Twilight of the Arnor Beta 6b Change Log

Published on April 10, 2008 By CariElf In GalCiv Journals

I killed a lot of bugs this week.

We're getting close on the invisible ships bug, which we were finally able to reproduce here, but only in release mode, which means that we're debugging it with output statements, so it's taking awhile.

We did manage to determine that it is unrelated to the "Warning: Clone Frames Failed" message in your debug.err files. That happens every time you go to build a starbase that is not on a resource or an ascension crystal. The next build after this one will fix that.

Of particular interest to me this week is if you notice the AI creating too many space miners. I went through the AI code and I think that I found the cause so I tweaked the functions that set the colony's military project for Brad since Brad is still not feeling well.

We're getting close.

+ NEW: Enabled modded campaigns

+ NEW: Hooked up new Ascension victory cutscene

+ NEW: Dread Lords and Minor races now have their own tech trees.

+ FIXED: Added code to update the planet overlay after auto updating improvements or auto terraforming

+ FIXED: Added code to planet::trade to make ejected ships set new home planet, which should fix bug where AI ships try to go home to a planet that their civ no longer owns.

+ FIXED: Bug where AI designed ships didn't show up in the upgradewnd

+ FIXED: Changed the core scout to use a tiny hull so that you can build it and removed hyperdrive

+ FIXED: Core Ship designs will now strip components that they can't use so that races can still build them (eg Arceans will now be able to build core colony ships minus engines)

+ FIXED: Code when removing ship components to be more efficient and to not lose stats. Now ships that have a tech requirement in their xml file will retain that requirement even if the ship design is edited.

+ FIXED: Took out line from AISetColonyMilitaryProject that was not in Drengin AI which is the probable cause of the space miner spam. Also added code to prevent it from trying to build ships it hasn't designed yet.

+ FIXED: Added check to keep minor races from placing spies

+ FIXED: Now saving the weapon and defense focus variables so that they won't be reset to defaults when loading a save game.

+ FIXED: Bug where ShipDesignFocusWnd reset the sliders to the default after loading a save game

+ FIXED: Logic error that was causing the blank thumbnails when upgrading a ship design, which also caused memory leaks.

+ FIXED: Bug that caused the context area to not show any information except about Ascension crystals once an ascension crystal was clicked on

+ FIXED: Bug where Ascension victory was not being handled correctly and was resulting in a military loss (default for unknown game over condition).

+ FIXED: Bug where certain races didn't have anything regarding their relations with you in their reports when playing as certain races. This would have occurred for the Drengin viewing Torians, Iconians viewing various races, and Drath viewing Altarians.

+ FIXED: Bugs with initializing asteroid fields and other game objects

+ FIXED: Missing image for Interstellar refinery

+ FIXED: Crash caused when Terror star blew up colony with an agent on it

+ FIXED: Bug where after a starbase built on an ascension crystal is destroyed, the ascension crystal reappeared but was not detected by the mouse hit detection or collision detection code

+ FIXED: Bug where ships designed for the player by the AI were not showing up under Core ships filters on most lists

+ FIXED: Bugs with having the dreadlords in a scenario

+ FIXED: Bug in the resource manager that may have caused textures not to load

+ FIXED: Whoever manually edited starbaseModules.xml forgot to put closing tags for the "Mining Matrix" and "Advanced Mining Matrix" modules they added. Fixed it in twilight/data/english as well as twilight/metaverseData/English

+ TWEAK: Disabled playing DA or DL campaign in TA

+ TWEAK: Took out skip internet check option because it doesn't do anything

+ TWEAK: Added code to make sure that the AI is not affected by auto launch code

+ TWEAK: Increased max number of asteroid fields to 500 from 250 so that the game won't run out of available asteroid fields when destroying star systems with Terror stars. May increase it further for custom maps.

+ TWEAK: Assigned Ascension victory weight of 2.5

+ TWEAK: Added code to print out AI intelligence values to debug.err when loading a save game

+ TWEAK: AI will now design ships for player after unlocking ship components or researching miniaturization

+ TWEAK: Fixed typo in Krynn Tech tree

+ TWEAK: Made it so that you can't select the dread lords tech tree to use for your race

+ TWEAK: in scenario editor, made it so you can't set the Dreadlords as the player race. This was a bug that existed in the old scenario editor and was overlooked until a user had pointed it out to Cari today.

+ TWEAK: In an effort to get more information about why some ships are invisible, I added information to the “CloneFrames failed” message

Comments (Page 3)

TheLaywer

on Apr 12, 2008

One of the races has the lite constructor module. The Arceans' core ships will be a little cheaper than the other race's because the engines are stripped off so that they can build them even without the engine techs.

Is that why the Arcean Flagship has a speed of only 1 pc/week?

rls669

on Apr 12, 2008

Is that why the Arcean Flagship has a speed of only 1 pc/week?

That has to be an unintended consequence. The Arcaen speed penalty is bad enough without crippling the flagship.

CariElf

on Apr 14, 2008

Is that why the Arcean Flagship has a speed of only 1 pc/week? That has to be an unintended consequence. The Arcaen speed penalty is bad enough without crippling the flagship.

Well, everyone else in the game would also have a survey ship with engines stripped off because they're all using the same design, same for the initial colony ship and initial space miner. It makes the starting ships less valuable to the Arceans, but at least those ships now show up in the ship list to build instead of forcing the player to design their own.

rls669

on Apr 14, 2008

Having a survey ship 1pc/week slower than the others is already a handicap. A 1pc/week survey ship is useless, especially for a race that's already weak in the early game.

CariElf

on Apr 15, 2008

Having a survey ship 1pc/week slower than the others is already a handicap. A 1pc/week survey ship is useless, especially for a race that's already weak in the early game.

All right, I'll make it so that the survey ship will be like the attack ships in that it won't show up in the list of available ships to build, but it doesn't have anything stripped from it.

Loupdinour

on Apr 15, 2008

Having a survey ship 1pc/week slower than the others is already a handicap. A 1pc/week survey ship is useless, especially for a race that's already weak in the early game.

As long as all races (AI or player) are under this same rule, then the only thing 'wrong' here is that the Arceans will be 1 parsec slower. No races will be able to upgrade the ship w/ it's survey module until they learn that tech anyway. By that point you'd have some speed enhancements.

rls669

on Apr 17, 2008

All right, I'll make it so that the survey ship will be like the attack ships in that it won't show up in the list of available ships to build, but it doesn't have anything stripped from it.

Excellent! Thank you very much. Now at least we'll be able to find some planets. Of course the other races with faster colony ships will get there first anyway

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