Bug in attacking asteroid

[glubbar]

Hello there,

I was trying Metarinka's maps, and came accross this bug.
I've managed to capture all asteroids but one, and for like 10 minutes, hundreds of dysons were turning around without entering the asteroid at all. In the end I had to end the game, there was no other way.
See attachment for proof.

Also, I noticed smaller asteroids are way harder to capture than bigger ones because dysons turn around their target without hitting a lot. This happens very often and it's frustrating to being able to call back attacking dysons to another asteroids. When they're attacking, there's no way but to wait for them to capture, or die...

Hope to see this improved in future version!
Great game btw!

[crazeh.monkeh]

I think I figured out that bug...

What level was it on? because in one of them he had the asteroid set to static, and for whatever reason that causes a glitch at this point in time.
Alex said he was trying to figure out why it does that, but I'm not sure if he has gotten anywhere with it.

If you really want to fix it, go in the source code for the level and go down to the bottom where he declares the asteroids. If one of them is set to 'static=true' change it to false. If I am thinking about the right level that should fix it. If that isn't the problem let me know which level it is on. I will go in and try to figure it out.

[glubbar]

The level where this bug occurred was the first level in Metarinka's map pack.

As for the other bug, where dysons have trouble attacking very small asteroids  (only troubles, they do attack but have difficulties in finding the entrance or attacking the trees), it mostly occured on the last level of the original levels in Dyson.
But this one bug does happen on every map with small asteroids.

Not sure about the fix you're talking about, but I'll give it a try.
Edit: after checking, that one level had static="false".

[crazeh.monkeh]

yeah, the one that I found wasn't the one with attacking the small asteroids. that's not really a bug, but if you go into the level script there is a variable that you can stick in to change their hover distance. I can't remember what it is at the moment, though...

It should be something like

Code: [Select]

<dir name="HOVERDISTANCE" type="int" value="5" />
Maybe Alex will pop in and correct me on that...
Anyway, if you decrease it they stay closer to the planet, increasing it keeps them farther away.

Alternatively you can change

Code: [Select]

<dir name="ATTACKAGENTDISTANCE" type="int" value="80" /> to have a higher value to increase the range of the attack. That would be my last resort, though. I will try to figure out the Hover distance variable for you.



I will also play through his first level again.

[Alex]

That first one might be "MinimumDesiredAltitude", try reducing that (or adding it to the level in the agents dir if it's not there - just copy out the agents section from default.xml and paste it into the level xml). Also try increasing the agent turn rate. We'll look into a code fix for that, cheers guys. Alternatively raise the minimum asteroid size.

I think (once again) I've fixed the statics bug, but we'll see. Haven't had a chance to test it yet. It's been crazy busy guys, sorry about the lack of replies.

[crazeh.monkeh]

oh cool. I have had a good level idea waiting for that static fix... can't wait!

lol. I didn't even think of changing the asteroid size. Duh.

[glubbar]

Thanks for the heads up Alex!

I will try this tip if I get these problems again.

[mabrev]

Hi,

I got a bug that had the same result (a never ending attack...)

In the level 4 of dyson 1.10 the root of an ennemy tree always followed the wrong way ...
(see attachement)

[cornerghoul]

Same thing happened here - the little "spark" animation never made it to the core so no shoot grew but the game still registered 1/3 trees
I think it happened to me on level 6

[crazeh.monkeh]

Well from looking at Mabrev's screen capture, I can pretty safely say that it is NOT a problem with the asteroid being set to static... That being said I have no idea what it is.

[Alex]

I've rewritten this code now - all these awful problems ought to disappear. Here's a screenshot

[Lord storm]

Hi Alex

Do I need to donwload and re instal the game?? Or can you do a 1.11 versions => we will have just to clic on "the download new version".

Cheers

Lord Storm

[Alex]

I don't think I'm clever enough to do an auto-updater from the game itself. I can provide patches, but it may get complicated quite quickly and I've got a lot on my plate as it is. It shouldn't be too hard to provide a version without the music tracks (the bulk of the download), so that would probably work as they don't change too often.

[wogan]

If the updates are incremental resource files, you can have a WebRequest fetch them and dump them as files. It'd get tricky if you need to replace an entire file (main exe, for instance), especially if you're running it at the time of the update. What would be entirely possible is a seperate updater program, that simply checks the contents of a designated FTP resource, and if any new/updated files are found, downloads them.

Since the main dyson executable won't be active, and the updater itself shouldn't need any updating, it should be a relatively simple download-and-overwrite operation.

[Stromfresser]

back to topic...^^
I read through the whole thread but I couldn't figure out of if this is the same bug that appeared to me:
On the last asteroid to conquer, all the Dysons tried to shoot an non-existent invisible tree 
Resulting in an asteroid impossible to conquer...
It was in lvl5, the roid on the very top of the map.