Fixed Unable to find battling fleets after dropping out of world map

[Pieter Boelen]

Sail-To indeed would show if they are around and will make an arrow show up above the target ship too.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Just a note for Levis:

This here is apparently the worst problem that was introduced between Beta 3 and Beta 3.1.
I don't remember there being many differences between the two though, so it should be relatively easy to find with WinMerge.

 

[Levis]

Just a quick tought. Is there a difference with this problem when using the larger map or the normal map? I can imagine the ships being places further with the larger or smaller map because they are calculated in a relative distance ..... dunno for sure if the problem is here but could someone test if this is the case?

 

[DavyJack]

This is a new thing. The battle is there......somewhere. If one is lucky the ships are in sight but usually I do not know where they are and can not see them.

Hmm a thought. I wonder if "sail to" would show where they are?

Sail-To indeed would show if they are around and will make an arrow show up above the target ship too.

Aye, but most of the times battling fleets and or regular fleet(s) are not present after dropping out of world map. When did this start again? I think its when the weather(storm thingy's) or ship encounter thing was adjusted for the iron man and realistic mode. W/c is now kinda sucks 'cause its killing the arcade experience.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

It is killing the experience in all versions that use the world map. Sail to does not work because the ships are too far away.

 

[DavyJack]

Oh so its even worse than I thought? Damn. Well, I sure hope this thing will be taken care soon.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

The only thing I remember being changed between Beta 3 and Beta 3.1 were some values in NK.c .
But I think Hylie already tried resetting those and that didn't work.

 

[Levis]

If someone could test the following for me while I take a look at the code if I can find a more permanent fix.
Open the nk.c and search for "DIRECTENCOUNTERDISTANCE"

There are two instances for it. A value for the realistic/open sea mode and the other modes. I believe for the others it should be on 1000 and for the realistic it should be on 2250.
Try to set them both to for example 500 and see if this makes a difference.

 

[DavyJack]

I tested it and some things are weird. (Log files attached) I often being transported/teleported to random places after exiting the worldmap.
I'm not that sure if it helped but I think it did. I encounter regular fleets just fine but battling fleets, no.
Oh and I have this strange note btw:

 

[Levis]

whats the difference again between normal fleets and batteling fleets?
You mean warships or merchants?

The kraken error is very strange .... maybe this is the cause for the problems ... could you upload your nk.c also? I got the feeling yours is different then mine cause the line they say an error is looks very strange to have an error.

 

[DavyJack]

whats the difference again between normal fleets and batteling fleets?
You mean warships or merchants?

Battling fleets? Its like an on going sea battle. And normal fleets, no on going battle.

The kraken error is very strange .... maybe this is the cause for the problems ... could you upload your nk.c also? I got the feeling yours is different then mine cause the line they say an error is looks very strange to have an error.

Oh indeed. I removed the waiting/recharge time of the Kraken attack.
I changed this line:

   if(CheckAttribute(pchar, "KrakenAttack"))        PostEvent("EnableKraken", 5*60*1000);

To:

   if(CheckAttribute(pchar, "KrakenAttack"))        DeleteAttribute(pchar, "KrakenAttack");

But anyway, my original NK.c file attached. I learned this from Sire Pieter. Hehehe.

 

[Levis]

That change isn't the difference but your NK file is indeed different from mine (I was modding in it so probally because of that I think).

it's erroring in the event where the kraken is finished, which is very odd cause the kraken shouldn't do anything. but I think it's not that much of a problem atm.

So the problem only is with batteling fleets? They are spawned wrong? You don't see them or they are to far away?

 

[DavyJack]

They don't show up. I don't know if they are too far away but the sail-to button doesn't show them or the mini map.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

The battling fleets are there....somewhere. A lot depends on exactly where you are in relation to them when you leave the world map and go to direct sail. Usually they are to far away to detect, sometimes they are close enough to detect but it takes so long to get there that the battle is over and they sail away from you, and very rarely you spawn right on top of the battle.

It used to be very reliable as to how far away they were and you could choose which side of the battle to spawn on.

 

[Levis]

I noticed also that island are often way to closeby, so it seems to me something is going wrong with the map coordinates to the sea coordinate conversion. Looking into it now.
Do you know for sure it did work right with 3.0?

 

[DavyJack]

Do you know for sure it did work right with 3.0?

I say I'm 90% sure. Don't remember if it were back then with the testing period before it was released that it has no problems with the ship encounter thing.

 

[Levis]

I found out I'm actually still running 3.0 and I have the problem sometimes so it seems it was present already there. I tought to remember that also. Checked with the updated version and nothing really changed, so would need to go one version earlier to see or I need to find a structure in this mess of code and see where the coords of the ships are actually defined. I think I'm slowely getting there, it seems the problem only arises when there are more then 1 group op ships. This can be with a battle where there are two groups fighting, or when you are close to an island and the ships on the coast are also logged in. I think it has something to do with this in sea.c (dont mind the traces):

case AITASK_MOVE:
                    Trace("Attak Move");
                    Trace("Check task "+rGroup.Type);
                    if (CheckAttribute(rGroup, "Task.Target.Pos"))
                    {
                        Trace("coords present");
                        Group_SetTaskMove(sGroupID, stf(rGroup.Task.Target.Pos.x), stf(rGroup.Task.Target.Pos.z));
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        Trace("coords missing");
                        x = 10000.0 * sin(stf(rGroup.Pos.ay));
                        z = 10000.0 * cos(stf(rGroup.Pos.ay));
                        Group_SetTaskMove(sGroupID, x, z);
                    }
                break;

Everytime I have more then 1 group it seems the code goes to the part which I labelled "coords missing". And then the game generates coordinates which are way to far from the player. So I think there is a group defined which shouldn't be defined or something like that, or information gets lost somewhere.
I'm still looking into it but its hard to retrace how everything goes. But slowly I'm beginning to see how this all works. And I'm also beginning to see how it could be done much better. If this works again I'm sure I'm going to rewrite the ship spawning script because its really crap. But thats for later.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Have you been playing around with the Kraken, DavyJack? I VERY much doubt that has anything to do with it.

In fact, if you were doing multiple attacks at the same time, I can see that causing that error message.
This is, of course, not possible in the normal Build files; only in your own because you have removed the check-line preventing that.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

You're talking about a Sea AI group now? The only thing that springs to mind is the recently-added MUTINEERS group.
Could that be related? But I don't remember this problem being EVER reported in Beta 3.

 

[Levis]

I honestly don't know yet. Could very well be it always was a problem but sometime just made it worse .... Haven't found it out completely yet. Just trying to reverse engineer how the process works first and where things go weird. And when I should have 2 groups and it shows 3 this count as weird and I'm going to see why that happens .