QUOTE (Lindley @ Oct 21 2010, 05:01 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
This may be a bug, but it's also useful for plug-in developers. For instance, it could be used to create a "ship graveyard" of unboardable vessels.
That can be done much more easily in other ways.
Guy sent me a long list of bugs, and I will add them into my first post as I have time to format them properly. Meanwhile, here they are in plain text:
1.1 Issues:
• Pure white portions of cicns are transparent (even if the mask says otherwise).
• New/Open/Prefs dialogs unresponsive on 10.3.9.
• Nova Ships 8 is redundant, race movies shouldn't have resource forks, music shouldn't have (incorrect) type/creator codes, Nova-DF.rsrc should be check-summed (to avoid exploitation by unregistered users).
• Filenames are missing from debug log sections for "opening files in Nova Files/Plug-Ins folder"
• Plug-Ins section in the Help doesn't clearly indicate where the debuglog should be created.
Engine Limitations:
• Non-simultaneous weapons can fire no more than once per frame.
• Negative DatePostInc doesn't work. We need to travel back in time!
• Perses not present when a pilot is created will all be assumed to be dead.
Engine Bugs:
• Beam hit detection is terrible. Beams can pass right through large parts of a ship without hitting.
• Non-infinite aux ships are lost on quit. Ie, if you have a mission which has a fixed number of aux ships but you quit the game before completing the mission, when you next load that pilot the aux ships will be gone.
• RLE colour runs aren't affected by colouring/transparency/murk.
• Starfield is also not affected by murk.
• Exit points don't work for carried fighters - they just always come from ship center. The additional downside to this is that you can't use negative inaccuracy to make fighters come out sideways.
• Player's ship can only turn at rates in multiples of 10 (30°/s), despite what's shown in the player info. AI ships have no problems.
• Ranks only discount ships, not outfits.
• If you have an IFF jammer planets still won't let you land. When you hail them though they appear all happy and friendly and you can't offer them a bribe to let you land. You have to demand tribute to turn them hostile and then you can offer them a bribe.
• Missions where you have to retrieve cargo from multiple ships don't seem to work very well. When you board the first ship you'll retrieve the complete quantity of cargo but you can't complete the mission without boarding the others too. To board the remaining ships you need to have the same amount of free cargo space again but when you actually board them you retrieve 0 tons. Ideally, the cargo quantity would be distributed across all the ships.
• The choice of nebu picts is messed up - it prefers to scale small picts up rather than large picts down. Even if the large one is only 1 pixel too large for the current scale it'll choose one half the size and blow it up. Looks really bad.
• Outfits set to modify max guns/turrets don't stack. If it's set to give you 2 more turrets and you buy 4 of them then you still only get 2 more turrets.
• The Hxxx ship changer (and probably Exxx too) doesn't give you any carried fighters that might come with the new ship - all you get is an empty bay. Same thing also happens with the ship the player is given when starting the game.
• Weapons that draw ammo from other weapons can cause incorrect free mass readings in the ship info dialog. The mass of the ammo is added to the free mass reading. If you buy the ship it has the correct amount though.
• Fail texts are dependent on CanAbort, in that the mission will only be "persistent" on failure if CanAbort is false. This may not be a bug but it makes things really difficult and I can't see any good reason for it. Missions should instead check for the presence of a fail text to determine whether or not it is persistent after you fail it. They would also need to be non-abortable after failure (regardless of CanAbort) to prevent OnFail and OnAbort from both being run.
• Systems that change due to visbits will often be coloured on the map according to your status in the previous system (the one with the lower ID) rather than the new one. The same applies to message buoys - the previous string will always be shown instead of the new one.
• Sometimes ships will become paralysed if you hit them momentarily with a tractor beam. Hitting them again will bring them back to life.
• Sometimes map outfits will not reveal all systems within the specified number of jumps. This is to do with the ordering of the hyper links - Nova doesn't always take the shortest route to a system so it thinks it's further away than it is.
• Missions where cargo is to be picked up from special ship and dropped off at travelstel will allow you to complete the travelstel objective before picking up the cargo.
• Ship trade-in value sometimes appears higher in the player info extras pane than in the shipyard. I'm guessing that it's including persistent outfits in the extras pane while the shipyard is correctly ignoring them.
• PD beams will sometimes fire at targets way out of their range. I'm guessing this happens when it fires at one target that is within range and kills it but the count of the beam requires it to stay on screen for longer so it acquires the next target whether it is within range or not.
