6535 feedback

[yandonman]

Played several games on Manical AI with MatGB's "50% armour rounding up" strat with Organics and no shields. I agree that it is very effective. (OP even)

The AI let's me pick off ships. It will often set a fleet of ships that is inferior to one of my fleets within 1 starlane jump. I take advantage of that every time I see it and it allows me to cull the AIs ship count. (the AI should not let me do this so easily)

The AI seems much weaker when it doesn't have vision, so I've started hunting AI scouts as well.

I noticed the AI fielding Active Scanner scouts, which was a nice touch.

I noticed that the AI prioritized trying to blockade my only Solar Orbital Generator.


I'd like to suggest that during planet bombardment, the planet's PP, RP and infrastructure be used as it's hitpoints and that bombing the planet will set all of those to zero.

[Geoff the Medio]

I'd like to suggest that during planet bombardment, the planet's PP, RP and infrastructure be used as it's hitpoints and that bombing the planet will set all of those to zero.

I think there has been suggestions to have bombardment be distinct from attacking a planet's shields in order to enable invasion. There is a semi-implemented system now, where selecting ship(s) with > 0 total weapon damage in a system with an enemy planet (native or other empire), causes a bombard button to appear on the planet panel on the sidepanel, which can be clicked to order the bombardment. That bombardment can then be checked for with the OrderedBombardedBy condition, and used as part of the common effects system to cause effects to act on the bombarded planet. It's incomplete and a bit buggy now, though. The point of this being manually ordered vs. automatically happening when a ship is in system is that negative consequences of bombardment can be implemented, which would need player authorization to make usable... so you can decide whether to invade or bombard or use some other method to capture or damage a planet, given their various costs and consequences and benefits.

[shawndream]

Unrelated to the gameplay stuff above:
- third entry in Encyclopedia Index is ERROR:ENC_GRAPH
- right clicking an item in the production queue gives ERROR: DELETE_QUEUE_ITEM

[MatGB]

Shawn, look slike your en.txt isn't up to date, I got that a few times while learning to use SVN, they work fine for me.

[shawndream]

Ah, I had applied the windows 6535 binary on top of my 4.3 release. I'll grab the full 6535 and do a diff.

Possibly related? I've got an interesting bug in this savefile (unless it's a symptom of another missing file).

If I click on a combat log in my sitrep, the pedia button just toggles it off and on instead of opening the pedia. (Fixes itself if I visit the research tab).

Also I noticed that expanding the window does not reset the position of the star bar on the right... it keeps opening at the location of the old window edge. Likewise shrinking the window causes the starbar to open at the position of the old window edge, even if it was never opened when the window was that size.

I'll let you know if the full 6535 fixes any of these. --

Full 6535 only fixed the pedia error when I ranamed the old folder and put 6535 at that file position... guess it uses hardcoded file references.

Winmerge finds a ton of files different, not just text files, but AI python scripts and some images, Note to self, no substitute for the full installer.

I also noticed the sitrep's combat log opening causes the Pedia Button to glow and going up shows the full pedia in that window. Probably combat log was just slapped in quickly using the Pedia code and hasn't been cleanly separated yet... Unless the combat logs are supposed to become part of the pedia... like the monsters you've seen.

Anyway, I think I've found a showstopper bug with this savegame. My freeorionca kept crashing semi-randomly, but faster each time I redid my turns (pulling from autosave after the crash). I have a saved game that reliably crashes when you just hit turn twice... but the forum doesn't seem to let upload it with any extension.

[Geoff the Medio]

I also noticed the sitrep's combat log opening causes the Pedia Button to glow and going up shows the full pedia in that window. Probably combat log was just slapped in quickly using the Pedia code and hasn't been cleanly separated yet.

I don't have any plans to add a separate window for combat logs. The pedia window works well enough.

[MatGB]

Winmerge finds a ton of files different, not just text files, but AI python scripts and some images, Note to self, no substitute for the full installer.

There's been 250+ commits since the 4.3 release, including a LOT of work on the AI tweaking Dilvish has been doing, plus new weapon abilities, and similar differentiating species, artwork, etc. It's going to be a big changelog methinks.

Anyway, I think I've found a showstopper bug with this savegame. My freeorionca kept crashing semi-randomly, but faster each time I redid my turns (pulling from autosave after the crash). I have a saved game that reliably crashes when you just hit turn twice... but the forum doesn't seem to let upload it with any extension.

Zip it, then it can be uploaded as long as it's not too big.

[Geoff the Medio]

I have a saved game that reliably crashes when you just hit turn twice... but the forum doesn't seem to let upload it with any extension.

Working as intended. Zip it first, to save bandwidth and server space.

[yandonman]

More random feedback

In order to save screen real estate:

• Make the fleet window "collapsible" - i.e. have the ability to hide the ship panel portion of the fleet panel. A little button next to the X (close) button would do nicely.
• Give the SitRep window the ability to be always on top. A little sticky pin button next to the X (close) button would do nicely. (the bottom of the planet panel is often empty space, but the sitrep can get hidden behind it sometimes)

AI

• I watched the AI take a fleet of 50 ships with weapons=6 attack a Drone Factory, which had shields=7. It sat there attacking and losing ships for multiple turn while obviously not doing any damage to the Drone Factory

Low starlane/low planet

• Ok, yes. Now fuel is important. More important than speed.
• Outposts are now important. (as supply line extenders, as oppose to just gas-giant generators.)
• I enjoyed this setup. I wouldn't mind seeing a very low setting for both starlanes and planets.

[shawndream]

Here's the youngest save I could find from that game.

It crashes reliably if I hit turn 3 times and nothing else. Interestingly, by actually playing you can get it to go much further before crashing, although it still tends to crash regularly.

I looked at the save game format and see it has blobs for AI missions... since I started the game with vanilla 4.3 in the default install position (which is apparently used for the server regardless of which exe you start) which has very different AI, I suspect it got confused in the switching back and forth.

It would be useful to improve the graceful handling of confusion if nothing else... a confused AI should forget it's old goals and re-evaluate (maybe with a warning popup for now), not crash... but I'm just guessing AI is the issue.

I'm going to say farewell to the delicious snowflake nest I found and start a fresh game REALLY using the full 6535.

[Vezzra]

Ah, I had applied the windows 6535 binary on top of my 4.3 release. I'll grab the full 6535 and do a diff. [...] Note to self, no substitute for the full installer.

Yup. The binary-only package is not intended to just drop into an older installation (although, if the difference isn't too great that can work sometimes), but for folks that keep a up-to-date working copy (via SVN), but can't compile FO themselves because their computer isn't up to the task (building FO is quite demanding, crashes on older systems). These people already have all the content files, graphics, sound etc., and only need current binaries. So, to save them the need to download the full installer (which is ~180MB) I provide the binary-only package (which is just a few MB).

[Dilvish]

It would be useful to improve the graceful handling of confusion if nothing else... a confused AI should forget it's old goals and re-evaluate (maybe with a warning popup for now), not crash... but I'm just guessing AI is the issue.

I think the AI already does recover fine from incompatibility; I have some features implemented in the deserialization process so that even if new class attributes have been added to the AIstate since the save it can provide default values for just those new attributes and still keep the old info. If the incompatibilities go farther than what I have covered, it should just start over with a blank AIstate and reevaluate from scratch. You can always check the AI log files for errors; if the AI ever causes the game to crash please post about it.