Last I recall of this, they would follow you around in sector (although not in an especially elegant manner), but not between sectors...

I'll elaborate because last night I was in a bit of a @_@ state of mind:

The follow command, as I've seen it used and as I've used it on the editor in the past several months only makes the bot follow you around in the sector. The bot won't follow you from sector to sector even if you're 5m away from it when you jump. This can be remedied by having the bot follow you until you jump out, then changing its action to "go to sector_n", but that's a little time-consuming, especially because the entire editor is written in javascript--it tends to lag the web browser frequently when there are a bunch of items in there.

Man, I've had so much school work on my hands, I haven't been able to play VO lately, and someone killed my account payment somehow. I'll try to re-sign up and get into this ASAP.

THANK YOU SO MUCH INC AND COMPANY!!! We've been asking to contribute like this for as long as I can remember, and now you've finally harnessed the playerbase's true potential. Thankyouthankyouthankyou!

/me kisses Inc's feet

-Calder

The "follow" and "defend" commands work well through jumps and warps with no additional scripting. The bot is just slow as hell. If you get more than one jump ahead of it, you'll lose it.

A quick suggestion, set up a "Clean Up" mission, which you can use to remove mission accomplishments that will have built up during testing.
Add any accomplishments you'd like removed to the first stage.
Then, take the mission and you can see all parts of a tree in your list and play them as they're meant to be.

Also, can the @#$!@!!! checkboxes for the mission timers please be set that they don't uncheck themselves everytime.

Whoa, I somehow never noticed that those are totally broken. Whoops. That explains why roguelazer can't get the mission clock to show up.

Fixing...
update: there, I think that should fix it. I love how inconsistent the W3C DOM is, don't you?

Woo! Mission clock!

Minor suggestion: could we get the indentation increased a bit so that it is easier to see the nesting of stages/actions/&c.? I made the following change to the stylesheet in Firefox (via the Web Developer extension):

table.missiontable {
margin-left: 2em; /* more indentation */
padding:0px;
}

Good suggestion Swithun, I would like to see a definite break between stages, a blank line or two would make it much more readable imho.

Only consistent problem I have with the editor is that if I have a mission of 3 or more stages, the javascript the editor uses to turn the mission into something the server/client can use lags so bad it takes several minutes to update the screen.

I know it's a lot of extra work, but would it be possible to have a stand-alone application for making the missions, or perhaps a tool built-into the client that is accessible a) on the test server and b) if the current account has a "PCC" flag or something? The lag from the javascript makes it very difficult to put together missions of any reasonable length.

Other than that, I don't have any issues--if there's something I can't do explicitly, I can easily find out a back-door into getting the editor to produce the effect I'm looking for. As mentioned ingame and via email, great work, and keep it up!

3 stages? Some of my tutorial missions are 20 stages. I don't have any problems. Yes, it does get slower as the missions get longer, and javascript has its issues, but it generally works fine for the mission lengths that are commonly useful.

Developing another editor would be a tremendous amount of time. We do have the framework of Ray's standalone editor still, but that is MUCH less friendly than the web editor and has no framework for posting missions to the submission process or test server. At some point we may put some more work into that to make it available, but not in the near term (read: 6 months). We have a lot higher priority projects for now. So, the web editor is it for the moment.

It might be the amount of RAM I have in my laptop, or that because Firefox still has that really odd graphics bug on the VO website (where the images and colors are all corrupted), I'm using Camino (a Firefox clone built similarly in style to Safari) instead.

I expect to be getting a new computer within the next month, so hopefully more RAM and CPU will fix that problem.

I was going to suggest trying Opera, which is supposed to be a hell of a lot faster than firefox. But the editor doesn't seem to work in it at present. Anyway, a faster CPU will probably help. On my Athlon64 3000+ it's fine, but I sure wouldn't want to try editing missions on the P3 504mhz Linux box in my basement.

Okay. I have finals tomorrow and thursday (woo, seven-week terms) so I probably won't get much time to mess with browsers and the editor until Friday. Thanks for the info, Incarnate.

Just heads-up that it works very well in Firefox, and decently well in Camino here. It's definitely both CPU- and RAM-bound on gecko browsers.

Found an error.

Just as a simple test (whilst I am still learning things I can and can not do), I created an Artemis Collector of issuing_station faction that undocked from the issuing_station and go mine stuff.

The first time I ran it, I was surprised when I undocked immediately after taking the mission to find the bot 2500m away and heading back to the station. So I added a timer to make sure I was outside the station before npc_1 undocked. It actually appeared almost 3000m from the station, and didn't mine, just went and re-docked.

Bots can't undock from stations in the mission editor, they can't particularly mine, and they don't handle cargo well.

They used to be able to undock. That's odd. In one of the TPG missions I made, your escorts undock from the station.. I remember seeing it happen. Anyway, if anyone can isolate exactly how that's broken, it'll help us fix it.

Um. All bots that you create warp in instead of undock. That's how it's broken. :-D

Bug:

http://makchuga.tejat.net/uploads/vendettaclientScreenSnapz001.mov

It's only a ten second clip but watch the menu buttons.