Well there was one last night, same on I reported first. If anyone's bored, try to find out how to make Mining beams stick on the game field. It probably came from a bot. Anyway, killing an Orun while mining with 4 rails (instakill) doesn't do it.

Errr, if it's fixed, delete this.

I noticed it too. If anyone can make it reliably happen, please post because I would like to fix this bug.

I've seen this sort of thing happen several times, but not yet in VO- this sounds like a more general type of problem, but thankfully a harmless one. Every now and then, people will lose a packet and whatever checks are done just happen to miss the missing packet. Since most games keep updating the client<>server states, the error is usually corrected in mere fractions of a second, except for a few rare cases, most of which involve "On/Off" low priority visual effects (like a mining beam's activation/deactivation).

When the client ends up missing the notification that the effect has been ended, all sorts of odd, yet harmless, things can happen. When this rare and completely random situation occurs, you're left with a visual effect that's 'stuck' in place in most instances. From what my memory can drudge up, I recall occasional 'stuck' Laser Rifle & Targeting Laser shots in Starsiege Tribes, and Shield Inversion & Recharge Shields effects getting similiarly 'stuck' on from Earth & Beyond.

This is actually fairly simple to fix- just have the server tell the client to turn off the visual effect twice. The odds of both commands getting eaten by the net is so low that it can be reasonably expected to never happen in a timeframe relevent to the game. Of course, the question then becomes, "Is this glitch so severe that it's worth the additional overhead?" In general, the answer is no. A purely client-side implementation would be to run a check every second or so on all active visual effects, to see if any are unassociated with a proper creator. Sadly, this is a preformance hit, and again has to be weighed against the problem it's trying to solve.

Of course, without any method of reliably re-creating the problem, figuring out exactly how to fix it will prove difficult, at best. All I can say is that I've seen similar things across multiple games, on multiple OSes (well, different Win versions...), using several different hardware setups, all appearently completely at random, and nothing that a map change or sector hop wouldn't fix.

silent [knew|knows] of a way to abuse something rather like this, from the first release which featured mining. Is that bug fixed?

I think so.