Self replication

Guard · #1 April 6th, 2007, 09:02 PM

I am working on a mod involving an alien race of giant bacteria. Each ship is fighter sized and contains a fighter bay which produces the same ship. After a lot of tweaking i sorted the speeds on the fighter bay so that I get a nice exponential effect with their reproduction; 1,2,4,8,16 etc, and they are weak enough that a good ship can take out large numbers.

However, in the simulator or more rarely in the real game, after a battle is completed and zooms out and if the bacteria have survived, the game crashes. This doesn't always happen; if the bacteria are all destroyed, or if the player retreats before many have reproduced, the game runs as normal.

The problem can not be that there are too many ships as production eventually stops when they reach their limit, is there some other reason why this would not work? Thanks

Fingers · #2 April 8th, 2007, 07:36 PM

Can you attach a version of the mod (zipped) or upload it to a website so I can take a look at it?

There's a chance this could be related to the crash some people have experienced with the Ravian encounter, so if it's reproducible it may help me find the root cause.

Guard · #3 April 9th, 2007, 11:27 AM

Ok, I've attached it here. I don't think the fact that it is self replication is actually significant as I have now created two ideantical ships with different names; one of which starts and then produces the other, but the bug continues as before.

There are a few more things I've come across in the rest of the mod, I don't know if anyone has seen any of them before but I can't find them on the forums;
1) I have a trader race who starts of neutral and is set to friend by a quest which can occur before he is encountered. In this case, when summoned, the unknown radar graphic appears on the world map and trade starts. When the planned is then "viewed" the radar come up. When "engage" is selected, no message opens, the radar on the world map vanishes and the trader ship is seen to arrive from the planet he was on before again, not just be uncovered.
2) The same trader has only 4 items in his inventory, instead of 10.
3) One quest adds two years to the mission time limit using ADDT. However, if you return to Hope with more time left than you set out with, your score is increased to several million. Interestingly, my ship appeared at the second bottom rank with a score of 18million.
4) I tried to set up a wish loop; I have on page 8 "WISH -1 9" which works as normal, and then on page 9 is another "WISH -1 9". Supposedly if your first item fails, you can try again and again until you find a succesful item and then it closes. However, page 9 does not show up as being a wish.
5) Not so much a problem but a question. Is it possible to make a quest always occur if and only if another quest occurs? I have two quests that I want together to make a main quest, at the moment they are both set to always.

Thanks again, Guard

Guard · #4 April 9th, 2007, 11:27 AM

Hmm how do you attach zipped mods to a post

Guard · #5 April 9th, 2007, 11:29 AM

Ah found it I think

Guard · #6 April 10th, 2007, 05:36 AM

Oh don't all go downloading that; a) its rubbish, b) I don't have copyright for those pics, they're just fillers till I make my own

Fingers · #7 April 10th, 2007, 08:36 PM

Thanks, I'll take a look at this when I have some free time.

2) could be caused by not having enough items left "unplaced". after the game populates the map and the Klakar hold. Check if this goes away on a smaller map, or if Klakar is removed.

5) is probably not possible, except via the mission quests (each mission can launch one or more quests.. the default game only used this for gameplay messages like game_brass.ini).

edit: my suspicion regarding the crash is that it's got something to do with the launched "fighters" staying in the fleet after the "carrier" is destroyed, which happens more often with the ravian heads (or your self-replicating ships) than it does with Garthan or Urluquai carriers.

Fingers · #8 April 11th, 2007, 08:41 PM

I debugged this last night, and found & fixed the crash problem with the bacteria. We may release a minor update to WW with this and other fixes soon.

Your crash has to do with carrier-launched ships acting as carriers. Unfortunately, this seems to be unrelated to whatever causes the Ravian crashes.

sgqwonkian · #9 October 15th, 2007, 11:40 AM

Are you still working on this?

Of the 5 glitches you mentioned:

1-3) No clue what's causing those.

4) I'm really not sure, but it may be that a page can't lead directly back to itself. Have you tried making page 9 say WISH -1 8? That might work, and should still retain the functionality you were looking for.

5) Pretty certain you can do this with user variables. Have your first quest set to event, the second to always. On the first one, include a user variable via the SVAR command. On the second quest you include a CONDITION that requires a particular setting of that variable in order for anything to happen. Just make sure that something in your mod (either of those two quests, or a late-game entry in the GAME_BRASS etc files) sets it back to the default starting variable (otherwise you could often end up with items in the second quest triggering because you'd met their requirements in a previous game). I have something very similar in a mod I'm working on now, and it seems to work fine.