Congratulations!

/me breaks open the Divinia Champagne!

So, does this satisfy the coupon conditions or not? Is it live or is it Memorex?

Whoa! When you said that Kourier was going to "take a little work yet" to go live, I thought you meant on the order of DAYS.

"I know this isn't really the most exciting of newsposts, since I'm basically saying "nothing visible is really changed, or will be for awhile!"

No, it's pretty exciting.

Congrats Incarnate et al.

yay

Among the issues that should be fixed by or because of Kourier: Escort missions should be generally more reliable and always end. Hive and Border Skirmish missions should always get reinforcements and end properly. The reduced load on Deliverator, which is still doing most (in terms of gameplay) of what it was, should also mean that it doesn't have long pauses resulting in a loss of feedback in various situations.

For the next few weeks, I'll be focused on making sure Kourier and the altered Deliverator (codename: Hiro) are working well. I hope to fix any outstanding issues with Deliverator functionality before starting to replace/augment it in Kourier, so this is the time to inform or remind me of any problems you've been living with in the Escort, Liberation, Liquidation, Hive-Skirmish, and Border-Skirmish missions, or in interacting with any of the associated bots (convoys, unrats, etc).

The Short List of Known Bugs:

"*Bot Name got bored and wandered off" messages about escorts in the destination sector. If you get any of these outside the destination sector it's a different bug, and I'd like to hear about it.

There may be an issue with the selection of the player who's station-departure begins the escort mission when multiple people take it.

Various pirate oddness: I'm aware of a number of issues, some are poor design, some are completely bizarre and will hopefully not happen or happen with much less frequency now. I'd still like the specifics of anything you encounter with the unrats that 'feels' broken.

Much thanks for all the encouragement and help in testing!!

On an escort mission I just took from Dau L-10 to Arta B-7, when the mission ending messages were displayed there was "NIL" instead of my name. In the previous mission I took my name was displayed correctly. Other than that both missions worked perfectly :)

[EDIT] Third mission took the convoy through a storm - when one of traders was destroyed, the message about it showed up twice in Mission Log in PDA. I don't know if it showed twice in the game because I was busy killing bots. I also think (but am not sure) that convoy's Exit Point was different from mine.

Today I had two issues, both of which were much less severe than when Deliverator had the load alone.

First issue:
I enter the sector of the Sedina->Odia wormhole. An unrat hails me as if he's attacking, like having already counted me down. Then he starts counting. The counting continues even after I have used the wormhole. If you ask me, he just hits the bottle too hard. See *Zek Roka

Second issue:
I stop by the Corvus station in Bractus after destroying an Itani CtC convoy for some repairs. Naturally, I have to drop the pure xith to dock. When I do, an unrat whom I never spoke to hails me as if I had been ordered to drop the cargo after stealing from his kill. The kill was in fact made in the Ineubis station sector. See *Dizotaka here

Same old Border Skirmish bug. Ships stop jumping in and the caps that are in sector stop moving.

I think I just solved the Unrat attacks from pilots who aren't in sector, like issue number one in my above post.

On my way through Grey space, at the Bractus->Pelatus wormhole specifically, I was hailed normally, but by a pirate who was not present. There were a dozen in the sector, but it was THIS guy instead of them, meaning I basically got a free pass.

So I continued. When I reached the Sedina->Latos sector, (I'm addicted to my new wormhole notation I think..) The very same pilot who hailed me back in Bractus came sailing through the wormhole I was about to use.

Did he perhaps chase a convoy all the way to Latos, and if so, why was he the one hailing me, not just once, but repeatedly?
Chat log of the pirate

When I got to Initros, I saw another sight which has become familiar. Unbots issuing from my proud Serco Barracks. They park in front of the wormhole when they get there, OR if the sector has no wormhole, they stop at the station exit they came from. Every convoy that exits an affected station rams them just slightly, which in the CtC channels looks alarming as all heck (you can imagine I'm sure).
Unaligned issue forth from.. Red Space?

Anxiously tried the re-deliverated Hive missions in Sedina tonight. I've missed those artificial, cold, calulating, little machine-mind buggers. But it seems I have to wait a bit longer to be reunited with my favourite genocidal a.i.-constructs.

