Greetings all!

--*Please*--
--Read this whole message before posting.--

NOTE!:
If you encounter a bug with a mission, please type 'bug <short description>' into the mission computer (without the quotes). This will cause a snapshot of your mission's state to be saved, along with your description. This helps immensely with understanding exactly what the bug is and reproducing it. If a short description isn't enough to explain what happened, please leave a more detailed one here, and let me know what short description you entered so I know what you're expanding on.

Here is the latest list of fixed and outstanding bugs:
- (the newest info is preceded by '*Edit4:')

First, the rough edges/missing-features. Some of these will be polished before release; some will have to wait on other things.

1) The names of the items that the pirate and mining missions ask for are not the nice readable names you see in your cargo list. It should be fairly obvious what they are referring to, though.

2) You aren't grouped with your mission group. This requires client-side changes, and will have to wait for the new client to stabilize. You can, of course, manually group with other players. Also note that unlike previous group missions, you each take the mission rather than grouping and having one person take it.

3) Enemy mission groups (eg. pirates for escorts), will only be red on your radar if you have a bad rep with them. I imagine we *might* be able to make this work by some kludge in the near future, but it screams for a new faction system and an interface for marking any ship hostile, temporarily or permanently.
*Edit4: We *might* still do something with this before release.

4) If you are in the capship when the battle is won, and it warps away to nowhere, you get sent back to your home station without your ship. We'll probably find some workaround for this, like leaving the capship there until no players are in the sector.
*Edit4: The capship will now remain. It won't warp away at all at the moment, but I'll fix that.

5) The 'mission starting in n minutes' messages will be replaced by a clock, but not until the client is stabilized.

6) Some of the dialog is silly, uninformative or just missing.
*Edit4: This has been improved somewhat- mostly a lot of extra info has been added- there is still work to do with this

7) The rewards are still just what I stuck in there to test. We'll be figuring out good starting values this week.
*Edit4: I haven't gotten to sit down with John and hammer out appropriate rewards, yet, so these are still wrong. However, they should be better than before, and none of the double/triple rewarding should be going on.

8) The miners warp to nowhere after mining for a while (when their hold is full). Eventually, I want them to make trips back and forth between the station and the roid field, and I want one or more guards to be assigned to escort them.
Edit: fixed?
*Edit4: The miners will stay until the end of the mission, and the end is now dictated by when/if the hive retreats.

9) If an escort mission is taken by a player in the first 2 minutes of availability, and a pirate mission in the same system is only taken by NPCs, they may not be able to catch the traders. I might have a fix for this, but I have to think about it more.
-
EDIT: this is now a little more unlikely, but not impossible.
-
Edit2: I now have it set up so that the pirates should get as much time to intercept whether a player takes the pirate mission or not, but it should still be available at least 2 minutes and (if no one takes the corresponding escort mission) as much as 10.

And the bugs that I will definitely fix before we release this:

10) There may or may not be an occasional issue with counting the remaining Hive bots in the HiveHunt missions.
Edit3: fixed?
*Edit4: Fixed, except it may sometimes be off by one (thinking there are 1 more than there are)- this doesnt really hurt the hivehunt or guard missions, though, because they are now conditioned on the Hive's retreat.

11) I don't think the Hive is repairing or defending at present. It should be easy to fix; I haven't looked into it yet.
*Edit4:
The Queens in bastions get repaired now, but I havent managed to have a HiveHunt battle in the Stronghold sector in which any of the bots that would be repairing the Leviathan are left. (** new bug, the bastion and stronghold bots aren't respawning)

12) I'm not sure defending is working in the lower-level AI in the sector code, or at least it's not working very well.
Edit3: indeed it isnt working. Will definitely work on this tomorrow.
*Edit4: this has been fixed (though it actually had nothing to do with the defend action not working)

13) The tenacious mission-menu bug (actually a number of bugs, but I think we're down to one). Also on the sector side, this bug causes missions not to show up for some people some of the time. Logging out and in is a surefire workaround at this point, and I think I have enough info on the cause that Andy should be able to fix it easily.
EDIT: FIXED! Edit2: maybe not :( Edit3:fixed, i think.
*Edit4: Really fixed this time.

14) You sometimes get both success and failure messages for a mission; usually, the failure coming several minutes after the success. This is probably easy to fix, but it takes longer to test than most things, and I'm just too tired right now:)
EDIT: I think this is fixed.
*Edit4: I'm pretty sure this is fixed

15) The NPC miners prefer bouncing off roids to mining them (though they can occasionally be seen doing their job).
*Edit4: they're still pretty bad at it sometimes, though the behemoths were the worst and I took them out.

Edit: New bugs (or rather, bugs that I hadn't listed above)

16) The mining/guard missions don't end except in total failure.
Edit2: fixed? Edit3: not fixed yet
*Edit4: fixed.

17) The number of bots the HiveHunt mission description reports is wrong (usually 0)
Edit3: fixed (except maybe in the first 15 seconds after the mission is posted). It will also now stay up to date after it is posted (in case someone outside the mission starts killing bots).

