Hello all,

The new missions are *almost* ready. As far as I know there are no bugs that would get in the way of you completing them successfully and having fun. I'm going to list the bugs I know about, but it would still be helpful if you report it when you encounter them.

I've added a new tool for debugging these missions. If you send the word Bug to the missions computer (caps don't matter), followed (on the same line) by a descriptive phrase, it will make a special log of your mission's state at that time. This should make it much easier for me to diagnose some of the harder-to-reproduce bugs that have been reported.

Things I know are wrong and intend to fix before release:
*Sometimes pirates won't go after the traders in their sector.
*The reward amounts are all wrong
Hmm, I think there was something else, but I don't recall right now.

Things that suck, but probably won't change before release:
*The pirates/escorts don't appear as red (depending on your reputation) when you are taking the complementary mission.
*You aren't automatically grouped with anyone else taking the mission.
*If you are in the capship when a battle ends and it warps away, you will be put back in your home station as though you died.

In the interests of my being able to easily catalog the remaining bugs, can we *please* stay on topic. No suggestions, questions, or anything but testing reports (ie please post that you successfully took some missions). Please be as specific as you can.

Thank you all! Your help has been invaluable!
~Michael

P.S. I'm going to bed now, and I feel quite certain that the Murphy elves will break things as soon as I stop checking channel 100 and this forum. But I'll be available on the test server most of the weekend to facilitate the testing and maybe let you try an alpha mission or two.

I had an itch that I thought would only take a minute to scratch. 4 hours later we have group mining missions. The only thing I know of that's wrong with them is that they get double posted. That and there's no miner-escort mission yet, so they get wasted when the Hive moves in (which they're rigged to do). They're available in Sedina K-13 for those interested. Obviously this one is even more likely to fail utterly as soon as I go to bed. Maybe I should stay up and do the Miner-Escort mission instead ;)

no go to bed...

debugging code is so much easier with a clear and well rested head

Perhaps I wasn't specific enough in the other thread. When the mission gave me +1000 with every faction, the +1000 didn't go away after the mission finished... I'm STILL +1000 with everybody.

I know rogue. That's intentional. Maybe I'll take it out now; it seems to be causing more confusion than good.

Edit: I deleted some posts. I'd really like this thread to be a list of bugs and not a discussion.

Okay, then.

*Convoy escorts still have a strange fascination with staying in ion storms after the convoy has moved on.

*Bots forget who was hostile towards them when they warp between systems. Eg: I'm in Sedina B-8, escorting a convoy. Some Corvus pie-rates attack the convoy, so I shoot at them. When I hit one, he treats me as a target and comes after me. The convoy warps out of Sedina. On the other side of the wormhole, the bot which I had previously engaged no longer sees me as a hostile.

*At the end of the mission, it says something along the lines of "We suffered some losses, but most of the cargo made it through" even if all of the cargo makes it through (ie: only escorts are lost, not traders).

Thanks, rogue.

Escorts will currently have all other behavior overridden if they take enough damage from some other character. In other words, their fight goal gets too high a priority. I'll think about how to fix this.

Targets *should* be persistent between sectors. I'll look into this.

Hmm, are you sure one didn't explode while undocking? Did you use the new bug report feature to save your state at that time?

Thanks for the report roguelazer

Nah, I forgot to bug report. I'll do so if it reoccurs, though.

Um...where's the mission? I can't seem to find any new missions in K-13 or D-14, do I need the new UI?

sedina b8 seems to be broken on the test server i get stuck at the loading screen listening to bots turbo and the message about the transports warping to latos o-12 goes on forever

Sorry guys, I've been away fixing a friends computer. I'll get the test server back in gear.

Well, it's up and running now, but I experienced some very odd behavior with the Escort mission I took. I'm back on the Dev server now, trying to reproduce it. If I can get reasonably confident (again) that the 3 missions are working, I'll also update the test server with my new Guard the Miners mission, which seems to be working quite well for only spending about 4 hours on it so far. I'm hopeful that in a week or two, adding a similarly complex mission will only take 1 hour.

Showing up early (going to the 'hunt' sector before the timer runs out) for the HiveHunt mission throws off the bot death counter and doesn't let you finish the mission. When all the bots are dead, all the ships stay in the 'hunt' sector doing nothing (they do look at you if you get close to them though - cool behavior).

I'm going to try to work on some more bugchecking - I thought it might be nice if you posted a list of known/possible bugs, so if we see them, we can ignore them and test for other bugs, and you could knock known bugs off the list as they are fixed...

Thanks for the report, Doukutsu; that isn't something I had thought to try.

About the list of known bugs:
Indeed, that is meant to be the purpose of this thread. I originally started this thread when I was pretty confident in the code; I listed the bugs I could think of at the time in the first post. But then I went and hacked up the code, adding the Mining mission and some of what I needed for the Miner-guarding mission, which involved changing things the Escort mission depends on.

Anyway, the issue is that the code that is currently on the test server has some new bugs that I didn't notice in my testing after implementing the mining mission. I have further altered the code, since I was unaware of this (the miner-escort mission works pretty well). So, rather than finding and fixing the bugs in the test server code, I am trying to fix all the important bugs in the newest codebase. When it's not *totally* broken, I'll update the test server, and make a list here of all the bugs I know of.

Thanks again for the help, all of you.

Edit:
A new feature I don't think I've mentioned on the forums: in the interests of making missions more readily available, when you warp into a station sector, if another mission hasn't been posted too recently, a new one will be posted. Pirate in Corvus stations, and Escort elsewhere. I'm not sure, but I don't think *all* stations have trade-routes currently, and for those, no mission will be posted (but I have yet to run into such a station myself). I think it's kinda neat the way you have another escort mission waiting for you at your destination (and all destinations are also trade-route origins, I believe).

Sorry everyone... I tried. The newest code is still a little buggier than what's on the test server. But it is buggy in a havent-quite-hooked-everything-back-up-yet kind of what instead of a what-the-(*&*(-that-was-working-a-second-ago sort of way. :) I'm a little overtired... off to sleep.

Status update:
I'm afraid there are still some issues that I'd like to fix before I put the code on the test server. I made some fairly fundamental changes to fix some issues with larger groups of npcs, and I haven't quite fixed all the things that broke. I'll keep you updated.

Testing a bit more::: I took an escort mission (I couldn't find any pirate or hive missions up), which only had two ships - a Behemoth and a vulture (going from Latos to Sedina (xang xi). No ships were destroyed (as in, I didn't miss any other ships - there were just the two, and no npc destroyed messages came), but when the mission completed itself, it stated that some of the ships did not reach their destination. The pirates in Sedina B-8 also did not attack us. This was approx. 12:30 AM MST / 1:30 AM Server time.

Thanks for the report Doukutsu; I'm almost ready to replace the code on the test server. A lot of the bot-accounting code has been improved, so hopefully that bug is gone.