• A target is determined to be in or out of a weapon's firing arc (front, sides, rear) based on the angle from the centre of the firing ship, rather than the exit point the shot is coming from. For example, a front-quadrant turret can fire backwards from its weapon exit point if the target is behind the weapon exit point but in front of the firing ship.
• Smaller asteroids don't appear in higher res. This is somehow related the actual size of the sprites and can be avoided by padding them out to make them larger.
• When Gxxx is used in the OnBuy field of a weapon or ammunition outfit the actual outfit you're trying to buy does not get given to you (symmetrically, Dxxx in OnSell). This can be worked around by making the outfit Gxxx itself as well. DO NOT FIX - Plug-ins that use the work-around will be broken.
• Crons don't work! There would appear to be multiple bugs at work here so fixing even just one of them would be a welcome improvement.
• Missions with random travel/return stellars when accepted from a stellar whose system will be changing the next day will fail to find an appropriate travel/return stellar. More info.
• Dude specific advice STR#s often fail to load all entries.
• 'Owned' spobs (using the "always dominated" flag) have a minor glitch when hailed. The middle button reads "Leave" and appears disabled but you can still click it to evoke a 'no response' from the spob.
• A number of people have complained bitterly about the shan 0x0002 flag "unfolds to hyperjump and land". It would be far more useful if it did NOT unfold to land, but only for hyperjumping.
• Govt borders on the map are only drawn in a 512x512 area, which is a problem when using plugs that change the map size. Ideally it would be drawn to the same size as the DITL element for the map area. The performance of the govt borders is already pretty poor though, so I'm not sure how well it would work with a really big map.
• The 'Auto-Machine-Gun' bug: An issue with beam decay. I'll talk about the Winter Tempest which it affects in a big way, though it also affects some other beams in the game.
Prior to EVN 1.0.A, when you held down the fire key for the WT, the beam would fire on every frame but not decay until you stop firing. This was more-or-less fine except that it didn't always work. If you had other primary beams (like the BRL) on your ship which fired at the same time then each time the WT fired (every frame) it would also decay and the overlapping beams would build up and cause extreme damage to anything crossing its path. Alternatively, you could rapidly press the fire key rather than holding it down and the same thing would happen.
The 1.0.A update changed things so that the beams will always decay every time they fire, so no matter what you're doing the WT will always build up and cause extreme damage.
My proposal is a 3-stage solution:
1. Whenever a particular beam is fired from a particular exit point, kill off any previous decay of that same beam that exists at that same exit point. Ie, the same as pre-1.0.A behaviour, except working in all situations. This isn't perfect though as the player could still exploit the behaviour to save fuel on the WT by firing once, waiting for it to decay, then firing again.
2. Decay the beam's damage down to 0 as the beam itself decays. This would make decay more logical and also provide a disincentive to exploit the beam as mentioned above.
3. Draw out fuel consumption over the life of the beam. Ie, rather than x units of fuel per shot, use x/count units of fuel per frame. Consume additional, decaying quantities of fuel as the beam decays. Kill the beam immediately if there's not enough fuel. This way the player is 'paying' for the additional damage done by beam decay, if and only if the beam does decay.
• FPS vs 30ths of a second: Certain statistics in Nova are based on the current framerate, while others are based on a timer ticking at a rate of 1/30 of a second. The problem occurs primarily with weapons, where the reload depends on the 1/30 timer while the duration depends on the framerate. For example, a beam set to 14 reload and 15 count should appear to be a constant beam if fired continually but in practice, with an average framerate of 47 FPS, there is a very noticeable gap in between beam durations. This could also happen the other way: with a much lower framerate (e.g. in a big battle), the beam would last longer than the reload timing. This isn't just a cosmetic bug; since no weapon can fire faster than once every frame, slower computers will be able to deal less damage per second than faster computers with some weaponry, such as Ion Cannons, Bio-Relay Lasers, and Hail Chainguns. This upsets the gameplay balance depending on a computer's speed.
• Issues with AI cloaking.
AI ships will cloak when hyperspacing: Should also be cloaked when jumping into a system.
AI ships will cloak when just flying around: Should also be cloaked when going to leave a system.
AI ships will not uncloak until close to their target: Only works for carried fighters.
AI ships will cloak when docking: Doesn't seem to do anything. Assumed behaviour is for carried fighters to cloak when returning to mothership.
