Greetings,

I'm fading fast, but I'm reasonably confident that the convoys you'll find on the test server are working as intended. The only problem I know of is that the escorts don't do much in the way of protecting the traders, though they will fight you if provoked directly. Anything else you see wrong, you can feel free to post here with as much detail as you can.

And now I'm off to bed:)

I don't want to disturb your sleep but, I went to the test server a few minutes ago and I could not find any conovys. If there were convoys I thought I would see them near stations and/or wormholes.I looked in Sedina, Dau, and Itan and had no luck finding any.

Ssshhhh! Let him sleep.
We'll hit him with this when he's bleary-eyed in the morning, that's much more fun to gauge their reactions then...

P.S. Sarahanne I'm gonna need your help with something soon(tm)

They seemed to be on a timer when a few of us went over there. It was a blast. Cant wait to see them on production :-) Course the escorts only shot at us when we shot them or bumped into them.

the whole point of the escorts is to prevent the transports from being attacked in the first place, this sounds like they are simply mindless ships, what's taken so long to get that much implemented?? :/

john they rewrote their ai rule combobulator from scratch, havent u been paying attention to the forums?

To say that they are mindless ships is a gross exaggeration. Perhaps actually looking at them would be informative. At the moment there is an issue with reliably triggering a particular behavior. AI is extremely difficult to code and many expensive games from large software houses suffer for it. Guild is determined to make a worthy bot AI - which takes time. Momerath has stated that it is a problem and intends to fix it when he isn't psychotic from sleep deprivation.

Hmm, the loop I started was meant to provide a reasonably steady stream of convoys, but I forgot that I shortened how long it takes them to get through a non-running sector, so it fluctuated between around 15 to 150 convoys every hour instead of staying above 100 as I intended. I'll adjust that now.

Can anyone report any unwanted behavior besides the escorts not defending the traders? Did anyone come across any bots that weren't going anywhere? Someone recently reported seeing a group warp through a wormhole and then back the other way; did anyone see that? How about station guards and convoys fighting?

12:36: I found a bug, fixed it and restarted the test server, sorry to anyone who was on to help test. Convoys will be back in a minute.

gonna test

@ananzi
Yes, I have been watching…and watching…and watching…and well you get the point.

@FM
I fully understand that AI's are extremely difficult to program.

I accompanied 4 different convoys at various stages of their routes ( Station Departure & Group Formation / WH & Sector jumps / Arrival & Docking ) and each appeared to proceed normally. Other than no defense by the cargo carriers or escorts when attacked ( even in ion storms against bots ) all aspects of the route went well.

At one point there were 4 diffent convoys in the Sedina/Latos WH which proved quite interesting with that number of objects in one sector.

Keep up the good work & thanks.

http://roguelazer.com/vimages/Roguelazer/totally_awesome_convoy.jpeg

Looks nice right now. Except for a1k0n forgot that 0=true in LUA.

vary cool

Escorts are defending now. Come load down the test server, so we're more confident about releasing!

Holy cow, those bots are fun!... LOL!

I have been testing hive stuff and a new logging mechanism I wrote, so I apologize to anyone who came looking for convoys in the last few hours. I'm still at it; will let you know when you can kill convoys again.

Well, I just popped on, and wow, thats gunna be some fun! Just 1 thing though.

Is the extra memory/cpu usage caused by the lameness of the test server? Because I have seen a hell of a lot more than 30 bots in a sector before, and not had the issues that test server causes. (my vendetta client got ground to a halt, process manager showed me 100% cpu usage, and a VM size of over 1 gig oO, usually it idles at around 50% CPU, and 228mb VM)

Yeah, sectors are "frozen" when I jumped into them last night, but I am told that THAT particular problem is just a server issue that will not appear on the REAL production server. It was kinda funny to blast away at a behemoth while it sat still...

I shot up behemoths and their escorts came at me. Sometimes their escorts brought friends... (with Flares!)

The Behemoths themselves STILL did not attack, I would suggest swarms or mines.

They seemed to dock ok, but a few times it appeared as if both the 'moths and their escorts would get hung up on a station "corner", like the SF bots and Station Guard bots sometimes do.

But it was nice to watch the behemoths fly like a school of fish, and queue up in an orderly fashion in order to dock with stations. Wonderful.

Now just make them respond to your hails. Make the escorts somewhat mean, like "Move along pilot, nothing to see here." or "Get outta our way."

I only have one issue with the Voys as they are right now, and it is something I brought up on the test server...

I still think that the levels, the amount of Voys that are running right now are way too much. Way to much if it is the same all over the galaxy. Inc said that this is what he wants, a bustling galaxy, and I agree, but with a few slight differences...

In nation sapce, I agree that the WH's would be bustling with activity, tons of little convoys going all over the place, with some larger ones mixed in. Just how it is now.

But in greyspace, I think it would be more realistic to have less convoys, in fact, still have stretches of no activity. But when the Voys do go out, they go out huge. It would seem to me that a greyspace corp would send out infrequent, huge, heavily guarded convoys. Instead of lots of small easily picked off convoys.

Other than that, excellent excellent work. The Voys and their escorts, IMO, acted flawlessly... It was not an easy task to take out more than one ship if you were flying solo....

The size, frequency, firepower, ship-types and cargo of convoys are going to be determined by the economic system we have planned. It isn't time-effective to tweak these settings that much when we don't plan to use the random-convoy-starting code Much Longer(tm).

For those interested... I stayed up all night hacking together a logging system. It was expedient because the printing of all the debug info was the biggest cpu consumer in our tests last night. It would have been enough in the short term to be able to turn the messages on or off. It would have been nice to have a verbosity setting in each log message, and print only those below a given level. It would have been cool to also have tags assigned to log messages and the ability to view only messages matching one of a set of tags along with verbosity filtering. Some icing on the cake might be an implicit 'all tag, so you can print log messages regardless of their tags (really just adding the functionality of a verbosity-only system back in).

Well, I did all that, but I also added a value constraint mechanism. It allows us to turn on messages with tags and verbosity, and then to filter out any message that doesnt contain one of the value constraints. So now we can watch the progress of just one bot or convoy without searching through the output of all of them. Which will allow us to debug much more easily on the production server where we don't want to kill all the bots just to get readable logs. Or in cases like last night, when we're asking you to test and there need to be lots of bots to test with, but we want to be able to examine situations that you report.

Well enough horn-tooting:)

I named it XENOLOGER :)

XENOLOGER Enables Natural Observation of Logs; Omitting Garbage, Excess and Redundancy