[Black Wolf]

It's not as easy as you'd think it should be. OK, here's the situation.

I have a Sobek, sitting in a ganymede. The connecting pipes have been destroyed, so it's just sitting there, powered down (Disabled, glowmaps off).

A Satis warps in, and heads to dock with the Sobek. All goes surprisingly well. The satis moves remarkably well in the relatively confined space, turns around, follows its path nicely etc. etc. The trouble doesn't start until after I want them to undock. I undock the satis, it starts to move away following its waypoints, the Sobek begins to move a few seconds later, following its waypoints, and then things get weird. The sobek starts shaking around like it's having some kind of fit, and the satis doesn;t do much better. Anyway, I've fiddled my sexps around a bit several times, and the last time this happened, I decided to let them go and see what happens - I look back a few minutes later, and they've somehow managed to dock back together again. Argh!

This is rather frustrating, as in order for the rest of the mission to continue, this needs to go well, and I'd rather not have to do some unconvincing workaround (ie. have the satis dock to the ganymede rather than the sobek and hope the player assumes the Vasudans suited up and spacewalked across invisibly).

So, any ideas? For the record, I'm using FSOpen, version 3.5.5 and I think the last FRED before the openGL one that wouldn;t show any text, whichever version that is. I've put a "dont-collide-invisible" sexp onto pretty much every ship in that part of the mission - the Sobek, the Ganymede, the Satis, and the Aeolus that's floating around outside not doing much just yet, for good measure. Other than that I'm stumped as to what the hell FS thinks its doing...

[.::Tin Can::.]

This has happened in some weird case before, when the capital ship is starting to shake around like it's having a tantrum. Usually, its the waypoint placement, and when it gets to one waypoint it needs to realign exactly with the next one, and usually moves unexpectedly fast and weird. If you can managed to straiten out the waypoints it might fix something. Otherwise... I have no clue...

[Unknown Target]

I've had this problem, where the cap ship swings around wildly for the first 5 minutes of a mission, even though it's supposed to play dead.

Anyway, I think your problem is that the AI gets confused with all those spars and stuff sticking out and about, contrasting with their actual waypoints.

[Black Wolf]

It shouldn't be the waypoints - they're positioned dead straight with the little position and orientation editor, and if it is all the struts on the ganymede, well, I'd be disappointed that V put that much effort into that, but allows ships to fly straight through each other while docking. I'll try shifting the Ganymede, see if that helps any. If it does, well, I'll just have to get rid of the struts on the actual pof I guess.

[karajorma]

Take a look at the docking paths on both ships. There could be a problem there. Although I don't know how the ship is managing to dock.

If worst comes to worst have the sobek power forwards for a good 10-20 seconds and then undock the satis. Just say that it took the vasudans a while to get back to their transport

[Goober5000]

Are you telling them both to undock, or only one?

EDIT: Same if you're telling them both to dock.  When one undocks, the other might start docking again.

[StratComm]

I'd just try increasing the delay so that you know the Satis is actually finished undocking, as there may be problems in the target points for the dockpath moving out from under the Satis.  Disable the Sobek when the transport detaches and see what happens.

[Black Wolf]

Hmmm... I may have fixed it - eliminated a few things, shifted the ganymede etc...nothing seemed to work. I ended up changing the sexp that set the Sobek moving. It used to be triggered to fire 80 seconds after the satis docked, now its triggered to fire off 20 seconds after they undock, even though that's exactly the same time. Fs is an odd beast.

Thanks for the help though guys.

[Anaz]

That's almost as odd as my teleporting cargo container...glad you found a solution.

[Trivial Psychic]

Originally posted by Anaz
That's almost as odd as my teleporting cargo container...glad you found a solution.

That wouldn't be with a Chronos freighter would it?

[Anaz]

Originally posted by Trivial Psychic

That wouldn't be with a Chronos freighter would it?

nope...just your run-of-the mill poseidon...

[Trivial Psychic]

And what were the symptoms of this problem?

[Anaz]

Here's basically what happened:

Poseidon 0 gets orders to undock. Poseidon 0 undocks. Poseidon 1 gets orders to dock. Poseidon 0 gets orders to "move to waypoint." Cargo container previously docked teleports to poseidon. I've played with the delays, and I think the cargo container still teleports to poseidon 0 when it is docked to poseidon 1.

[Trivial Psychic]

Oh.  I was having a problem with the Chronos, where it would arrive with something docked to it (either cargo or bridge dockpoint), drop that something off, then dock to a cargo module on the cargo dockpoint.  The Chronos then has orders to head off to a waypoint, but just before it moves, the cargo module suddenly swaps to the bridge dockpoint.  I've worked it down to how the model itself interacts with FSO, since I never saw that in FS_Retail.  I think it might have something to do with the name of the cargo dockpoint, so I will try to change it and see if that fixes it.  Also note that this will not happen if the Chronos was not previously docked to anything.

Later!