Forums » Bugs

Three things that really piss me off....

Mar 30, 2004 a1k0n link
Re: invulnerability timer.
What the hell? The wormhole no-fire timer is 12.5 seconds and the invulnerability timer is 8. No idea why. I'll fix that for the next restart. It is annoying, but I never bothered to look.

Re: "wing bug"
The so-called wing bug is just a result of goofyass collision damage code. When you clip your wing, you not only take damage for the forward velocity of the wingtip impact, but also for the torque resulting on the ship. Damage is nonlinear. In fact, it's cubic. I have no idea why, but I can't "fix the wing bug" without significantly affecting damage in general. Of course it should be done, but it'll require more game balancing, ensuring you can't go through objects, etc.

The various engine control systems (mouselook, arcade mode) always make this worse, too. The instant you hit something with your wing which knocks you the wrong way, it tries as hard as it can to correct, even though that will result in a repeated collision, and eventually to fast oscillation and destruction.

This has all been explained before, and you might rightfully ask what we expect to do about it, and the answer is we'll tweak collision and collision damage code later. It's not a focal point of development right now and it's going to require a lot of tedious tweaking work.

Re: logging off to avoid combat.
The proper solution to users logging out in space, IMO, is for the server to transparently hand off the player's ship to an AI "autopilot" whose mission is to run to the closest station and then log off properly. It won't be terribly smart, so it's in your best interest to warp out yourself, but players aren't inconvenienced by being screwed if they need to leave. This is what is specified in our design.

I don't think this will be very hard to implement after the AI framework I'm working on now is done, since bots will be capable of doing the same thing (warping, docking, and logging out, none of which they do in 3.3). I'm not making any promises of when this will be delivered to the test, though.
Mar 30, 2004 Forum Moderator link
[moved to Bugs]

While the issues mentioned are annoying, they aren't catastrophic. It doesn't make sense for the devs to go in and fix a module that will probably be entirely reworked soon. It just isn't efficient at a time when they need to maximize their time and funding. These things will be fixed when it makes the most sense to do so. Please be patient.
Mar 30, 2004 alienb1212 link
1: The wingbug. What the hell? This has been here since I started, (3.2.2) and has only been mildly improved. Wtf?
2: Can't fire exiting warp, but can be hit. What the heck.
3: Warping off while in the middle of a fight. Most other games that allow this, such as Freelancer for example, will earn you a ban from their servers if you do this. That's a little extreme here, but can you make it so you can only log off in station or something? or have a much longer wait to logoff than ten seconds.

Now don't get me wrong, I love vendetta, and appreciate all the work John and his crew have done. 'tis just a rant....
Mar 30, 2004 [Draco] link
1. Love the Wingbug...always fun to whatch people get mad becuase of it.
2. Yeah thatt bugs me a bit, but does not happen a lot.
3. No Comments :P

- Aggree with alienb, john and his crew have been doing a great job
Mar 30, 2004 roguelazer link
1. Annoying, aye. I've turned it into an art, thouhg. I can now wingbug a Vulture, Centurion or Centaur. But the Cenaur massestoo much to do anything interesting.
2. Also annoying, but requires specific circumstances.
3. Annoying, but your solution is worse. What about when sectors are 50000m across with one station and you're exploring the far end? Do you need to come in from your explorations before you logoff? If you're an hour away from station, youshouldn't be penalized.
Mar 30, 2004 randomblast link
about 3 - i sometimes play on my dads box when he's out, but when he gets back he doesn't want to find me playing games. 10 seconds is just about time to log off and open up a serious discussion on the side-effects of mushrooms, or the ethics of M$ business practices, but if it was say, 30 seconds, i would have to explain away the "extensive benchmarking of core graphical functions to determine the cost-effectiveness of optimization of the DirectDraw API for faster rendering of embedded Excel pie charts in HTML documents"
Besides the fact that i don't think he'll bite, it won't work every time, and my imagination isn't active enough to think of a new reason every time...
Mar 30, 2004 Mace link
you could make the logging off time longer for eg. 25 seconds? This will mean you will have to be far from bots and players, this also means that the warping time is about 7 seconds for me, so I have 25-7=18secs. 18secs is enough to kill anything (apart from frig)

The devs prob. have a lot on their minds atm anyway....
Mar 30, 2004 SirCamps link
LOL! Randomblast!

1. Wing bug. Very, very annoying. I have issuing a 100% Valkyrie traveling at 1 m/s down to a perfected art in sector 10 and 7.

2. My pet peeve. See electric's post in the bug forum--it's a simple fix.

3. Ah, the topic of perpetual debate--where, how, and what penalties should someone receive for logging off (I'm assuming you meant log off, not warping while fighting).

I would be in favor of extending the /logoff time to 15 seconds, as it allows a pursuing fighter time to kill the person (fixes exploiting), but also isn't terribly annoying to the person wanting to quit the game. If you are "innocent" (picking no fights), you could just apple-q the game without fear of someone killing you. I do this more often than using /logoff.
Mar 30, 2004 electric27 link
I thought command-q left you drifting for quite some time...

/me is confuzzled
Mar 30, 2004 Eldrad link
oooo... I like the solution to logging off.
Mar 30, 2004 Magus link
I like it too. Can we get an AI autopilot that gets us from sector to sector too? Buzz a proximity alarm if anyone targets us so we can get control back at the stroke of a key. It would make trading so much less boring if we could actually chat while we do it.
Mar 30, 2004 a1k0n link
I was afraid someone would ask for that.
Mar 30, 2004 raybondo link
SirCamps, if you can duplicate the wing bug exactly 100% of the time, can you record your actions for me and send me the resulting file? Email me and I will explain how to do it.
Mar 30, 2004 Arolte link
I'm guessing the collision detection will be reworked eventually. Even if not we probably won't see the Vulture model as it is in game right now. Chances are we'll see completely remodeled ships for the nonspecials. And since the wing bug is associated with the way the wings are modeled, say bye bye to wing bug!
Mar 30, 2004 Eldrad link
/me slaps Magus. Bad magus, use +turbo and be happy or write yourself a program to do it.
Mar 30, 2004 SirCamps link
ray, I don't have your email, but mine is in my account info....
Mar 30, 2004 The Kid link
Well I kinda like the wingbug, if you collide with a fighter with weaker portion of the ship, why shouldn't the ship blow up? ;)
The invul should be 1 or 2 seconds shorter than the no-fire, just so you can't be invul and fire right when it wears off. 4.5 seconds is a bit long though.
If you really need to log off and you can't wait 20 or so seconds, you can always force quit, and probably earn a death but anyway, losing a ship can't be that catastrophic.
Mar 30, 2004 SirCamps link
Recordings sent in Ray. They went off without a hitch, except for some brief player interruptions *glowers at Cybernet*. The files are a couple seconds long each.