*Edit4:
One newly noticed bug: The bastion/stronghold bots arent respawning- should be an easy fix- havent looked too hard at it yet- too tired to now.

ZZZZzzzzzz

:( I've just discovered that the end of the escort mission is broken. It doesn't (or at least didn't in my test just now) tell you to come to the destination sector to get paid, but rather skips from 'excellent work' to 'the convoy didn't make it'. Very strange, as I swear it was working fine for the last several hours on my development server. I'm just too tired right now to try to fix it; hopefully nothing more fun-impacting broke along with that.

See you in 7-9 hours.

Well, I'm up. A few people logged on, but I didn't get any bug reports. Hopefully that means that they didn't run into any problems that aren't on the list. I'm going to fix the escort mission ending, and then start on the rest. I'll be working on the test server until it's ready for release, so I'll see you there.

~Michael

Sorry, an important question - with the mission computer bug report, is it ok to list a single bug with several lines? I.E.
bug blah blah blah blah bla
bug h blah blah blah blah

etc.

Well, that would submit multiple bug reports. If you need a long description, I'd prefer if you posted here.

Also- The HiveHunt and Mine/Guard-the-Miners missions are still only available in Sedina K-13.

Good to hear the missions are near Beta/release. It should really liven up Vendetta activity and provide something for new players to do after the marketing push^^ cant wait for 1000 active players online together. ^^

Also its great that were getting like five missions at once ^^, hopefully soon after you can expand the hive hunt missions into nation space.

Thanks for the sentiment Chikira, but let's please try to keep this thread limited to bugs and updates.

I finally fixed the bug I discovered before I went to bed this morning. The escort mission should now end properly, and I'd like reports if it doesn't.

Edit: Moved the continued bug list up with the main list.

Hi all,

I've updated the list in the first post of this thread. I think we can probably fix all the rest of the ones we're going to before release by the end of the day tomorrow (my day). A stress test or two later, and we'll be good to go.

Thanks again for all the help!
~Michael

misiorysio: When missions are over and the bots "jump to nowhere", their destination is listed as a WH sector but they never arrive.

Misiorysio:

Thanks for the detailed reports. They're a little more detailed than I'd actually have liked, but I appreciate the effort. A couple of the things you reported are new to me. In particular, I'm worried about you getting those messages so late on the first hivehunt mission and the pauses on the second one. The test server is quite underpowered to be doing all the things that our production cluster does, but I would have hoped that it could keep up with anything less than lots and lots of players. I'll definitely be looking into it today.

Also, in the first HiveHunt mission, the reason you encountered no hive bots is that it was the site of a successful guard-the-miners mission. I thought I had done something to prevent these from being posted, but I guess not. I'll fix this.

The lack of defensive behavior by the escorts and guards is one of the bugs listed in the first thread.

To address some of the things you reported that are not bugs, but are understandably confusing:

When you see pirates hanging around, it is because they are waiting to intercept a convoy. Not necessarily your convoy, or even one a player will be escorting. The NPCs take missions by themselves. It makes for a lively universe, and will form the basis of a dynamic economy Soon.

The availability of the Mining/Guard and HiveHunt missions is entirely determined by the activities of the Hive. If the Hive has been pushed back to its stronghold, there will be none of these missions until it ventures forth again. I have some code for emulating the outcome of a hivehunt mission that is taken only by NPCs, and once that is working, I will increase the Hive's expansion rate to the point that there should almost always be more than one of each mission type, waiting to see if players will take it.

The number of pirates to escorts is actually even on a one-mission to one-mission basis. However, the pirates will attack any trader that enters their sector, though only the ones assigned will chase it along the route. So, sometimes there are many pirte groups waiting for different convoys in the same sector. I intend to do something to limit this to some extent, though it will involve tradeoffs. At first it was set up that only the assigned pirates would attack, but then *everyone* who encountered pirates that just sat there reported it as a bug.

The miners just sitting there is a new bug introduced just before I went to bed. I was trying to prevent the miners from warping to nowhere when their cargo holds fill up. I gave them a goal of 'park' with a priority of 1, forgetting that the priority of their mining goal was only .5. So they just park as soon as they get to their destination now. I'll lower the priority, then they should only sit and do nothing after mining for a while.

Thanks again for the bug reports, Misiorysio. I'm going to go through them again after I go fix a couple of these bugs. I'll add responses to anything I missed, and then I'm going to remove them since it's quite a lot to scroll through.

~Michael

I'll try to keep it more condensed next time. I read the bug list when writing my first post, but forgot to check if the things I observed in later missions were already mentioned. Sorry, my bad.

"Also, in the first HiveHunt mission, the reason you encountered no hive bots is that it was the site of a successful guard-the-miners mission."

No no, the Hive bots were there, I just killed them all before the message that actually starts the Hive hunt mission appeared. This was the reason that there were no bots when all of my group arrived in the sector.

Ahh, thanks for the clarification. Hmm, what to do about that situation...

