[FUBAR-BDHR]

Been playing with vaporize and self destruct.  Is this supposed to just make the ship vanish completely as the name would suggest?  If so it doesn't.  Debris are left behind.  Not the targetable kind (at least not that I've seen) but the particles that float away and disappear.

[jr2]

There is a way to make a ship disappear, IIRC, but that's not it.. vaporize means no large chunks are left behind.

[Dark Hunter]

Does ship-vanish cause them to just disappear?

Alternatively, you could just teleport the ships really far away... and make them untargetable, so the player wouldn't accidentally target them.

Either way, you might try looking at the code for certain missions in Transcend. It is the only campaign I've played that had ships simply vanishing (Ransom accompanied it with a lightning-fast fade-in/fade-out).

[karajorma]

Alternatively, you could just teleport the ships really far away... and make them untargetable, so the player wouldn't accidentally target them.

Don't know about ship-vanish but that one certainly won't work in multiplayer unless you use the BtRL build or 3.6.10 builds. Turey discovered that the hard way.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

OK the transport the ship sounds like a plan.  Transport it then self-destruct it.  That may be the solution to the whole thing. 

One question about ship vanish.  What would happen if you vanished a ship then did a self-destruct?  Might just have to try that.

[karajorma]

After a ship-vanish the ship is gone. It basically does all the back end stuff to do with making a depart but doesn't do any of the stuff you would see in-game. One second the ship is there and next it's not. You could try transporting it and then use an explosion-effect SEXP to generate the explosion yourself.

Be warned that ship-vanish doesn't work in multiplayer (I've checked now) and since it doesn't write to the event log certain SEXPs will still think the ship is present.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Well I just tried using set-object-position to move the ship to 99999,99999,99999.  Now the problem is if you have the ship targeted it stays targeted.  I tried setting radar-set-max-range to 50000 and making the ship invisible before moving it but it still stays targeted.  Any way around this one?

Also I just tried self-destruct after vanish.  Doesn't work as expected but had to try it.  At least it didn't crash.

[karajorma]

Ah. Forgot about that. Make the ship stealthy (and friendly stealthy if it's a friendly ship). That will untarget it (on SP at least).

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Thanks worked just fine that way. 

[Vidmaster]

I used "invisible", seems to work too.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Invisible doesn't work if the ship is currently targeted.  Tried it in TBP 3.6.9 and in Taylor's 3.6.10 10-22 build.

[karajorma]

I'm trying to decide if that's a bug or not.

[Vidmaster]

damn.   Okay, modifying the mission again.
FURBAR, thanks for telling me about this thread. And I have to ask again: Do you still have that file with the rest of the errors? The typing ones are fixed (I hope), but I remember there were one or two controversal points left, I wanted to look those up...

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Vid:  Check your email I sent you the files. 

Kara:  Which part is the bug?  The ship still being targeted when made invisible or the ship still being targeted when it's moved beyond max radar range?  Both maybe?

[karajorma]

Both are probably bugs but since you can break the connection in the manner I mentioned I'm not certain whether it needs fixing or not.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Maybe just some notes about it in the Wiki then. 

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Found a new quark with this tonight.  Seems the ship stealthy work around might be a little buggy.  I tried creating an event to make the ship stealthy then make it unstealthy so it would untarget.  Tried in the same event which I figured wouldn't work and it didn't.  I then made a chained event.  Still didn't work.  Put a 10 second delay on the chained event.  Still didn't work.  Finally stored the mission time to a variable and created an event that checked the current mission time against the stored time.  Now it works.  It's like it totally ignores any delay and the unstealthy fires as soon as the ship becomes stealthy.  I even put messages in every event just to make sure the events were processing in the order expected.  Really strange. 

[karajorma]

That's very odd. Stick it in Mantis and I'll take a look. I'll probably fix the problem with ship-invisible too if I can figure out what causes it.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Well since the original test was in TBP 3.6.9 I moved it over to 3.6.10 3-28.  Seems that at least part of this has already been fixed.  The rest might be due to  a repeating event.  Does chaining to a repeating event work?  I know I've used it before somewhere but that's been years ago but it seems the problem starts as soon as I make the event repeating. 

[karajorma]

Chaining a repeating event never worked properly for me when I tried it. I use variables pretty much exclusively when I want to do something like that now anyway.