Messages

16

Feature Requests / Re: Alien using human weapons?

« on: May 15, 2009, 12:39:26 am »

At what difficulty level did you play? It certainly sounds like what I encountered when testing in the easiest level. Try pumping up the difficulty level. When I tried hardest I enede up totally frustrated. Couldn't make it through the first mission without having my butt wiped, kicked and served back at me. Several times in a row.

Cheers!

17

Feature Requests / Re: Small suggetsions

« on: May 15, 2009, 12:32:30 am »

About the saves, don't take it personally. It's just that it has been discussed ad nauseam.

Cheers!

18

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: R24409: Soldier moves to the same square as civilian

« on: May 12, 2009, 09:00:38 am »

It's during my turn that I move my soldier to where the civilian is. Then, once I end my turn, it will move a few aliens and then crash. Anyway, I think the ctash is totally normal, given that the soldier should not have moved to the square occupied by the civilian in the first place.

Cheers!

19

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: R24409: Soldier moves to the same square as civilian

« on: May 12, 2009, 08:35:25 am »

@Duke,
Without the patch. I reverted it once it did nothing for the other bug.

Cheers!

20

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: R24409: Soldier moves to the same square as civilian

« on: May 11, 2009, 07:07:49 pm »

Hi Kaz,

Whilst looking at this entry, i cant help but wonder about:
1) The dev revision of the svn u r using? (Revision nos, or a built by one of the uploaders?)
2) Your current operating system? (Xp, ubuntu, mac, version and Service pack?)
3) Was this recreatable?

Maybe it would help to provide a backtrace too? Or a savegame to this?

Hi Odie,
1) As in the topic's subject, SVN revision 24409.
2) Windows Vista SP1.
3) Like clockwork. I just selected the soldier closest to the building, disabled reaction fire (to have all TU available) and set him to move to the specified square.

The game was started in skirmish mode. Since you can't save in the middle of a battle, I can't provide a savegame.

Btw, a quick inspection of the code reveals that the failed assert that crashes the game seems to be checking that a distance not be zero, which given that it's the distance between the soldier and the civilian, seems to be that.

Cheers!

21

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / R24409: Soldier moves to the same square as civilian

« on: May 11, 2009, 05:30:27 am »

While testing another bug, I found this one. As I started he Dam map, I moved a soldier in the first turn to square (136,137,0) as shown under debug_map 3. As the soldier entes the building the square shows to have been occupied by a civilian, yet the soldier keeps moving to that square, until at the end of the motion, both the soldier and the civilian are standing in the same square, as shown in the first screenshot. Bad as this is, if you leave the soldier at that spot and end the turn, a little while later (presumably as the civilian's tries to move or something else) the game crashes claiming a failed assertion in file src\game\g_ai.c, line 516. It is my idea that the check for "square occupied" shows unoccupied for squares the player does not see, and is not rechecked while the soldier is moving.

Cheers!

[attachment deleted by admin]

22

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: r24148 - Actor movement out of sync - server crashed

« on: May 11, 2009, 03:35:31 am »

Tried Mattn's patch. Still crashes at the same spot.

Cheers!

23

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: r24148 - Actor movement out of sync - server crashed

« on: May 11, 2009, 03:18:31 am »

Ok. Here is my consistent way to obtain the crash, step by step.

1. Goto (137,135,1).
2. Crouch.
3. End turn.
4. Move to (135,138,2): Fails: Square turns yellow if using debug_map.
5. Move to (135,136,1): Crash!

I've tried it several times, and this crashes the game every single time.

@Duke.
I'll look into Mattn's patch and let you know what I find.

Cheers!

24

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: r24148 - Actor movement out of sync - server crashed

« on: May 10, 2009, 07:55:55 pm »

I can compile again So I did some testing. I can confirm a bunch of pathfinding probs with the tower on the dam.map, including being forced to crouch and walking through walls.
Many of them are caused by the map not being 'designed to the grid'.
But I didn't get the crash.

@Kaz:
Just a thought: Do you happen to use a multi-core cpu ? (I'm on an ooold single-core)

I will try the issue again and check if the crash is consistent. As for your question: yes, I have a Core 2 Duo. If I get consistent results, do you think fiddling with the processor affinity to bind the ufo.exe process to a single core would make it behave exactly as a single core system, or does ufoai change its behavior depending on the number of cores/processors?

Cheers!

25

Tactics / Re: 2-skills weapons: which skill would be used in Reaction Fire?

