Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: LAM3O on March 22, 2003, 12:02:43 pm
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Rarely, enemy ships won't be affected by my weapons. My weapons hit sheilds, i can collide with them, hit them with missiles, but my primaries pass right through them. After forcing myself to collide with an enemy ship the problem usually goes away, then it might come back, then go away, and eventually it stays away after a few minutes.
It doesn't happen very often, i think i remember it happening in the main freespace 2 campaign as well as user campaigns.
I've seen this problem for all the years i've played freespace 2, anyone else heard of it?
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Yes, I have had this same problem every now and then. It seems to occur in asteroid/debris fields when there are too many asteroids, but I have also had it happen by staying in a smaller asteroid field for long periods of time. This is something for the SCP people, I think.
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sounds like it might be a table problem... really disasterous if you have MODs...
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i've got it too, but it hapens as well outside asteroid/debris fields.
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I have been playing FS2 for three years, and I never had encountered this problem before. In FS1, sometimes when there were so many objects, my shots went throught any ships, includes me, when an enemy tried to destroy me. There was asteroid field, too in that missions.
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The Original Alpha One's ghost is out for revenge :nervous:
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Basic explanation of this problem is as follows:
The FS2 engine has to keep track of all objects in the mission and their positions in a list of "collision pairs." If at any time two objects occupy the same space, the appropriate collision procedures are invoked. Laser shots, ships, asteroids, etc, all count as objects to be kept track of, and each object has to be paired with each other object. As the number of objects increases, the number of pairs increases exponentially.
The problem is, there can only be a finite number of collision pairs in the list, which means there can only be so many objects in the mission before the engine runs out of available space in the collision pairs list. If the list is full, new objects will not be paired with other objects. When that happens, they will not go through the usual collision procedures, but instead pass right through each other.
Laser shots are invariably the newest objects in the mission, since they appear and disappear so quickly, so they are the prime candidates to be left out of the list. So, if you have a mission with lots and lots of fighters shooting lots and lots of lasers at lots and lots of capital ships in an asteroid field with lots and lots of rocks in it, FS2 simply runs out of space for all those collision pairs, and the newest objects in the mission, the laser bolts, won't collide with anything even if they pass through the same space.
Edit: Someone (Kazan, I think) tried to increase the number of collision pairs available in order to make better asteroid fields that would still work, but the attempt had bad consequences. Do a search for Asteroid Fields in the SCP forum for more info.
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thanks for the explanation.