since the first couple of flights I made. Also, the Nav Computer sometimes has button text the same color (or nearly so) as the background.

 

[fyodor]

Is anyone else having problem with in-game stats? My kills and relationships with the various factions haven't been updated since the first couple of flights I made. Also, the Nav Computer sometimes has button text the same color (or nearly so) as the background.

Haven't had any problems with the in-game stats. Kills and faction update just fine. (Faction is extremely easy to influence, however - far more so than the original, at least as I remember it).

I have the same problem with the Nav computer as you. It seems to like almost-white on white, giving readability issues (besides not looking very good).

Text also overflows the buttons, at least in 800x600. If the buttons have a fixed pixel-width, the fonts should as well. On the otherhand, if the buttons scale, so should the text...

 

[fyodor]

*SPOILER*

Here's another annoying bug:

If you leave the system during the the second Oxford mission, without visiting the jump point that starts the encounter, the screen still tells you to visit the jump point, but even going back and visiting it doesn't start the encounter (nor does it trigger the "100% visited jump point" mission sub-section). Visiting the library again just results in a "sorry, haven't visited nav3 yet, will do it ASAP" msg.

Clearly, either the mission should fail once you leave the system, or the encounter should still take place once you visit the correct nav point.

 

[dan_w]

There is no msg displayed at the time, since you are on a base when you select (or try to select) a mission. The reason for the failure isn't accessible until you launch into space - and use pgup to get the old msgs.

It's easy to tell, though; if the mission fails due to lack of space, 'current missions' continues to read as zero.

Faction is extremely easy to influence, however - far more so than the original, at least as I remember it.

I'm having a hard time keeping the hunters as enemies. I can insult and kill two dozen of them, have my stat at minus 100, but as soon as I kill a couple of kilrathis or pirates they are friends again... grrr... (I need them to be enemies, otherwise I have little hope of passing the book collection escort mission for oxford). I can avoid killing kilrathis and pirates on the way to oxford; the problem is that the nav points in oxford are full of them and if I don't kill them they follow me to the planet, and wait for me to start the mission, then follow me to my meeting the cargo ship. Or am I just getting paranoid?

This is a balancing bug, by the way --namely, that killing a kilrathy does more for my friendship with the hunters, than killing a hunter takes away from it. The hunters aren't "enemies" of the kilrathi (or of the pirates, for that matter), they are supposedly detached... "only kill for a fee". If this friendship phenomenon happens with the confeds, that's more understandable.

EDIT:
I'm thinking, confeds should be most impressed by one's killing kilrathis and pirates.
I'm thinking, merchants and militias should be most impressed by one's killing pirates, and retros.
I'm thinking, hunters shouldn't be very impressionable one way or another.
But then again, I don't know exactly how it worked out in the original.
But one thing's for sure, it should take killing 10 kilrathis to make up for killing a confed, and so on.

SECOND EDIT:
I keep thinking: Maybe hunters should only understand *money*. Though this would be a departure from the original game, perhaps it would be very fitting that after the palan missions, for example, hunters become enemies; and that there's no way to "sweet talk" or impress them back to friendship, but, instead, that when visiting the mercenaries guild, one gets a stern speech, and asked for a large sum, say 100,000 credits, for them to "forget the past".

By the way, in the original game, during the palan missions, hunters keep respawning. So, the last time I played the game, years ago, I kept killing the respawns for fun, and I only quit after about 300 or so of them. After that, the confeds and militias were my enemies as well. I'm not sure why that was, but I thought it didn't make much sense.

 

[MamiyaOtaru]

Speed at max is maintained completely. Could be that the inertia simply overwhelms the effect and even a stuttering afterburner is enough to maintain max.

I understand that it does with your current ship configuration but it doesn't always. It was similar in the original: you could maintain speed if you almost had enough energy. It is more pronounced in the remake, I know but if you don't have enough energy, your speed will drop.

 

[fyodor]

SPEED MATCHING BUG

Besides speed matching not always working unless you kill your own speed (e.g. backspace), it also allows matching of speeds higher than your ship is capable of. In a Demon, I matched speed with a Centurion going at 1000. Sure, demon can do that with afterburners, but they were not being engaged with the speed-matching. Appears to be a simple bug where a sanity check is not being performed.