I stupidly left something running last night that ate up all the memory. So Misiorysio, and anyone else who tested from about 3am to about 2pm today would have encountered all sorts of odd behavior. I hope no one else spent much time testing during that time period.

New fixes and changes:
The mining bots should now mine and then just sit where they are when their hold is full rather than warping to nowhere.

Fixed a couple of bugs that could cause certain general elements of missions to fail, causing several variations of 'the mission didn't end'

A greater variety of HiveHunt missions should now be available (though you can't tell whats what until I fix the description)

Escort and Guard missions will kick you out and treat you as hostile for killing another escort or guard now rather than just the protectees.

The guards will no longer get a message about the miners warping into the starting sector (when they undock).

Planned changes:
Andy is working on some functionality to allow the mission descriptions to be updated in place. This will allow me to make the bot count in the hive hunt missions accurate to begin with, and remain accurate even if someone comes along and kills some bots in that sector.

I had been thinking about the radar issue in terms of telling the client who should be red and who should be green. It hadn't really occured to me that I could temporarily tank your standing with a faction to make them red. I will need extra hooks to find out what your reputation needs to be set back to, but I think we can do this before release. The question is, should we. It is a major kludge, and could have some unintended effects. (for instance, if deliverator were to crash or somehow lose your standing info, it would be permanent- reliably guarding against this might be more trouble than it's worth)

Bugs with the mining mission:
1) No escorts. I stayed in the station until after the mission started, and when I left two centaurs and an EC-101 were leaving.
2) Mission didn't end. I mined for 30+ minutes.
3) If no players go to the mining sector, none of the NPCs / hive do anything. I entered the sector after the mission had been running for about 20 minutes, and the three miners were just heading for roids. They didn't last long without escorts. When they died, the only cargo they dropped was scrap.
4) You get paid for ore mined in any sector. We chatted about this yesterday, but I'm just being complete.
5) I've only ever gotten missions to mine Carbonic ore. Is the ore type supposed to change? (I hope so.)
6) Rewards are sporatic. My first reward was over 4k for 120cu, my second was 1001 for 120cu, my third reward was about 900 for 120cu, my fourth was 2893 for 66cu. I know the rewards will be adjusted before release, but I expected them to be more consistant anyway.
7) One time I brought in 120cu and was paid 1001 credits, but my cargo wasn't removed. I tried redocking but wasn't paid again. I unloaded, reloaded and redocked and wasn't paid. I undocked, dropped the cargo, picked it up, redocked and was paid about 900 credits. That time the cargo was removed.

I submitted a bug through the mission computer regarding the last bug. All of this happened in the same mission.

I'm sorry Klox- I had Deliverator completely messed up during the time you were testing. I just added updating mission descriptions; if that didn't break anything, things should be normal again. Which isn't to say that the mining mission works well ;) We may have to hold off on it for a little while, and release the rest.

I've updated the list in the first post again with the latest info on what has been fixed or is still broken (as far as I know). I expect things to go much more smoothly than last night.

One amusing bug that was found and fixed today, is that if you died by colliding with an asteroid, you would be treated as though you had killed a group-member (because you did, technically).

I have a bad habit of getting things working well, telling you all it will be stable while I sleep, and then adding one last feature or fixing one last bug before bed ;)
So anyone that came on in the last hour wouldn't have had much luck testing. I don't think anyone did, but just in case. I'm also not sure if I broke anything. I'm going to do some testing before I call it a night, so hopefully things *will* be in at least as good of shape as I said in my last post, but if they aren't that's probably why.

What I added was messages in the Escort and Guard missions when someone dies by collision (or their own weapon), and when an escort or guard kills a pirate or hivebot.

Oh, and I discovered that the pirates are not always(never?) pursuing beyond the intercept sector. This was working not long ago, so I expect it's a simple matter, but I'm not sure if I'll fix it before I crash or not.

I really am incorrigible :)

But when I tested, I found that my change had badly broken the escort and guard missions- it would treat any kill by you as friendly fire. It took a while for my tired eyes to see the problem, but it's working now. And I think i fixed the pirate pursuit problem (be aware that not all pirates should follow, but if you see some, some should probably be following). And maybe I just made it so that you get rewarded in the escort and guard missions for bots killed.

Anyway, I'm really going to sleep now. Right after I restart the server once to make it fresh and clean. ;)

There is currently a lua bug that can cause a bot to disappear without informing Deliverator. This can cause your escort mission to never end, for instance, if one of the traders disappears. That's going to have to wait until at least tomorrow (later today).
It must be pretty rare, because I havent seen it in weeks and thought that it was fixed.

Ahhh, someone knock me out please!

I just set up a silly little kludge. If you take the escort mission, your corvus standing will be tanked. If you take the pirate mission, your standing with everyone but corvus and xangxi will be tanked. The reason I leave xangxi, is that if you take a hivehunt, mining or guard mission at the xangxi station in sedina k-13, your standing with all factions will be raised. Neat eh? Took about 10 minutes- should give a taste of the slightly less kludgy way that we may or may not use to make the mission-enemy red on your radar.

Hopefully I didn't break anything ;)