Forums » General

Test the Escort and Pirate Missions!

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Dec 19, 2005 momerath42 link
Greetings,

There are known problems, but I have some logging in place that will make some player testing while I sleep quite useful when I wake up.

The escort mission *should* be pretty much working as it will in this next release except for requirement/reward tweaking.

The pirate mission is still awaiting some functionality before you'll be able to finish it successfuly, but it is ready for some testing. The missions are now spawned only for convoys passing through the corvus station's system. NPC pirates are created which will follow a player taking the mission, but don't quite manage to find the convoy on their own yet.

This isn't a release candidate test... just something that could help determine what needs doing when I wake up. I'm not sure it won't crash right after I lay down, so I apologize in advance if you can't find any missions.
Dec 19, 2005 GOBBLES! link
Okay i found a mission in SOL II M-4, it worked fine, except i don't think i got any reward. I docked at the dest. station within the 10 min. but i didn't get any confirmation that the money and or the exp was transfered. tried several times... tried buying stuff to see if it triggered anything to no awail(hmm how to spell that..?).

Also, I never saw the ship exit the station, which was quite annoying.. and we nearly never exited the same locations of the sectors, so it didn't really feel like i was escorting anyone.

Maybe slow down the ship so that you actually can get close to it before it leaves the sector...

I was in a normal vulture by the way...

EDIT: tried logging out and back in, then the mission tap was red and it said i got the cash, respect and the xp, i checked and it was recieved...!
Dec 19, 2005 GOBBLES! link
Also a weird thing -in my search to find another escort mission. I was just about to jump through a wormhole when i noticed a message "The escort didn't make it" for no reason.... there where a few npc's jumping at the time...
Dec 19, 2005 Ion link
When I ran the mission you spawned for me yesterday, I recieved no reward, just like Gobbles. But yer probably aware of that.

However, another piece of feedback I'd like to contribute with: it was rather difficult to know which green dots on the radar that represented my ships, and equally difficult to know which actual ships where my wards, and which to follow, until we jumped into systems where we were alone. ANd on production, with dozens of other trade caravans, this will be incredibly and refreshingly confusing. Perhaps the dots could be group coloured (yellow, right?) instead of normal green?
Dec 19, 2005 Renegade xxRIPxx link
can't be yellow since thats the collor for incomming missiles.

you prolly mean white. Maybe the escortmission could create you as part of the excort group?
Dec 19, 2005 Ion link
Yah, white. Sorry.
Dec 19, 2005 yodaofborg link
Tested one earlier, seemed to go OK, except for the fact I couldnt dock with the destination station due to being hated :)
Dec 19, 2005 momerath42 link
Thanks to those who tested the missions. I got email from others too. Special thanks to StarFreeze who has done as much testing in the last few days as everyone else combined!

There may or may not still be a bug causing posted missions to not show up in the station menu sometimes. Also the escort mission isn't available in every station. It is only available in a starting station for a few minutes before each scheduled convoy launch, but there is one convoy launching from *somewhere* every minute.

The pirate mission is obviously only available in Corvus space and is called "Aquisition". One or more pirate NPCs are spawned, which follow the last player to take the mission (will be the one with the best rep with the mission faction soon). These NPCs aren't properly aggressive toward the convoy yet, though, and will actually attack *you* sometimes. :)

A lot of the problems people encountered will be solved when we make it possible to add you to a group with the NPCs. I'm not sure when that will be; it may have to wait for the new interface.
Dec 19, 2005 CrazySpence link
i have never managed to run across an escort mission since I caused that station freezing bug when i logged off with a mission running a weekish ago, I did see the pirate mission in a corvus station though
Dec 19, 2005 momerath42 link
Well, CrazySpence, for a lot of the last couple weeks, the missions haven't been available, and all yesterday there was a bug causing almost none of them to show up. Also, as I said, there may still be *other* bugs causing them not to show up in some cases.

I'm thinking about ways of making escort missions more likely wherever players are, but I'm not sure yet if there is a way to do this that doesn't cause problems on its own or provide abuse potential.
Dec 19, 2005 Celkan link
hehe. lemme upload something you guys might find amusing...

Behold! Two simultaneously active missions!

Dec 19, 2005 momerath42 link
Very nice Celkan:) Any idea how you did that?
Dec 19, 2005 Celkan link
I'm guessing that it was some bug related to the Escort missions that night that a bunch of us were helping you with them.

I think the mission "ended" but didn't remove itself from the active list, and someone (Jan, perhaps) took a botting mission, resulting in two "active" missions.

I thought it was amusing, considering how everyone's asking for exactly what's shown on the screen, so I did a /dump and saved it ^^
Dec 19, 2005 momerath42 link
The primary thing keeping us from allowing concurrent missions is the interface, so, I wouldn't hold my breath or anything, but...
Dec 19, 2005 tumblemonster link
While you're making changes to make it possible to add bots and players to groups, is it possible to raise the maximum number of group members? It'd be nice to get larger groups sometimes.
Dec 19, 2005 Celkan link
I could see the group size at roughly 12 or 13 before we start to have space problems on the current HUD, as-is.

16 would be nice, though I would really like to see groups not have a set size limit--perhaps make the group list layout something like this:

Name 100%
Name2 57%
Name3 89%
etc. etc.

rather than

Name
----------
Name2
-------
Name3
---------
etc. etc.

With the first one (a new version) one could fit a large number of players into a group and not need to deal with running out of space because of the pesky health bars. Gimme numbers any day!
Dec 20, 2005 CrazySpence link
Have a group list on the side that shows the players in order to their proximity to you and! have a button that pops up a full group list similar to the sector list. this way you can have an entire fleet grouped with no limit!
Dec 21, 2005 leapfrog link
Totally fun... but there was the locked-in Adv Combat mission (where did *that* come from - the backup/restore, prolly)... Thanks for the fun, folks... you know who you are. :)
Dec 21, 2005 Doukutsu link
Ahg. I've been gone. Sorry I couldn't help with the testing. I'll get one tomorrow, though. Its looking good so far!
Dec 21, 2005 greengeek link
Escort missions are fun, though the convoys sometimes having trouble making up their minds about how fast they can go. Sometimes I see them all barreling along at full turbo so that the transports all outrun their escorts to their destination, other times they all fly at maxiumum cruising speed with little bursts of turbo so that they stay properly grouped up.

It'd be nice to have some way to issue commands to the convoy you are protecting to tell them to stay closer together, pick a different route, or break off and run like hell while you hold off any attackers.