[WC1] Spontaneuous Combustion -- is this normal?

Prometheus

Spaceman
I was playing Enyo 2 and intentionally wanted to lose it, in order to get to Gateway.

However, instead of just ejecting or blowing up the freighter myself, I just tagged along, but stayed out of the battle, while ordering Spirit to break and attack...

This way, the battle went on while we moved toward NAV 2.

However, the moment the Dralthi wing appeared, both Salthis, which were still alive at that moment, suddenly exploded. I would have bought that Spirit might have killed hers, but mine was in plain view, undamaged, and I wasn't firing, nor did it collide with anything.

I want to ask you, do you think that was a "freak accident", or is this normal behaviour of the game?

I think I remember instances in the game, where I had fought different types of Kilrathi fighters at the same time... But I wouldn't bet on that. This experience here seems to suggest, such a thing is not possible. Or maybe it is, but not with "carryovers" from the last NAV point.

Any thoughts, experiences, etc.?
 
If I recall correctly, if you get far enough away from an enemy ship then they do explode (presumably a bug in the "dissapear from view" code).
 
As far as I know (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if wrong :) ), the WC1 game engine can only support a certain number of different ship models at once, 2 fighter types and 2 capship/transport types I think it is. (due to memory limitations I guess).
I would assume that the Salthi's exploding, is to stop the game from crashing when you encounter the Dralthi's later on.
 
They definitely did not collide with each other, they were not even close to each other.
And I wasn't far from one of the Salthis, as it exploded. Spirit and the other one were further away, but "my target" was directly ahead in my crosshair, maybe even in weapons range. So if I actually had fired at that moment, I might have been surprised as to how quickly it went down, but I would probably have shrugged it off.

They also exploded at the exact moment, or maybe a second before, the Dralthi appeared. I read "Excuse me Commander, I noticed enemy ships." immediately after I saw the Salthi explode.

I'll see if I can reproduce it.

By the way, has there been any attempts to reverse engineer WC1 or maybe information from the original programmers which might shed light on all the ways that game engine works? I would love to actually learn more about that. Have been a Wing Commander fan for all this time, there's no way of telling how many hours I "wasted" on the first game alone... and with also an interest in Computer Science and Programming, getting a picture of the game "under the hood" would be an amazing experience for me. I often pondered about that already, noticing some things here and there, but for example this kind of "spontaneous combustion" never occured before, so that's a completely new "scientific discovery" for me... :)
 
Yes, I believe their explosion was related to the appearance of the Dralthi, and the memory limitations issue. There are a few situations like this, usually related to you escorting something which takes up one of the memory slots.
 
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