Proportions 2.4.2 released

[Phoenix-D]

Whoa. Major, major bug I just found.

Fighter Shield Generators (when you have lg fighters and level III shields) upgrade to *AFV* shield generators. This is very nasty, because the AFV shields are the same size but make 1600 shield points! Also, for some reason upgrading fighters adds an extra life support component.

Phoenix-D

[Aub]

Speaking of upgrades, I find it very irritating that ECM II (for example) upgrades to ECM Ia. This is something you never want to do to your ships.

What you do want is, after getting new tech, to click on "upgrade" and get your ship equipped with the up-to-day stuff. Going through and changing ECMs back to full-power Versions all the time is no fun.

Of course this pales in comparison to upgrade bugs that affect gameplay...

AUB

[oleg]

I concur. There are just too many component families in Proportions. It is not easy to track all upgrade bugs. Poor PvK needs all our help !

[PvK]

Thanks for catching those. It's been quite difficult to catch all of the weird upgrade side-effects. I thought I got the ECM ones sorted out, but I guess not. Grumble grumble...

PvK

[Rollo]

There is a very helpful tool in the tools archive (probably the old one) that will look through the components file and list all the family numbers. IIRC it is called 'Component Lister'. Helped me a lot to sort out the components and upgrade issues when revising the Devnull Mod.

Rollo

[Urendi Maleldil]

I found it, it's from November 2001, but the link is broken. That sounds like a really useful utility.

[oleg]

Another upgrade problem:

There are 3 separate mineral miners families:
Mineral miner (level I,II,III)
Mineral complex (I,II,III)
Mineral megaplex (I,II,III)

Now, if I research Industry 2 and get megaplex,
complex becomes obsolete. Thus, if I later research mineral extraction 2, I can upgrade miner 1 to miner 2, megaplex 1 to megaplex 2 but there is no way to upgrade complex 1 to complex 2 ! It simply does not show up in upgrade window. Thus if I already build complex 1, I stuck with it and must scrap it. Same happened to radioactive extraction buildings. I suspect there is a mix-up in family numbers of complex and megaplex.

[PvK]

Thanks Oleg. I thought I'd tested that, but ah well. The thing is they are all in the same family, so the intention was that they would upgrade to the biggest and brightest. It seems important to be able to upgrade from complex to megacomplex without scrapping. For some reason, it seems that it upgrades only to the first facility found with the highest roman numeral, so that's Facility II, not Megacomplex II. Ooops. So I either need to change the numerals, or reverse the fac family order. I may do one way for 2.4.3 (to preserve games in progress) and the other for 3.0 (since it will be easier to understand).

PvK

[PvK]

Oh, and BTW, a tip - megacomplexes don't really obsolete complexes, because complexes retain a much faster build time and a faster return on investment, to a serious degree. Especially once I fix the %$#@&* upgrade path, it can make sense to build complexes before investing in megacomplexes.

PvK