Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Legate Damar on June 28, 2012, 02:20:11 am

Title: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Legate Damar on June 28, 2012, 02:20:11 am
I made a test mission where one super ship was attacked by over 100 enemy capships in 5 waves (the first wave was present at mission start, each subsequent wave jumped in in intervals of one minute).

The supership destroyed the first wave just before the second wave jumped in, then it started firing its beams at the second wave but only destroyed a few of them before it stopped firing.

By the time the fourth wave (the largest one) had jumped in, the fps had gone down to 1 or 2 (this was expected) but what's odd is that the supership only then started firing its beams at the third wave, when they were destroyed it stopped firing its beams for the rest of the mission.

All of the other ships continued to fire their beams, and all of the waves were attacking from different directions (which were all covered by the supership's beam arcs). At no point were any of the supership's turrets destroyed.

Does anyone have any ideas what caused this?
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: headdie on June 28, 2012, 02:27:27 am
any chance you are exceeding one of these?
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Engine_limitations#Objects

though as usual a log would help greatly
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: X3N0-Life-Form on June 28, 2012, 02:51:44 am
I'd say you've the engine's beam or object limit.

nin'd
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Legate Damar on June 28, 2012, 03:00:39 am
No, like I said all of the other beams were working fine, and after the third wave was destroyed, there were fewer ships in the mission, but the beams stopped firing after that. They also stopped firing on the second wave before the third wave arrived, yet were firing later when there were many more ships.
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: headdie on June 28, 2012, 03:13:33 am
in that case definitely need a log
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Legate Damar on June 28, 2012, 03:14:53 am
I'll get one when I get back to my gaming PC
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Nyctaeus on June 28, 2012, 11:16:24 am
I have similar problems only for beams for new race. I've retabeled them 3 times but with small improvement. Problem must be somewhere else.
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Legate Damar on June 29, 2012, 04:15:31 am
Okay, I have a log, but when playing on debug the mission crashed shortly after the third wave arrived (when I first played it it got to the end with no problem):



[attachment deleted by a ninja]
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: MatthTheGeek on June 29, 2012, 04:26:04 am
Well, you have a ton of warnings all over the place already. Why don't you start by solving all of those ? It's not exactly easy to debug on top a messy modpack.
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Legate Damar on June 29, 2012, 06:11:34 am
I solved the SAAA one after I saw it, but most of the others are problems with the models which I'm guessing are really not major problems since all of those models have been used in released campaigns already.
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Dragon on June 29, 2012, 06:16:06 am
Open up your models and match the tables to turret names. A lot of warnings are turrets that don't link into the model file.
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Droid803 on June 29, 2012, 11:51:31 am
... which I'm guessing are really not major problems since all of those models have been used in released campaigns already.

NO
That is not the attitude you should have if you want people to help you debug.
I used a lot of models already in released campaigns, such as the UED Solaris, and I still needed to fix them. The UED Solaris as released with WiH initially causes a CRASH TO DESKTOP ERROR if you used its fighterbay in any shape or form, nobody ever found out when playing WiH because the fighterbay was never used (because they couldn't figure out what was wrong with it). And BP is a campaign put out by one of the most skilled teams in FreeSpace modding, with extensive testing and polish. Let that be the shining example of why you should NEVER just assume that just because it's in a released campaign it is bug free in any shape or form. If even they could miss something, don't believe that anyone else managed to catch everything. Always verify and debug your custom assets.

Eliminate every possible source of error that you already know about, or nobody can help you with anything in terms of debugging. (In fact, if you don't, you'll never be able to help yourself either). If you have so much as a single warning, you should fix it before citing "strange behavior", because it may not be strange at all.

(For the record the solaris CTD is an improperly named fighterbay launch path (Bay010), which causes FSO to choke and die when it is picked - the correct name is Bay10. I presume this is fixed in the current release, as I've told multiple people many times)
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Legate Damar on June 30, 2012, 05:03:22 am
Will work on it
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Droid803 on June 30, 2012, 11:38:39 am
Good :)
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Aardwolf on July 11, 2012, 05:59:15 am
Asking the obvious question: is it possible the super-ship's beam turrets have been destroyed?
Title: Re: Odd behavior with beams
Post by: Legate Damar on July 11, 2012, 08:25:15 am
Nope. Nothing in the event log about that, besides the ship was shielded and the shield wasn't breached until very near the end of the battle.