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Author Topic: Battleship Commander  (Read 43688 times)

mauridadde

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #105 on: November 06, 2014, 10:54:12 am »

In wave mode:
- when I tried to stop it accelerated instead, prograde face the way to slow down and vice-versa.
- if I don't use a battery, all fuel goes from 100% to 0% suddenly after a few seconds.
I haven't managed to reproduce these bugs

- I destroyed powerplant (grey, red should be enough to win anyway no ?) of the first enemy yet nothing happened and few minutes later I had a stalemate.
The enemy had a working battery?

- I tried to destroy battery with lasers but it was behind the powerplant, yet when powerplant is grey the battery still cannot be damaged. Maybe this is normal but in the latest video you made, missiles could go through destroyed components, I guess that if I try to use lasers after those they will still be blocked by components.
Weapons can pass through grey components, i did a test and didn't find problems. Maybe there was some hull armor in the path of the laser?

- Something special: a ship couldn't move nor attack, so I used stop with him as reference, then look at, then thrusted a bit, retrograde, stop again so I was very close to him forever. Yet, with cannon 20mm I couldn't damage the battery AT ALL, I checked by taking control, that was . And the reason of this was: the "dead" ship was very slightly rotating, so by the time a bullet reached the battery every of them went slightly bellow it. So, I don't know, sounds like while weapons anticipate huge speed and acceleration for translation, they don't do a single calculation for even a small rotation ?
I found a small bug, some parts of code used the center of mass as reference while others the center of the model.
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rex4

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #106 on: November 06, 2014, 12:23:59 pm »

- I destroyed powerplant (grey, red should be enough to win anyway no ?) of the first enemy yet nothing happened and few minutes later I had a stalemate.
The enemy had a working battery?
Yes, I realize I didn't understood "A ship is considered defeated when there are no working powerplants or batteries. ", you mean both have to be red, not just one of those.

- I tried to destroy battery with lasers but it was behind the powerplant, yet when powerplant is grey the battery still cannot be damaged. Maybe this is normal but in the latest video you made, missiles could go through destroyed components, I guess that if I try to use lasers after those they will still be blocked by components.
Weapons can pass through grey components, i did a test and didn't find problems. Maybe there was some hull armor in the path of the laser?
Unless there is hull between those 2 components, no.
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mauridadde

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #107 on: November 06, 2014, 01:59:16 pm »

- I tried to destroy battery with lasers but it was behind the powerplant, yet when powerplant is grey the battery still cannot be damaged. Maybe this is normal but in the latest video you made, missiles could go through destroyed components, I guess that if I try to use lasers after those they will still be blocked by components.
Weapons can pass through grey components, i did a test and didn't find problems. Maybe there was some hull armor in the path of the laser?
Unless there is hull between those 2 components, no.
If you have a sequence of actions that reproduce the problem i can look at it.
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rex4

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #108 on: November 07, 2014, 06:56:42 am »

I got the wrong way for prograde and untouchable battery bugs again, if you add a replay function I could send it easily to you, recording my screen on my poor computer would be harder. In the mean time: all I do is equipping 2 lasers bellow my ship on the side where the first enemy will appear, then I shoot his weapons, accelerate only a few seconds to avoid the few bullets I will receive, then shoot the battery and wait.

- I destroyed all enemy tanks, how come he could still thrust ? What changes when a tank become grey ? It doesn't even leak. I controlled the enemy to see and it showed "no fuel" but tanks still had fuel that get depleted with thrusters.

- There was a case where I just couldn't fire rockets for some reason even if I press the "shoot" button while laser was working. As soon as I chose the station as target it worked. Also rocket pods fire when it shouldn't: both me and the station are immobile to each other, yet when I turn in order to face the pod with the station it starts to shoot too early, rockets are shot a few meters above the station.

- Missile pod and missile turret have same name in the weapons list. Different weapons of the same type also need to be with a different name, like with " 2" " 3" at the end of the name and a way to know where it is located on the ship.

- If an enemy has no fuel left and goes faster/slower than me, I can easily destroy him with rockets even if he is far since his path his totally predictable, but, while it's easily done with a missile turret, it can't with a missile pod, while it could by rotating the whole ship instead of the missile turret: could you make a change to allow the whole ship to be controlled by AI for that purpose ?

