2.1 Discussion on AI weapon spam "rate of fire" bug

FX2K

FX2K
Mark Allen said:
Given the speculation about what might be causing this bug, and what it means for the game - I thought I'd clarify a few things on the technical side :). Sadly it wasn't as simple a change as an un-initialised or out of range value, my head would be a lot less hurty this week if it had been!<snippety snip>
-Mark
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Nice read.
At least it's a short week... presuming you had the bank holiday Monday off ;)
 

Ximrats

Ximrats
Mark Allen said:
or my favourite absurd case of a Huge Plasma Accelerator firing every frame because it thought it was a beam laser... Ouch.
-Mark
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Can...can I have one of these? Pretty please? I will donate all the pizza you could ever need over the course of a whole lifetime? :D
 

millstonebarn

millstonebarn
Thanks for the explanation Mark. It's a brilliant insight into your world. I've loved seeing these extraordinary weapons, but glad I have never been on the end of one! You know you (and all of Frontier) have the support of the E: D community ... even though (and perhaps because) some express their passion in interesting ways in these forums. Looking forward to 2.2, 2.3 ... 3.3 ... and 10.x releases.
 

PavelKCZ

PavelKCZ
BTW, there is one thing that comes to my mind, regarding the networking code.

In the future, when we will encouter and discuss some similar bugs, we should also say if the bug was observed in Solo, Group or Open. I really would like to know, if this bug was isolated to Open/Group, because I never encountered it and I was playing only in Solo all time. Even during couple of hours in Beta.
 
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Cmdr Eagleboy

Cmdr Eagleboy
Mark Allen said:
In my testing I've seen cases of railguns firing like slugshots, cannons firing as fast as multicannons, or my favourite absurd case of a Huge Plasma Accelerator firing every frame because it thought it was a beam laser... Ouch.
-Mark
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So you did develop Death Star ray - and you didn't tell us. Shame on you! :D

Lot of meaty stuff Mark, thank you for sharing.
 

yodajedifishmaster

yodajedifishmaster
i really am going to hate myself for this... but seeing the bug i hope its given them some ideas for the thargoids weapons...

actually thats assuming we find them hostile. for all we know, they are hidden because they are holding back a far greater threat and in the process defending us...
 

wstephenson

wstephenson
Thanks for the post mortem, Mark. So much more useful than 'the NPCs borrowed some weapons from Gradius!'.

I think Elite may have played a role in some of our career choices. It would be great if you could, when something interesting like this comes up, share the gory details again - it might influence some ED commanders to go into programming too.
 

Genar-Hofoen

Genar-Hofoen
Mark Allen said:
nDg0MBN.gif
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Awesome write-up Mark.

I know all too well about bugs - but that's pretty impressive :)

Regards
 

Javert

Volunteer Moderator
Javert
@MArk,

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Even for those of us who've only done a tiny bit of amateur programming in the past it's very interesting to get these kind of insights into how you track down and isolate those bugs (hint hint community managers!).

I'm sure it's also very nice for all those who posted videos over the weekend to be vindicated that they were not going crazy.

Edit: One other question - did this issue creep in at the last minute changes before go live or did we beta testers fail in our duty to detect this during the beta?
 
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Javert

Volunteer Moderator
Javert
PavelKCZ said:
BTW, there is one thing that comes to my mind, regarding the networking code.

In the future, when we will encouter and discuss some similar bugs, we should also say if the bug was observed in Solo, Group or Open. I really would like to know, if this bug was isolated to Open/Group, because I never encountered it and I was playing only in Solo all time. Even during couple of hours in Beta.
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Well if you read Mark's explanation in detail, he outlined that the bug was happening with a combination of events that included transfer of control of the NPC from one instance to another - that only happens in Open / group modes, so if you were playing in solo you would not see it. I believe it would also only happen when there are other players in the same instance, and the player whose machine is controlling that instance leaves - that means that the whole instance needs to be passed off to another machine. It's at this point that things went wrong if I understood correctly.

This would also explain why some people were saying nothing was wrong and everything was fine.

It's not 100% clear why nobody was reporting this in beta though - possibly it crept in at the last minute, or possibly the patterns of what players were doing in beta didn't trigger this. I would be interested to know that as well.
 

Faybs

Faybs
Great explanation, thanks! Does that mean that a good workaround, until the bugfix drops in a couple of days, is to stick to solo?
 

Sysmon

Sysmon
Javert said:
It's not 100% clear why nobody was reporting this in beta though - possibly it crept in at the last minute, or possibly the patterns of what players were doing in beta didn't trigger this. I would be interested to know that as well.
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Yes it IS odd. We did a lot of combat in the beta, a lot of mission testing. I'm almost always in Open too. And while it was marvelous and sometimes rather deadly to meet modded NPCs, I don't recall them cheating. In fact, I got a bit bored in a modded clipper and spent most of the beta in an Eagle and eventually a Viper Mk IV. The NPCs were challenging and there was always those few tentative seconds when you didn't quite know what you were facing, whether it was a run-like-hell or stay-and-fight type encounter.

But the NPCs didn't cheat. Noticeably.

:D S
 
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