Author Topic: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)  (Read 16856 times)

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Offline Tomo

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Ok, this is weird.

I'm definitely seeing the multi-bombing bug in SirKnightly's build 5548 - a veritable storm of bombs coming from these Seraphim.

It appears to affect Seraphim much more than the other Shivan bombers in this mod though. (FSCRP_Warzone)

(Edit)
From my testing, this bug appears somewhere between 5515 and 5541

Can someone check my findings?

(Edit)
Further to that, I think this particular change is happening between 5521 and 5522

[attachment deleted by admin]
« Last Edit: October 03, 2009, 11:06:42 am by Tomo »

 

Offline Goober5000

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Aha.  5522 was Sushi's ginormous AI commit.  Sushi needs to take another look at it then.

 

Offline chief1983

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Hopefully this a final "This is where this happened thing".  This one is getting to be like pin the tail on the donkey.
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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Well lets see Sushi's AI fixes involve the use of afterburners if I recall.  From reading this the behavior seems to have changed in Kara's afterburner change as well.  Sushi just recently fixed an afterburner bug.  So did the behavior change  again since that commit (5614)?
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Offline Goober5000

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Sushi's 5522 commit was his merge of ai_profiles into the AI struct.  And it looks like he didn't do it right at all (for one thing, he uses array references as integer values all over the place).  As soon as I get time I'm just going to revert his whole commit.

 

Offline Sushi

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Sushi's 5522 commit was his merge of ai_profiles into the AI struct.  And it looks like he didn't do it right at all (for one thing, he uses array references as integer values all over the place).  As soon as I get time I'm just going to revert his whole commit.

Aw, crap.

I'll be on IRC in a couple of hours.

 

Offline Ranger1

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed the uber bomber issue.  On a number of missions in Procoyn Insurgency this was me  :mad:

 

Offline Sushi

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
I finally got around to debugging this, and it should be fixed in 5618.

It turns out I committed a truly terrible crime: I forgot to initialize some variables. Meaning those variables can be set to ANYTHING when fs2_open runs. Variables which happen to control the AI fire-delay scale for secondary weapons. Including bombs. Meaning the delay between bomb firing could be forever... or zero. And it could be different for different ships, and for different people running the program, and even different every time you load the same stinking mission.

A terrible oversight, I know, but fortunately easily remedied. Please make sure the 5618 fix works. I did my own testing to verify, and bombing behavior now appears to be the same between 5618, 3.6.10 final, and retail FS2.

 
Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Okay two more things;


The shield management (enhanced shield control behaviour by SCP AI) behaviour is also from the same build, 5522 as far as I can see, played the mission a couple times on 5521 and 5522 and the behaviour is definitely different (no mods/same difficulty (insane), just apocalypse a bunch of times and watched the nephilim/nahema shields).
I need some peeps to corroborate/refute my testings when someone has some time.


The bomber behaviour is definitely fixed in 5618 (Unless I've had a bunch of playthroughs with it randoming to the default behaviour :P), and the bomb 'difficulty to shoot downiness' is still there (especially in multi as described in the post on page 2, though this might be unrelated?).
"Neutrality means that you don't really care, cuz the struggle goes on even when you're not there: Blind and unaware."

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I know we're not the only ones, and we were not the first,
and unapologetically we'll stand behind each word."

 

Offline Fury

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
I used QuantumDelta as a guinea pig for an experiment. In this experiment I created a new AI profile that contained only default values. QuantumDelta tested it fairly well and said there's not much, if any difference to default fs2_open AI. Which debunks my theory of FS2 Retail AI profile being b0rked.

So this leads to two possibilities;
1) Current default AI profile default values are not same defaults that the retail FS2 had.
2) There is still code issues causing AI to not to behave like it did in retail.

First should be fairly trivial matter to double-check for anyone who has SVN access. Second is hairy mess, if there's a code issue that causes this difference in AI behavior, it affects all AI profiles no matter what values are being used. Which means that once this AI code bug has been sorted out, there's fairly big chance it will affect mission and gameplay balance of any mod and total conversion, whether they are using custom AI profiles or not.

 

Offline Goober5000

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Number 1 is not the problem; the default profile has been checked very carefully to have the same exact values as in retail FS2.  In effect, it was moved from being hard-coded in the source code, to being read from the hard-coded file.

It's gotta be number 2 -- and, in fact, I suspected as much based on my testing of ST:R.  The first priority should be to fix the AI incompatibility.  Once that's done, if anything has dramatically changed, we can add a new AI profile option to activate the "buggy" AI that mods relied on.