By the way to be honest I'm basically just starting to enjoy your game, it's not that it's bad at all but while very interesting I couldn't enjoy it yet, I probably had to understand more of it first.
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mauridadde

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #109 on: November 07, 2014, 12:31:10 pm »

I got the wrong way for prograde and untouchable battery bugs again, if you add a replay function I could send it easily to you, recording my screen on my poor computer would be harder. In the mean time: all I do is equipping 2 lasers bellow my ship on the side where the first enemy will appear, then I shoot his weapons, accelerate only a few seconds to avoid the few bullets I will receive, then shoot the battery and wait.
I solved the mystery. Given the small initial budget i had to choose 2 small lasers. When the enemy appeared at 15Km i had no problem destroying his gatling cannon. Because this was his only offensive weapon he started to run away. Because the 2 lasers was small i was doing little damage to the battery, and before i could destroy it he was so far that the lens diffraction made the ray have a diameter of 0.25 meters at the target. This area is large and the lasers are weak and the result is that the laser only heated the battery.

The prograde bug did not appeared. You can try to record the game using fraps. It records uncompressed video and the overhead should be small.
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rex4

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #110 on: November 07, 2014, 12:53:53 pm »

I got the wrong way for prograde and untouchable battery bugs again, if you add a replay function I could send it easily to you, recording my screen on my poor computer would be harder. In the mean time: all I do is equipping 2 lasers bellow my ship on the side where the first enemy will appear, then I shoot his weapons, accelerate only a few seconds to avoid the few bullets I will receive, then shoot the battery and wait.
I solved the mystery. Given the small initial budget i had to choose 2 small lasers. When the enemy appeared at 15Km i had no problem destroying his gatling cannon. Because this was his only offensive weapon he started to run away. Because the 2 lasers was small i was doing little damage to the battery, and before i could destroy it he was so far that the lens diffraction made the ray have a diameter of 0.25 meters at the target. This area is large and the lasers are weak and the result is that the laser only heated the battery.
Why then was I able to reduce powerplant to exactly 0 hp while I couldn't do a single damage to the battery ?
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mauridadde

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #111 on: November 07, 2014, 02:08:40 pm »

- I destroyed all enemy tanks, how come he could still thrust ? What changes when a tank become grey ? It doesn't even leak. I controlled the enemy to see and it showed "no fuel" but tanks still had fuel that get depleted with thrusters.
I haven't yet made a function to handle "laser vs tank" so it is uses the generic function "laser vs component" that doesn't add "leak" to the tank. The tank is destroyed by the laser but without leaks it retains all the fuel. I will implement this now.

- Missile pod and missile turret have same name in the weapons list. Different weapons of the same type also need to be with a different name, like with " 2" " 3" at the end of the name and a way to know where it is located on the ship.
Yes. In the meantime you can disable the component, press 'k' and see which component become red.

- If an enemy has no fuel left and goes faster/slower than me, I can easily destroy him with rockets even if he is far since his path his totally predictable, but, while it's easily done with a missile turret, it can't with a missile pod, while it could by rotating the whole ship instead of the missile turret: could you make a change to allow the whole ship to be controlled by AI for that purpose ?
This requires some work so i'll wait until i do a general improvement pass on the AI.

I got the wrong way for prograde and untouchable battery bugs again, if you add a replay function I could send it easily to you, recording my screen on my poor computer would be harder. In the mean time: all I do is equipping 2 lasers bellow my ship on the side where the first enemy will appear, then I shoot his weapons, accelerate only a few seconds to avoid the few bullets I will receive, then shoot the battery and wait.
I solved the mystery. Given the small initial budget i had to choose 2 small lasers. When the enemy appeared at 15Km i had no problem destroying his gatling cannon. Because this was his only offensive weapon he started to run away. Because the 2 lasers was small i was doing little damage to the battery, and before i could destroy it he was so far that the lens diffraction made the ray have a diameter of 0.25 meters at the target. This area is large and the lasers are weak and the result is that the laser only heated the battery.
Why then was I able to reduce powerplant to exactly 0 hp while I couldn't do a single damage to the battery ?
Maybe the powerplant get destroyed just before he got out of laser range?
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rex4