The first mission seemed to start ok, but when I jumped into the target system, all I found was four unrats, eager to fill the wings of the absent Hive bots, but far too 1800th century to satisfy me in the slightest. (Have the unrats become even easier, by the way? I took down four tonight in a minute or two, and I've never been very good at ratcatching...)

After having aborted the first mission, I tried it again. The second mission started out just fine in the log, but when I reached the target system, I found five depressed Xang Xi Hive hunters, floating in space in a small cloud in an otherwise empty system.

Hmm, very odd. Can you tell me what time you took the missions, and if possible, which sectors you were sent to?

Bleh. Embarrasing. Two years of VO, and I refered to sectors as "systems". Not quite sure if you mean me or Aramarth, momerath42, but I'll make my report anyways. I'm afraid I can only give you approximate values, but I hope it's of some help:

Both missions where taken within five minutes of each other. My Vendetta.app was last modified at 2:56 GMT +1 (and I'm assuming this happens at launch), which means I probably took the missions around 3:05-3:15 GMT +1.

As for sectors, if my ionmissions.txt is correct, I was told to fight the Hive in Sedina C-12 and Sedina B-12.

Thanks Ion. I'll look into the problems you encountered. Same goes for Aramarth and misiorysio. I think I just fixed the BS problem on the test server, Ghost; I'll probably release the fix tomorrow along with anything else I can figure out by then.

Well, that might be my fault Ion . I did a fair number of HS missions yesterday ( say 1700 -1900 gmt ) Most worked perfectly , but 3 ( b12 , b13 , c14 ) were cleared with no new bots jumping in and no confirmation of the end of the mission .

A group of us then killed the Levi, hoping that would restart the HS cycle , but it didnt and HS missions to those cleared sectors continued to show .

Oddly the levi dropped very little in the way of ores ?

I then tried a number of escort missions which worked as they should . Minor mission bugs as reported above , A man called "NIL" and the escorting players storm exit being different from that of the voy .

I also note that there is cross-reporting between voys , not that that is neccessarily a bug . If a voy Ecka, and ships a b c is in the same storm as voy d e f then I get messages from the other voy such as "d killed an orun " , " e sucked vacuum " .

Good to see things progressing .

ecka

I think I've really fixed HS and BS this time! The fix is only on the test server right now, but I'll probably release it tonight (fri night cst). Please do test it as much as possible before then; it's a pretty substantial change to the way all bots are removed from deliverator (now under kourier's control).

I'll look into the Levi-death/hive-restart thing; it could be related (and therefore fixed), or not.

I took a few more escort missions last night; no problems at all except a few nasty traffic jams in Arta Caelestis C-4 and Azek D-11, where a damaged station guard had gotten stuck on some station part trying to dock--and everybody (by "everybody" I mean two or three convoys that even didn't include my own yet) was waiting in line behind the station guard. I nudged the guards free and things cleared up pretty quickly, however.

Not sure if this is a Kourier bug as opposed to just a simple "these AI have trouble seeing where they're going" bug. ;)

Iv'e seen that myself though its easily fixed with a conc mine or 30. Also if your lucky enough to have a pile of uit convoys jammed up near a uit station and you are uit in good standing, you should be able to plant a pile of concmines (100 or so) all over the place so when you detonate them moths issue on the station.

Don't fix the traffic jams entirely, let them happen once in a while. Who sais you can't have traffic jams in space? Perhaps only let it happen with the smaller stations that have one docking bay like arta c4. For larger stations perhaps if the convoy is in the destination sector (not in station oviousley, and they haven't moved more than X amount in Y time they attempt to use the next closest docking bay.

clay: The problem arises when a bot not controlled by Kourier/Deliverator (in this case, a station guard) gets stuck and can't get to the dock. The bots in a sector use a docking queue, so they all line up behind each other and wait until the bot ahead of them in the queue has docked--and will wait indefinitely if the bot in the front of the line can't get to the dock for some reason. It's a pathfinding issue, mostly.

I also think that most factions would ideally be pretty pissed if you tried pulling that thing with the concussion mines. :P