 

Offline Sushi

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Right. So for every AI difference we see between Retail and FSO, we need:

1. Clearly defined example of what the difference is.
2. The ability to reproduce the problem (otherwise nearly impossible to debug).
3. When the difference appeared.

QD's been doing a great job at bringing things up so far... but we should probably put a comprehensive list of outstanding AI bugs together somewhere. I guess Mantis is the right place for that.

 
Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
I've mantis one of them last week end  :)

$Formula: ( every-time
   ( has-time-elapsed "0" )
   ( Do-Nothing
   )
   ( send-message
      "#Dalek"
      "High"
      "Pro-crasti-nate"
   )
   )
)
+Name: Procratination
+Repeat Count: 99999999999
+Interval: 1

 
Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
I have been absolutely rushed off my feet since late November, so I apologise for my absence.

I haven't forgotten about this and I have in mind that Fury asked me to address/list what bugs/peculiarities are left.

Honestly, I want to double check my entire list, because I want to be sure, and right now the only one I /am/ very sure of is the 'not-flinching' which is of course my biggest bugbear.

Anyway, I will get back to giving feed back on as many builds as I can on the issues I find as soon as I can, but needless to say thanks to Sushi and several other peoples hard work a lot of them are indeed either fixed or a lot better these days (...though I'm still considering using one of Fury's AI builds for /everything/ >.>).

Like I said, I want to test through before I make another (current) list.
The previous list was all constructed before Sushi spotted his slight mistake.
"Neutrality means that you don't really care, cuz the struggle goes on even when you're not there: Blind and unaware."

"We still believe in all the things that we stood by before,
and after everything we've seen here maybe even more.
I know we're not the only ones, and we were not the first,
and unapologetically we'll stand behind each word."

 

Offline Goober5000

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
QD, you might want to check out this thread: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=65138.0

 
Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Right, christmas finally gave me the time to check through most of the stuff I had left to check.
I should point out that although I am distinctly aware that it isn't retail behaviour and is still slightly harder than retail AI - Fury's AI is significantly more 'true to freespace' than SCPs current AI, However, most of the bugs in quotes have been fixed.

AI; shield management has dramatically increased.
AI; "not flinching" leading to super-AI accuracy, even to the point where they push the turning limits on their ship.
AI; missile evasion / CM launching is greatly improved (leading to dumbfire missiles on occasion (CM fired almost simultaneously to Missile launch, doesn't bother me much since I don't use aspect seekers if given the choice but I imagine it could annoy some people :P)
AI; Now bombs like a player (well, an ok one), leading to fleets of incoming bombs from wings of bombers (they fire -> change bank, -> fire, etc)
AI; Shivans use "slide" far, far more effectively on some missions haven't worked out what causes it solidly (*looks like collisions and/or target swapping mostly) but they can circle strafe a player.

Subsystem damage - seems a bit high (possibly due to more CPU time free to calculate it), this is most obvious with beams (AAA) but that may also be related to the lack of beamwhack, it is however visible with primaries that have smaller projectiles (subach/kayser/SDG) as well.

Collision damage - especially subsystem damage from collisions seems to be much more punishing, especially on multilplayer (collision physics was always a bit screwed up on multi, the client had a tendency to take a little more damage than the host, but at the moment this has been exacerbated massively - skimming a capital ship at very low speed can leave your fighter on very little hull, or even destroy your ship), it's very difficulty to furball properly because of it (*ramming used to be a tactical decision, now it's near suicide).

Bombs - seem to be significantly harder to shoot down on Multi (their tracking isn't correct - even lag adjusted), they also seem to be very slightly harder to shoot down from behind on Single/As host, but on multi it's virtually impossible, they also don't always report if they have been shot down to the clients - which leaves the clients chasing bombs which aren't there.

Beam accuracy - now this one might raise a few eyebrows, but beams were somewhat inaccurate at the best of times when they were introduced, beams could never be dodged or evaded (*'cept by ducking around a corner whilst they powered up), they either hit, or they miss, currently they seem to use the normal AI code for aiming, and thus have increased weapon accuracy, leading to them virtually never (*never in some cases)missing, when they would have previously missed ~30% of the time.

SCP builds seem to randomly completely lose sync between host and clients (very rare) - it used to happen with laggier clients on Retail, but currently it happens even with sub 100 pings.

The client sometimes crash when the host jumps whilst the client is in respawn (about to get the respawn screen, after their ship has exploded) - Believing this to be a retail bug, but I don't really remember, also other than this condition I'm not sure exactly what causes this.