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #112 on: November 07, 2014, 02:51:05 pm »

Maybe the powerplant get destroyed just before he got out of laser range?
That sounds like a big coincidence, I saw this like 3 times.
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rex4

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #113 on: November 07, 2014, 08:30:08 pm »

I had a game crash on like the 5th wave, doing nothing special suddenly I couldn't even move the cursor, memory kept going from 700mo to 900mo then instantaneously back to 700mo and so on, with cpu being used between 40 and 45%.
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rex4

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #114 on: November 08, 2014, 06:36:50 am »

Any file is created when a crash happens, that I could check/upload to you ? I don't mind the lack of save feature, I know how hard it can be to make one and in special cases it may not save some things so if I don't have the time to do all waves or I still have a lot of enemies to defeat in sandbox mode I just leave the game open, use virtual memory and pause the game with cheat engine and when I leave my computer I just leave it in stand by/hibernate so the game is not closed, but, if the game crashes all this is useless and I would have to start again anyway. I could use vmware save states but my computer is not good enough to have full fps with it and I would probably have the crash a few seconds later each time I load a state.
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mauridadde

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #115 on: November 08, 2014, 09:20:03 am »

You can check Battleship_Commander.log but if the game freezes it wasn't aware something was wrong.
In dev mode you can directly destroy enemy using the console command .destroy <ship name> , for example to destroy the first ship .destroy speeder t1-1-0
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rex4

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #116 on: November 08, 2014, 10:57:13 am »

I tried the game with vmware to check, in fact it works better than expected, except that when I fire with one of the 2 turrets the game crash while it doesn't with the other one despite it's the same.
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rex4

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #117 on: November 10, 2014, 08:35:49 am »

I tried to test something very specific but that might waste tons of missiles/rockets in particular circumstances: if an enemy ship doesn't move, you are far and target with 2 missiles turrets a component that is on the edge of the enemy ship, each pair of missiles might explode each other like 1 meter from the target. Well after multiple tests it didn't happen for some reason but might still happen later. Anyway, trying this I realized that unless using "take control" of missiles, which isn't possible without cheating I guess, you can't target anything else than powerplant with missiles.

- PD weapons don't shoot rockets, they're not even shown in circles so you don't see them coming, they seem to be considered dead because they don't have battery/powerplant. In most cases though it's a good thing though since they can be easily avoided but there should also be a role or something to be able to shoot them down automatically, 72 manual targeting would be very annoying otherwise.

- AI doesn't shoot sometime simply because in the random moves it makes its only turret is behind, and those random movements are next to useless against lasers.

- There is 500 ms of delay after pressing V to warp, to stop the warp.

- I just wonder, since there is no air in space, why missiles are long instead of more looking like balls so they use less metal to be made for the same amount of fuel/explosive ?

- If missiles turrets can't aim directly their enemy, they don't fire, while they could since missiles aim themselves. The "fire weapon" button may help but pressing it as fast as possible to fire the 12 missiles of each turret as as soon as possible may be annoying.

- It seems like the AI acts this way: 3 missiles incoming, 3 PD missiles sent. I destroyed those 3 as soon as possible, he had a lot of time to send 3 more but didn't. By the way, could you add a way to auto target enemy PD missiles ? Mostly in the menus of "1st Role" and "2nd Role".

- It seems like "Point defense" role doesn't destroy incoming missiles if aimed on an ally, which may be a good thing in some cases but another role to destroy those too would be good.

- Why do PD weapons aim the battery ? For an already close missile that's useless, why doesn't it aim the explosive instead (because by default weapons aim powerplant/battery I guess) ? I lost on wave 8 because of that.

- For now wave mode is unfinishable because of "ship too advanced: koyaba maru" ?
« Last Edit: November 10, 2014, 08:40:45 am by rex4 »
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rex4

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #118 on: November 10, 2014, 02:24:36 pm »

About what I said about rockets with ship controlled by AI: it would also be useful for when a weapon has its turret engines down. With current AI it probably never happens though.

