*** Vendetta 1.8.7
- Overhauled bot targetting system, currently utilized in
Border Skirmish, Hive Skirmish and Escort missions. Among
other things, this means that players will be targeted more
frequently and fighters won't focus on capships.
- BS bots warp in from opposite ends now, preventing some
capship tangles.
- BS now includes Ragnarok bombers.

(server still down as of posting time)

A little rough releasing it, but should be all good now. An additional change:

Border Skirmish should now be considerably faster for a lot of people (framerate-wise), due to less swarm missile use. It may not look quite as cool, but I'll be continuing to work on capship loadouts.

HS missions are strange lately the factions npc kill the hive orun collectors so quickly once you enter the sector, that the small and common missions it is hardly possible to score a hit before the battle is over and your team won.

hrmm for missions that only have collectors you really shouldn't need backup.

Hmm, HS has gone rather odd , no idea if its due to the update . See bugs forum.

Andy's fixed some bugs and propagated the changes into production. As sectors naturally shut down and are restarted (by people leaving them, or flying into them) the new code will spread. Hopefully his changes fixed the bot issues, but he's still investigating.

Hahahahahah. Sounds like a virus.

very interesting... "the new code will spread"....

I wonder if you could make the hive expansion work in a similar fashion?

We often propagate changes in this way. Sectors that are already running would have to be manually restarted (dumping anyone playing in them) to force them to update their code. If it isn't a panicked change, we can passively propagate it in this way, letting sectors shut down when idle and upgrading the game without disturbing any players.

Thats really cool.

But there are many sectors that are not visited at all. How do you fix those? I know that mostly these are empty sectors, but missions do have you go there.

Sectors that aren't running will be updated immediately. Only sectors that *are* running have to be updated.. since they have the old code resident in memory, rather than the updated code on disk. So essentially, as soon as we commit a passive change like this, all non-running sectors are instantly updated, and we wait for the running ones to eventually become idle and shut down on their own. If they should restart after that, they'll re-read the code from disk, and be up to date.

The only real problem are sectors that are never shut down, due to certain bots or extremely idle players sitting in them. But, that's a very small number, and usually station sectors. As long as the problem being patched doesn't impact stations, we don't worry about it. If it does impact those few sectors, then it's really a more worrisome patch anyway, and we usually just do a full server restart.

It all depends on the priority of the patch, and whether it's worth disturbing the game (meaning, the players) by doing a full server restart. This also factors in the time of day and game activity and so on. We do passive patches for very minor fixes and changes all the time.

Poor Odia M-14, never getting the passive changes like the rest of the universe.

In those cases, we'll just manually drop that sector when no one's using it (no non-bots, that is).