[Zacam]

I was playing "A Flaming Sword," where the Knossos is destroyed by meson bombs, and the two wings of Maras you're supposed to lure back to the Renenant have been changed to Astaroths. It wouldn't really matter, except that the dialogue still refers to them as Maras. Also, around 8:30 when Lambda 2 and 3 are delivering their bombs, Pisces wing shows up asleep at the wheel, flying slowly in straight lines, only evading if I attack them, and never attacking anything.

The Maras issue has already been addressed as a Retail issue, but I'm putting to question: Should we fix it so that they are Maras instead of Asteroths and assign the Asteroths to a Mara Wing? Would anybody be willing to test if it unduly breaks the mission flow?

Pisces is indeed asleep at the wheel, because apparently did not give them _any_ AI Goals, anywhere. I _could_ add in "$AI Goals: ( goals ( ai-chase-any 50 ) )" so that they match Libra and Capricorn wings, but that will also have to extensively tested to make sure it doesn't bodge things up.

[High Max]

;-)

[Goober5000]

Pisces is indeed asleep at the wheel, because apparently did not give them _any_ AI Goals, anywhere. I _could_ add in "$AI Goals: ( goals ( ai-chase-any 50 ) )" so that they match Libra and Capricorn wings, but that will also have to extensively tested to make sure it doesn't bodge things up.

What did they do in retail?  Because if they did something back then, it means that somewhere along the line the default behavior was changed.  If so, it should be fixed.

[Zacam]

I'm saying that gave no AI orders to Pisces wing. That means "Retail Mission" they still sit on their ass doing nothing.

[Goober5000]

What I mean is, if you play the same (unmodified retail) mission with both retail FS2 and SCP, do you get the same results?

[Zacam]

Gee. Considering that there are no AI Goals, the answer should be obvious.

[Goober5000]

Gee. Considering that there are no AI Goals, the answer should be obvious.

And what prompted that snarky response?   No, the answer is not obvious, because FSO and retail FS2 have different codebases.

SCP programmers (myself included) have introduced bugs into the AI code in the process of fixing other bugs.  We think most of them have been fixed, but it's possible that a few remain.  It's important for us to nail down the specific differences between AI behavior in FSO and retail, including in the edge cases.  This is one of those edge cases.

[Zacam]

In both Retail exe and FSO, the Retail mission has Pisces wing sitting on their thumbs.

And nobody deserved the snarky response. But I would expect that, same as I do, when some one has a question regarding combinations of events and has the ability to determine them by their own means, shouldn't it be more usefuly at large that they do so? You and anybody else has the same level of ability to run the retail data on both a retail exe and the FSO exe, so innstead of pushing the question on the findings, it could have been collaborated on by your own findings.

So, now the question is, do we leave it as is, or give Pisces wing AI Goals? Personally, I dislike them just sitting on their thumbs, but I dislike even more hearing people scream that I broke a mission because they're now doing something.

I've attached a test mission where Pisces has the "$AI Goals: ( goals ( ai-chase-any 50 ) )" added for people to test.

[attachment deleted by Tolwyn]

[Goober5000]

And nobody deserved the snarky response. But I would expect that, same as I do, when some one has a question regarding combinations of events and has the ability to determine them by their own means, shouldn't it be more usefuly at large that they do so? You and anybody else has the same level of ability to run the retail data on both a retail exe and the FSO exe, so instead of pushing the question on the findings, it could have been collaborated on by your own findings.

Ever heard of delegation?  If you already know the answer, or if even if you just know half of the answer, it's more efficient for you to put in the small amount of time required to round out your understanding of the problem than it would be for me to research the problem from scratch.

Your point would be valid if you had no idea how to characterize the problem, and thus were starting from scratch -- then we'd be at equal footing.  But this is not one of those cases.

[Zacam]

So, does any one have any thoughts on the mission or proposed change as yea or nay?

(And no Goob, I'm not ignoring your response, but in the interest of keeping discussion topical, I'm preferring to reply elsewhere on it.)

[Zex Marquise]

Well, if you're still debating on whether you should fix Pisces or leave them as-is, I will tell you that in all the times I have played through FreeSpace, I have never seen the AI go dead the way it does now in Flaming Sword. It completely and entirely jars the player out of the immersion experience. I'm sure everyone would be grateful if it got fixed, even if it means retesting it several times over to ensure that Pisces don't suddenly become unusually competent and mess up mission balance. No one will blame the coders if it doesn't work right the first time. AI is a crapshoot.

[The E]

I agree wholeheartedly. Give the AI something to do besides sitting around.

[Mongoose]

Yeah, I sincerely doubt that wanted a random wing of lobotomized fighters in one of their missions.

[Sololop]

I have a problem with the mission "A Lion at the Door"

I was playing through the campaign again, but the majority of the messages in this mission do not send. (All from Command send, but almost none from your Wingman) However, they worked in all the previous missions.

Only when using the re-released 3.6.10 mediaVPs, plus the patch.

Weird..

[Zacam]

There is a bug in the patch version where that happens, though there is _no_ explaination as to why.

This will be resolved, but in the meantime, don't worry. While it'll sound strange hearing Command responding to people you are not hearing, the mission progresses just fine.

[-Norbert-]

Ever since the re-release of the 3.6.10 mediaVPs I get errors on the last two missions (both played fine in the original 3.6.10 release).

On sm3-fs09.fs2 (battle of the titans II or something like that) - the mission were you have to escort the Bastion - I get this error followed by several more.

Code: [Select]

Error: SM3-09.fs2(line 989:
Error: Required token = [#Wings] or [$Name:], found [+Respawn priority: 0] .

File: PARSELO.CPP
Line: 670


Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------

I also ran the debug-build and attached the fs2_open.log.

If I override the mission with the one form the root_fs2.vp I can play it (albeit it doesn't look so good) and afterwards I get some errors for the last mission too.

Code: [Select]

Error: Invalid point.

In sexpression: ( <
   ( distance
      "Jump Node right:1"
      "Duamutef"
   )
   300
)
(Error appears to be: Duamutef)
File: MissionParse.cpp
Line: 6096


Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------
Again I attached the log from the debug build, but renamed it into fs2_open2.log so it has another name than the first log.

Does anyone have an idea what's going on and how I can fix it (other than using the retail mission files)?

[attachment deleted by Tolwyn]

[The E]

Is there a reason why you're not using the patch?

[-Norbert-]

Yes and it's a rather embarresing one....
Sorry to bother you, I simply overlooked it before....

It works fine now, I didn't even have to replay the battle of the titans.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

CubeMap.dds looks nice... but what's it actually for?

[Zacam]

It for the fact that due to an over-sight, when we decided to include Woolies cubemap, it wasn't checked to see if it had mip-maps.

I, at the time, was not aware that the engine required the cubemap to have mip-maps and if it did not, that the engine would then mip-map it itself (even if the -mipmap option was not selected in the launcher). Given that I have a DX10 capable card, this was not a problem. For systems that cannot, however, manage to dynamically mip map a cube map, you get an ASSERT error on !resize.

This cubemap (also linked in the third post of the reRelease topic) has the necessary mip-maps and should resolve this issue for anyone having that error (noted by crashing non-debug builds when attempting to view the techroom or F3.)