[General Battuta]

Cause it ain't.

We should check how this behaves in retail vs how it behaves now.

[TopAce]

I don't see this breaking any backwards compatibility so why not. But why would you use it as such?

[Novachen]

Stumpled upon this one once, but i have to say, that the current behaviour make sense to me.

[DefCynodont119]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this what the "is-in-mission" SEXP is for?

[General Battuta]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this what the "is-in-mission" SEXP is for?

Is-in-mission won't stay true once a ship is dead. So say you have the GTD Gadzooks in mission at time 0, and it dies at time 1. If you want to check whether it's ever been in the mission at time 100000, you can't use either is-in-mission or has-arrived-delay (since it's not in the mission AND it hasn't arrived). But you could use an or (is in mission) (is destroyed delay).

But I don't want to change this behavior, it is what it is. I just want to be sure WE haven't changed it since retail.

[AdmiralRalwood]

I'd be very surprised if this has changed since retail, since the basic behavior is very straightforward (has-arrived-delay checks the mission log, and ships that start in the mission are never logged as "arrived"); that being said, just because I can't see anything in the code that would make it behave differently doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't behave differently, so if somebody could test and confirm, it would be appreciated. Or I could do it, but I'm lazy.

[karajorma]

This absolutely would break retail.

Has-arrived-delay always worked that way. It's only meant to be used for ships which aren't in the mission at t=0 (the mission designer is supposed to know which ships are there at t=0 even if this is dependent on a SEXP for the arrival cue). This behaviour used to be well known enough that I considered it an intermediate level question when I wrote my original FRED quiz.

We could always change the text for the SEXP if it isn't clear enough though.

[General Battuta]

I absolutely agree, it shouldn't be changed.

Just as a point of curiosity, though — would it break retail? Or anything? How often are mission designers going to be checking if a ship present at mission start has arrived, and counting on getting a 'no'?

The only thing I can imagine breaking is us accidentally UN-breaking stuff which has been broken the whole time.

[karajorma]

I can definitely see having a ship's arrival cue being dependent on -is-previous-event-true so that the ship is either present at mission start or arrives later on in the mission. 

In that case, you would simply test if the ship has arrived for the purposes of sending messages etc.


In fact, I'm pretty sure I actually did that in a few missions.