About what I said about rockets fired "too early": same happens with guns which engines are down, it starts to fire as soon as it points in the big square with the name and distance of the ship.

In hull editor, what is "radiator" ? Saw only components with "ld radiator".

I just saw there actually were some armor slots on speeder, I saw it only because I looked at slots on the right in refit page, they are otherwise not only very thin but also in such a dark grey that I never saw them before. By the way it's annoying that each time you unmount something this list is moved back to the top.

About missiles touching each other the way I described in previous post: after all I'm not even sure about what would happen, they would probably do it that slowly that they wouldn't explode, maybe I will test again later, more likely if you allow them to directly target a component.

Changing the hull thickness is not shown on the model, it doesn't matter much but with a slightly larger ship there is slightly more chances to receive bullets, here not. It may be tricky to change though, unless you can just scale up the model. The slider to change the hull thickness lack of precision also, simply allow to type directly any number to fix that.

"Trade" is the only thing to do with stations and it's done often, maybe remove the menu and a single right click on them does trade, with a message appearing as usual if the ship is going too fast or is too far.
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mauridadde

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Re: Battleship Commander
« Reply #119 on: November 10, 2014, 05:52:47 pm »

I tried to test something very specific but that might waste tons of missiles/rockets in particular circumstances: if an enemy ship doesn't move, you are far and target with 2 missiles turrets a component that is on the edge of the enemy ship, each pair of missiles might explode each other like 1 meter from the target. Well after multiple tests it didn't happen for some reason but might still happen later. Anyway, trying this I realized that unless using "take control" of missiles, which isn't possible without cheating I guess, you can't target anything else than powerplant with missiles.
I didn't manage to make the 2 missile collide, it is a very unlikely event. Even if it happens they doesn't explode because they are friendly with each other.
You can target any component with missiles, just checked.

- PD weapons don't shoot rockets, they're not even shown in circles so you don't see them coming, they seem to be considered dead because they don't have battery/powerplant. In most cases though it's a good thing though since they can be easily avoided but there should also be a role or something to be able to shoot them down automatically, 72 manual targeting would be very annoying otherwise.
I don't think it is usually necessary to shoot them but i may add the option when i improve the tactical window.

- AI doesn't shoot sometime simply because in the random moves it makes its only turret is behind, and those random movements are next to useless against lasers.
AI for now doesn't care where his own weapons are placed.

- There is 500 ms of delay after pressing V to warp, to stop the warp.
Is 400ms to avoid unwanted warp exit or reentering, if it is too much i can reduce it.

- I just wonder, since there is no air in space, why missiles are long instead of more looking like balls so they use less metal to be made for the same amount of fuel/explosive ?
Spheric missiles would require more ship surface when stored in missile launchers. They have a lower moment of inertia, but if thrusters are used to rotate they have also worse lever. Being more compact they require a smaller shield bubble so there may be a place for them in the future.

- If missiles turrets can't aim directly their enemy, they don't fire, while they could since missiles aim themselves. The "fire weapon" button may help but pressing it as fast as possible to fire the 12 missiles of each turret as as soon as possible may be annoying.
Missile turrets do fire even if they are not aligned with the enemy.

- It seems like the AI acts this way: 3 missiles incoming, 3 PD missiles sent. I destroyed those 3 as soon as possible, he had a lot of time to send 3 more but didn't. By the way, could you add a way to auto target enemy PD missiles ? Mostly in the menus of "1st Role" and "2nd Role".
- It seems like "Point defense" role doesn't destroy incoming missiles if aimed on an ally, which may be a good thing in some cases but another role to destroy those too would be good.
Yes, point defense only target missiles directed toward the ship. For lasers it makes sense to add this option.

- Why do PD weapons aim the battery ? For an already close missile that's useless, why doesn't it aim the explosive instead (because by default weapons aim powerplant/battery I guess) ? I lost on wave 8 because of that.
As you guessed it is because missile are treated like ship when choosing a component to target.

- For now wave mode is unfinishable because of "ship too advanced: koyaba maru" ?
I forgot to increase the year of wave mode when i added more advanced components on the last ship.
The name is Kobayashi Maru and is a reference to an unwinnable battle in star trek.
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