Another old bug that's gotten slightly worse; Secondaries on ships that are warping in (trebs at a Ravana front beams for example) seem to 'miss' for no discernible reason other than the capships speed is over ~100 or whatever the actual speed is (hard to judge sometimes, but it seems to be just over 100 that this behaviour begins).

Debris - another old bug, not really one that has been made worse by SCP but one that would be greatly appreciated to be fixed. On the host side, Debris is rendered correctly, however on the client side, it's rendered completely differently, different sized debris, different directions of travel, and the real ones obviously are totally invisible, so clients end up 'dying for no reason' on occasion because debris has clouted them in the face.
The remaining bugs are below;

AI; "not flinching" leading to super-AI accuracy.

Subsystem damage - seems a bit high (possibly due to more CPU time free to calculate it?), this is most obvious with beams (AAA) but that may also be related to the lack of beamwhack, it is however visible with primaries that have smaller projectiles (subach/kayser/SDG) as well as missiles, subsystems seem to take 'clearer damage', I'm not suggesting the value of subsystem damage on the weapons involved have changed, because even (see below) collision subsystem damage is dramatically higher.

Collision damage - especially subsystem damage from collisions seems to be much more punishing, especially on multilplayer (collision physics was always a bit screwed up on multi, the client had a tendency to take a little more damage than the host, but at the moment this has been exacerbated massively - skimming a capital ship at very low speed can leave your fighter on very little hull, or even destroy your ship), it's very difficulty to furball properly because of it (*ramming used to be a tactical decision, now it's near suicide for clients).

Bombs - seem to be significantly harder to shoot down on Multi (their tracking isn't correct - even lag adjusted), they also seem to be very slightly harder to shoot down from behind on Single/As host, but on multi as a client it's virtually impossible, they also don't always report if they have even been shot down to the clients - which leaves the clients chasing bombs which aren't there, and being unable to shoot down ones that are. <----- this needs some double checking from other people please!

SCP builds seem to randomly completely lose sync between host and clients (very rare) - it used to happen with laggier clients on Retail, but currently it happens even with sub 100 pings, causes are completely unknown too (or, at least, no one has suggested one to me, happens most regularly on knife fight (very busy mission) and the cold sword (relatively quiet mission)).

The client sometimes crash when the host jumps whilst the client is in respawn (about to get the respawn screen, after their ship has exploded) - Believing this to be a retail bug, but I don't really remember, also other than this condition I'm not sure exactly what causes this.

Another old bug that's gotten slightly worse; Secondaries on ships that are warping in (trebs at a Ravana front beams for example) seem to 'miss' for no discernible reason other than the capships speed is over ~100 or whatever the actual speed is (hard to judge sometimes, but it seems to be just over 100 that this behaviour begins, basically, sometimes missiles will go through the ships hull, other times it will impact (Even if you've aimed it correctly) on the subsystem and do no damage).

Debris - another old bug, not really one that has been made worse by SCP but one that would be greatly appreciated to be fixed. On the host side, Debris is rendered correctly, however on the client side, it's rendered completely differently, different sized debris, different directions of travel, and the real ones obviously are totally invisible, so clients end up 'dying for no reason' on occasion because debris has clouted them in the face.


A few of the multi-only bugs will probably have to be fixed for WiH to be practical online.
"Neutrality means that you don't really care, cuz the struggle goes on even when you're not there: Blind and unaware."

"We still believe in all the things that we stood by before,
and after everything we've seen here maybe even more.
I know we're not the only ones, and we were not the first,
and unapologetically we'll stand behind each word."

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
Quote
A few of the multi-only bugs will probably have to be fixed for WiH to be practical online.

Bluh?

 

Offline Wanderer

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
About the test.. have you used retail data or mediavps or some other dataset?
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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
For comparison I stuck mostly to one build, I did update to 5716, and after that I was using the build immediately after the countermeasure fix, which I can't find the number of now (knew I forgot something/shouldn't have deleted it).

All comparisons are "vanilla" SCP vs Patch 1.20 Retail.

Any further tests will be done on the latest but I'm pretty much done again now.
« Last Edit: December 30, 2009, 06:46:46 pm by QuantumDelta »
"Neutrality means that you don't really care, cuz the struggle goes on even when you're not there: Blind and unaware."

"We still believe in all the things that we stood by before,
and after everything we've seen here maybe even more.
I know we're not the only ones, and we were not the first,
and unapologetically we'll stand behind each word."

 

Offline Wanderer

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Re: Balance(Bugs) Vanilla vs SCP (Philosophy?)
I was referring to the game data as it should preferably be kept the same regardless of the exe in use. That is SCP builds should also be tested against the retail data.
Do not meddle in the affairs of coders for they are soggy and hard to light