 

[JKeefe]

Actually, that is how it's designed. Because the Vegastrike engine uses Newtonian physics, and cargo is generally rather lighweight, it can get moving pretty fast sometimes. This never happened in the original, so speed-matching lets you still catch up to it to tractor it.

The fact that you can match ships (specifically ones that go faster than you) is an unfortunate side effect. The "sanity check" is not needed - in the absence of external forces, you can theoretically go as fast you want. It's just a bit of difference with the original.

 

[fyodor]

Actually, that is how it's designed. Because the Vegastrike engine uses Newtonian physics, and cargo is generally rather lighweight, it can get moving pretty fast sometimes. This never happened in the original, so speed-matching lets you still catch up to it to tractor it.

The fact that you can match ships (specifically ones that go faster than you) is an unfortunate side effect. The "sanity check" is not needed - in the absence of external forces, you can theoretically go as fast you want. It's just a bit of difference with the original.

I get the physics argument (of course), but since ship speed is limited, one would assume that there is some reason for this (spacial disturbances causing the drive or reactor to lose power / ship to shake, insert other pseudo-scientific argument here). For me, this just breaks the immersive experience.

Does it really matter if you accidentally bump cargo out of range? Sure, this could be a problem with special mission cargo, but the same problem would exist with shooting it (by accident, just like bumping into it by accident).

In this case, the "cure" is significantly worse than the "disease"... imho ;-)

 

[spiritplumber]

The way I heard it about Wing Commander ships was:

Their engines push against the very fabric of space to get better purchase and better acceleration. However, this makes the fabric of space non-transparent to ships, so they effectively fly a lot like they were in atmosphere. Sorta like the "luminiferous aether" theory of the late 19th century...

 

[dan_w]

The way I heard it about Wing Commander ships was:

Their engines push against the very fabric of space to get better purchase and better acceleration. However, this makes the fabric of space non-transparent to ships, so they effectively fly a lot like they were in atmosphere. Sorta like the "luminiferous aether" theory of the late 19th century...

Yeah, that explains a lot of things now... It actually does make sense for those who, like me, look at Relativity with a bit of guarded skepticism. I've never accepted the official results of the Michaelson-Morley experiment. I think the "ether" IS there, but that its speed relative to the Earth does not affect light's speed, just like the speed of water in a river does not affect the way surface waves propagate. If so, the problem of grabbing onto the fabric of space is its being "slippery", which is more of a concrete problem, than a theoretical one, --which might yield to technological inventiveness.

The above paragraph is copy-lefted; feel free to include it in the manual.. ;-)

 

[rail]

How to use your ship to clone and imprison yourself for fun and profit!

I haven't seen anyone mention this but I noticed that if you eject from your ship and then transfer control back to the ship and then eject from your ship and then transfer control back to the ship and then....wait, how many people are in this ship anyway? When you get bored you just tractor all your "selves" back in and sell yourself off at the next local planet. UBER-Ship here I come!


(I had a bunch of REALLY corny puns here about this ---I decided to remove them before posting for your reading pleasure).

 

[spiritplumber]

Sell yourself off? You Jezebel!

(see I can be tasteful too!)

Seriously though, it is a pretty serious bug.


Physics wise... I saw the M-M experiment being done here at school, it didn't quite convince me either as they had to do it a bunch of time to get the "right" result. What I would like to see done is get a M-M setup in outer space (REALLY outer, think at a Lagrange point, so we know we're absolutely clear of atmosphere or any other medium) and try there.

Or maybe then the solar wind particles count as a medium... trickyness @_@; Either way, if it means us sending out more spacecraft I'm all for it.

(I for one vote that we give 1% of the US military budget, AND a copy of every WC game around, to Burt Rutan so that he can shut himself in a room for six months and invent the jump drive)

 

[chatbot_0]

Sorry I just find it funny how you say you were "trying to enjoy the game more than take notes." Well that's quite a bit of notes for trying to enjoy the game lol..