Forums » Bugs
Queen hunting broken due to sector resets
It appears that sectors now reset when you leave (bot damage, position, activity, etc. is reset when you reenter the sector). This means that:
1) You can't damage a bot (e.g. queen) and then come back to finish it off. (Yes, I could use energy weapons, but ever since the update that fixed crackbotting, the bots backup too much to make energy weapons very practical against 30 bots.)
2) If you want to follow a collector to a queen, you have to stay in the sector for the full 4-5 minutes. (I used to take the time to reload.)
1) You can't damage a bot (e.g. queen) and then come back to finish it off. (Yes, I could use energy weapons, but ever since the update that fixed crackbotting, the bots backup too much to make energy weapons very practical against 30 bots.)
2) If you want to follow a collector to a queen, you have to stay in the sector for the full 4-5 minutes. (I used to take the time to reload.)
That's probably because of the loss of DELIVERATOR
The whole sector doesnt restart because if it would the asteroids would reset too, but they dont.
Where did all this talk of Deliverator being lost/down come from? Go read my post in the This is Vendetta 1.2.6 thread (second page). On the test server we set the sectors to shut down almost as soon as there is no one in them. This allows us to test various things more easily. This change accidently made it to the production server when we did the release. We left it for various reasons. We thought it would help people not get outdated Hive Hunt missions and keep the additional load of the trade convoys down. We hadn't considered the effect it would have on queen-hunting. I expect we'll set the sector-timeout back up to where it was on the production server. The real solution to this problem, though, is to make the bot's health persistent. This should be quite easy to do with the Deliverator controlled bots (the Hive in Sedina), but I don't think we will be bothering with the old style bots since they're to be replaced before too long.
Malo: The sector does restart, though there is some information that persists in our database.
Malo: The sector does restart, though there is some information that persists in our database.
momerath42, Thanks for the detailed response. It's helpful to understand what was going on behind the scenes that caused this.
The real solution to this problem, though, is to make the bot's health persistent.
Don't just make their health persistant. Ideally, their position, activity, state, etc. would be saved too (or more realistically, a subset of that list). Notice that half of my initial post mentions that collectors restart their mining when you re-enter a sector. Health isn't all that matters. In their case, simply remembering how much cargo they have (or even just starting them with a random amount of cargo) would be adequate. But as the bot AI gets more complicated, there will be more and more cases where saving just health or cargo status won't be enough (as I'm sure you're already aware).
The real solution to this problem, though, is to make the bot's health persistent.
Don't just make their health persistant. Ideally, their position, activity, state, etc. would be saved too (or more realistically, a subset of that list). Notice that half of my initial post mentions that collectors restart their mining when you re-enter a sector. Health isn't all that matters. In their case, simply remembering how much cargo they have (or even just starting them with a random amount of cargo) would be adequate. But as the bot AI gets more complicated, there will be more and more cases where saving just health or cargo status won't be enough (as I'm sure you're already aware).
Not only that, but they will continue to virtually mine asteroids and carry the cargo back to the queen without the sector even running. We've thought of that. :)