cannot board drone even though I changed crew to 1

Hi again, I have another problem with this new storyline I'm creating

There's this mission where you need to disable and board a cargo drone, and since the default setting of Crew is 0, it is not boardable...
So, I copied the ship and shan resource for the cargo drone and changed the ID to 500 (as not to conflict with other ships), and changed the Crew field from 0 to 1, and when I test it again, I still can't board the drone.

can someone help me with this problem? Perhaps there's something else I need to do, but I'm just missing it...

Thanks!

Just to check, you did add the modified Cargo Drone to its own unique düde, and inlcude that düde as the mission's Special Ship, and setting the Ship Goal to Board Them? Unless a mission specifically requires you to board the special ship, you'll be unable to board it. Try starting a new pilot also - I don't think the game properly updates düdes if you don't start a new pilot.

@belthazar, on Mar 28 2008, 11:15 PM, said in Cannot board modified cargo drone:

I don't think the game properly updates düdes if you don't start a new pilot.

It does, at least on the Mac.

@belthazar, on Mar 29 2008, 12:15 AM, said in Cannot board modified cargo drone:

Just to check, you did add the modified Cargo Drone to its own unique düde, and inlcude that düde as the mission's Special Ship, and setting the Ship Goal to Board Them? Unless a mission specifically requires you to board the special ship, you'll be unable to board it. Try starting a new pilot also - I don't think the game properly updates düdes if you don't start a new pilot.

I did create a new dude ID 275 and included the ship goal to Board.

Quote

It does, at least on the Mac.

I also have a mac, so starting a new pilot will probably not work

Any other ideas?

I have a Mac, and I seem to need a new pilot every time I update the düde, flët and përs resources.

Yah, despite Josh's naysaying, starting a new pilot can't possibly hurt at all, so you might as well try it. I don't really have any idea otherwise.

Weird, it always updated fine for me. Otherwise I'd have an additional 40 CTC dev pilots.

You need to start a new pilot file when you create new përs resources, because any përs slot that was blank when the pilot was created is automatically marked dead. düde resources don’t have a dead marker, though, so there isn’t any reason why you should need to create a new pilot file for them — and even if you did, this isn’t the sort of behaviour that would result from failing to do so.

As long as your mission points to the new düde, and the düde points to the new shďp, I can’t see anything else obviously wrong. Is your plug-in small enough that you could post it (or the relevant parts of it) to the board?

(Incidentally, in the course of searching for possible causes for your problem, I found and fixed an obscure bug in MissionComputer that would probably never have come to light otherwise, so thank you. )

For some reason when I try to upload the file, it says, "you did not select a file to upload".

the shortened version of the plugin file is 8 kb, so its not too big...

@david-arthur, on Mar 30 2008, 07:29 AM, said in Cannot board modified cargo drone:

(Incidentally, in the course of searching for possible causes for your problem, I found and fixed an obscure bug in MissionComputer that would probably never have come to light otherwise, so thank you. )

Okies, now you've made me curious - what bug?

@ezpass, on Mar 30 2008, 09:50 AM, said in Cannot board modified cargo drone:

For some reason when I try to upload the file, it says, "you did not select a file to upload".

Don't forget you need to browse for the file first. When you the Upload button, make sure it's actually uploading, and that you're not just getting an error message that you haven't seen. It could be that your file isn't in one of the file types that the board software likes - you might need to compress the file in a .bin.zip archive first. The boards don't like .sitx.

Edit: Sorry to ask the obvious all the time, but have you tried a number of times to do this mission? Is it possible that another ship boarded your cargo drone before you managed to get to it?

This post has been edited by Belthazar : 29 March 2008 - 06:43 PM

Thanks, I zipped it

Here's a bit of the plugin

(quote) Is it possible that another ship boarded your cargo drone before you managed to get to it? (\quote)

Oh, and the cargo drone is located in an uninhabited system in Auroran space (the Hope system), and the only ships that fly around in that system are either one or two fighters, which don't board the drone (I'm the only person that attacks it and disables it).

Attached File(s)

• Cargo_Drone.zip (936bytes)
  Number of downloads: 6

This post has been edited by ezpass : 29 March 2008 - 08:29 PM

@ezpass, on Mar 29 2008, 09:23 PM, said in Cannot board modified cargo drone:

Thanks, I zipped it.

I notice your cargo drone has an inherent government of 184. Is there by any chance something in that gövt resource that might be interfering?

@belthazar, on Mar 29 2008, 07:41 PM, said in Cannot board modified cargo drone:

Okies, now you've made me curious - what bug?

It was a rather obscure text-encoding issue left over from the conversion to Unicode that was necessary to make version 4.0 possible. It interfered with the correct loading of the resource ID limits table used by the New Resource and Get Info dialogues, but in a way which to anyone other than me would have made the feature simply appear less useful, rather than actually broken.

@david-arthur, on Mar 30 2008, 10:50 AM, said in Cannot board modified cargo drone:

I notice your cargo drone has an inherent government of 184. Is there by any chance something in that gövt resource that might be interfering?

184 is the Cargo Drone Robots government. I don't think that the gov has to do with anything, but just to make sure, I changed the inherent gov. to -1, and I disabled the drone, but I still can't board it.

Any other ideas?

I wonder if it's simply the cargo drone's tiny sprite that's making it difficult to line your ship up with it properly. Perhaps, as an experiment, you should try swapping its shän with something enormous, like a Raven, and see if that makes any difference.

I swapped sprites and disabled the Raven/Cargo Drone, and still couldn't board it.

But your idea gave me another thought: what if its the ship I'm flying?
I originally changed the char resource for the test pilot so it would give me a Raven at first (to make things easier). I then changed the raven and bought a pirate starbridge (for something for proportional), but it's the same problem.

So we now know that it's not the graphics; it probably has something to do with the ship or misn resource, or possibly the ships I'm flying...

Any other ideas?

Is it saying "You cannot board this ship" or "You cannot board this ship because you are moving too fast" or nothing at all?

Have you tried boarding a non-mission version of your Cargo Drone?

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Is it saying "You cannot board this ship" or "You cannot board this ship because you are moving too fast" or nothing at all?

It says "You can't board this ship"

In addition, I tried something else: I changed the cargo drone dude to a Starbridge, to see if it was the ship that was causing the problem. To my surprise, I could not board the Starbridge either! This means that it's not the cargo drone, it's probably the misn or the dude, or something else?

This post has been edited by ezpass : 30 March 2008 - 12:16 PM

The dude resource has a flag that prevents it from being boarded by the player. According to the Nova bible, it should say "You were repelled while attempting to board this ship," but this probably isn't true. We've used this flag extensively in CTC, but I'm not sure how, exactly, it's used...

Try checking one of the "booty" flags in the dude resource and see what happens.

I don't think that's it.
I have a number of dude ships with no booty that can be boarded just fine.

I tried the booty flag and it still doesn't work.

So now we know it's probably not the dude--it's probably the misn resource.

sighs Any other ideas?

This post has been edited by ezpass : 30 March 2008 - 01:26 PM