[Vidmaster]

In the wonderfully surprising tower defense level, there is a new surprise in the 2015 release. The tanks miss their platforms...

In the screenshots below, most of my turrets failed to deploy. I watched one of the deployment projectiles flying in a wonderful circle around my platform before finally vanishing before my eyes (guess the missile's time-to-live was over).

Please fix 

[attachment DELETED!! by Strong Bad]

[Damage]

I had this as well, followed by a crash-bug report (which was odd, since I was not running a debug build), and when I went back into the game all was fine, tanks were in place as planned.



Edit:  Played it through again 5 minutes ago, issue did not repeat, tanks landed on platforms straight away.

[General Battuta]

This issue is really hard to reproduce. If you get it, just restart your game.

[Axem]

The script is pretty straight forward in that regard. The drop pod flares are actually missile objects that have the platform targetted. I'm not sure why they miss sometimes, they have a ton of time to point correctly at the platform. I haven't actually seen it happen myself I'm afraid. Maybe there's a countermeasures screwing it up? (FreeSpace, why must you make everything so hard...)

[General Battuta]

Hahahaha I'd laugh so, so hard if that were it.

[Vidmaster]

Failed to reproduce it, sorry. CMs might be a good idea actually...                   though my feeling was that the time of drop is important, I dropped most of the stuff fairly late, shortly before the hostile transports arrive.

[GhylTarvoke]

I get this bug about 50% of the time, so reproducing it won't be a problem. Anything I can do to help?

[rance]

I've had this bug to. The tanks miss their mark and end up spinning around their target platform until they blow up. Is there anyway to force a second firing if the first doesn't reach it's destination?

[Axem]

Well... I can sort of reproduce this by having countermeasures continuously spawn near a platform... But that doesn't explain why it would happen on such a large scale though...

Can someone where this happens regularly please download the table attached and put it in BPComplete/data/tables and run the mission and see if it still happens regularly. The seeker strength for the drop pod "missile" is now 2 billion something instead of 2. Dunno if it'll fix it but it'll help cut down on what it isn't.

[attachment DELETED!! by Strong Bad]

[GhylTarvoke]

Bad news. At first I thought the table had worked, because the bug wasn't happening anymore. Then I removed the table, and it still wasn't happening. What the heck? It used to happen about half the time, and I don't think I changed any settings between now and then.

[Axem]

I guess I fixed a problem that didn't quite need fixing...

Honestly I don't know what could be causing the problem. Something is pushing the missiles off course and it doesn't have the ability to right itself enough so it just circles around the target, trying to hit it. The rotation turn times for the drop pods are 1 second, the same as a Harpoon missile, so it should be an easy hit.

[General Battuta]

After the initial curve, can you $substitute a variant with much faster turn times?

[Axem]

No, the weapon collisions are carefully monitored to look for weapons the script creates, substitute won't allow me to do that anymore. 

[AdmiralRalwood]

Wouldn't that be spawning a submunition, not using $substitute? Do we not have scripting hooks into the spawning process?

[Axem]

Oh, looks like I'm smarter than I look. I thought I was watching the spawned weapons, but not so. All the info goes to the platforms. (In my defense I wrote the script like a year and a half ago)

The platforms just need to be hit by any Drop Pod weapon in order for them to advance to "deployed" status. This opens up other silly hacks... (For example with cheats you could start deployment on a platform, switch your secondaries to "Drop Pod Effect#New", fire it at the platform and suddenly it should become deployed.