« on: May 10, 2009, 07:41:05 pm »

I just had an idea to make this work. Sniping takes concentration and time to aim properly. When RF sniping, the sniper should have some sort of counter which starts at zero and counts up for every square the enemy moves in sight of the sniper. Once a certain threshold in reached sniping RF can be performed. When snipe shot taked place all TU for an aimed shot are expended. If the enemy moves out of sight before being shot at, a fraction of the TU for the aimed shot are expended regardless. Perhaps an amount proportion relative to the counter and the threshold; if counter made it to 50 and threshold is 100, expend 50% of aimed shot TU. The counter's increase rate should be higher for soldiers with higher snipe skill. Opinions?

Cheers!

26

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: r24148 - Actor movement out of sync - server crashed

« on: May 07, 2009, 01:30:54 am »

Hey Duke! Thanks for the debugging tip. I will try it some time later. For the moment, I'm more than happy to keep sending in detailed bug reports and pound on the spanish translation.

Cheers!

27

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: r24148 - Actor movement out of sync - server crashed

« on: May 06, 2009, 10:37:14 pm »

@Kaz:
Great dam.map is non-random (in the base/maps folder, the *.bsp files are non-random maps while the folders are RMAs). The numbers in the msg are x/y/z coords btw.

Your report should enable me to track it down. Once I can compile again
Meanwhile, if you want to help even more, you could toy a bit with that situation and try to find the least complex way to reproduce the crash ie. further narrow it down.

btw that was a *very* good bug report Do you happen to be a coder yourself ?

I will try and get some more crashes of this type to send any info. Is there some way to enable more detailed debugging info I could send if/when I get more crashes? You read me right I am a coder, but it has been ages since I've done C/C++ stuff. At the moment part of my full time job description is QA testing systems, which really benefits from detailed bug reports. Another part is fixing bugs, which gives you an appreciation for detailed reports...

Cheers!

28

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: r24148 - Actor movement out of sync - server crashed

« on: May 06, 2009, 04:43:36 pm »

Don't know if dam is non random, but I just got the same error message (with somewhat different numbers):

ERROR: LET_PathMove: Actor movement is out of sync: 137:132:1 should be 135:135:1 (step 3 of 3)

The error occurred while trying to move a sniper up the tower. On one round, the sniper made it just to the top of the first flight of stairs. As the game would not let me move the guy further into the second flight, I decided to try and crouch him in case there were some actor height issues. It seemed to work at first, since the grid turned green at the top floor, but the sniper did not move and the grid turned blue again. At this point I decided to try and move him just to the stairs and not beyond when I found a spot there which gave me a green grid. As I clicked to make the guy move, he started his crouched motion towards the stairs, then out the builduing through a wall, and back to the main menu (I started the map in skirmish mode). Checked thre console and the error message was there.

I also recall seeing the same error yesterday with an alien who was coming over the dam towards the tower walked over the railing and into the water just before the game crashed back to the main menu.

I hope this description helps reproduce the issue.

Still, progress has been made with pathfinding. About a week ago I could not move soldiers into the tower building.

Cheers!

29

Translating / Re: Navy, army or air force ranks?

« on: May 06, 2009, 01:05:41 am »

In establishing an organization such as PHALANX, I would not object to having certain specialist officers drawn from the navy even if the bulk of the operation would be run by the army or air force. Some navy skills could be of great benefit in PHALANX. If building underground bases, you need to minimize the space so as to build faster and cheaper. The navy are specialists regarding how to handle lots of stressed men in these conditions (think submarine). Other specialties would benefit having the best man (or woman) for the job regardless of branch. I'm sure the wounded soldiers coming from a field operation would really appreciate having the best surgeon patch them up, even if it was a navy or air force surgeon. The same could happen for science officers, etc.

Cheers!

30

Artwork / Re: Animations

« on: April 22, 2009, 12:09:34 am »

Some thoughts on the list of animations:

1. There is standing walk and crouched walk, but no prone walk. Soldiers in the battlefield will crawl to avoid fire while moving, so I think it should be added. From a game mechanics perspective, this motion should be very costly in TU.

2. Do the standing, crouching and lying down animations are what the characters looks while not moving in that stance, or how the character moves into that stance? If the former, then you are missing the animations to transition from one stance to another. If the later, I think the animations should be defined in terms of start stance and end stance, since the motion to stand up from crouch is not just the reverse of crouching from stand, etc.

3. Melee combat should depend not only on the stance of the atacker, but also on the stance and/or height of the victim. The motion to stab if you are standing is completely different if your victim is standing, crouched or prone in the ground. Heal is affected by pretty much the same thing.

4. Climbing ladders and stairs should also have different animations when climbing up and when climbing down.

Cheers!