• 'Pirates' take care to disable but not destroy their targets - their weapons will always leave at least 1 armour point on the target. However if a ship only has 3 or less points of armour it cannot be disabled, leaving it invulnerable to further damage from the pirate. In these situations, it would be better if the pirate simply destroyed the ship.
• Font behaviour has been kludged on the Windows version of Nova. Requests for Mac fonts like Geneva or Charcoal are unnecessarily translated to Arial, meaning if the user were to install these fonts they would still not work.
• The hyperspace flash on the Windows version of Nova does not 'build up' like it does in the Mac version. This is why Windows users have been complaining about the flash.
• There have been many reports of compatibility issues with QuickTime on Windows.
• On Windows Vista, users may not have permission to write to the program files folder or may need to explicitly give permission.
Scenario Bugs:
• The 200mm railgun is inferior to the 150mm. The only advantage is the increased mass damage but the vastly increased reload time more than cancels that out. Not to mention the greater decay and increased weight and cost. Also, I think the larger railguns should have greater range than the smaller ones rather than the other way around.
• The Fission Reactor is heavier and more expensive per unit of fuel generatation than Solar Panels and provides no additional advantages. Eg, you can buy 3 Solar Panels (9 tons) for a fraction of the price of a Fission Reactor (10 tons) and enjoy faster fuel generation than the Fission Reactor.
• Set and launch trap mission is way too hard. The escorts jump in and destroy the poor little guy before you can say Old Grey Fox.
• Multiple Ion Cannons (either variant), BRLs or TBRLs do not stack damage as they cannot fire more than once per frame. Qaanol's plug-ins includes a number of methods of fixing this, each with various downsides.
• Vell-os abilities are lost on eject. Qaanol's plug-ins includes a method of fixing this.
• There remains an exploit allowing you to do multiple strings on the same pilot. Qaanol has the details.
• STR#s 4001 and 4002 are missing entry 80 "*Samantha".
Scenario Bugs fixed in Mac Nova 1.1 but still present on Windows:
• junk 138 (Ancient Vell-os Sculpture) lowercase name missing an o: "ancient Vell-s sculpture"
• Mistake in desc 314 (Kymonth Station): "This is where most critical patients and battle-injured warriors are bought."
• Mistake in desc 4135: "Upon seeing you a there is a sudden hush"
• Mistake in desc 4544 (need to escape speech marks): "This Eiric may be a different man altogether{b809 ", although by your reaction," he smiles, "I think this may be a man we count on." "."} Techerakh would be going himself..."
• Mistake in desc 9307 (missing speech marks): "{G"His" Her"} honor is impeccable..."
• Mistake in desc 9368: "she asks slightly impatiently as you make her way over."
• To work around an engine bug involving asteroid sprites on high res screens, the sprites should be padded out to about 50x50.
• The Vell-os area map only works every three days. To make it work every day, set the PreHoldoff to 0 and move OnStart string to OnEnd (to work around a cron bug).
• To work around an engine issue involving beams with decay, the Flower of Spring, Summer Bloom, and Winter Tempest should have their decay removed.
• The Auroran Cruiser and Thunderforge ship resources have garbage values in their moviefile fields, which causes Win Nova to crash when selecting these ships in the shipyard.
Bible Errors:
• oops Stellar: Spob range should be 128-2175.
• oops Stellar: -2 (mission-related news) is not a valid value. This functionality from the EV/O days has been replaced by crons in Nova.
• weap Flags: 0x0008 (don't fire at fast ships) is not a valid flag. This functionality from the EV/O days has been replaced by smarter AI in Nova. The AI will automatically determine whether or not to fire guided weapons at a target based on the capabilities of the weapon and the target.
• Game Constants: Max Crons (512) is not mentioned.
• Game Constants: Max Person Types is actually limited to 1023 as the 1024th ID is reserved (for Hector?). Note: 1023 is the Bounty Hunter.
• misn ShipStart: -5 through -16 are also valid values for other spobs in the system.
Features not mentioned in bible:
• Falloff for a projectile weapon will cause the shot to fade out if positive or fade in if negative.
• Zero-speed warships are treated as "defence platforms" and will be placed in formation around the system centre.
• AI ships set to scoop asteroid debris but lacking the means to do so will go into "economy-at-work" mode, continually travelling between two stellars in a system.
• Duplicate perses are treated as a single pers with an increased chance of appearing.
