Fractal Softworks Forum

Starsector => Bug Reports & Support => Topic started by: j01 on February 18, 2012, 05:25:06 PM

Title: My 0.5a bugs, inconsistencies, etc. list
Post by: j01 on February 18, 2012, 05:25:06 PM
1) Shift-clicking while refitting: If you don't have any more of that weapon, it still works and thus duplicates the component for you free of charge.

2) Omni weapon slots do not let you place components of 1 category smaller like regular slots do. For example, I can equip a small laser in a medium energy slot, but I can't equip a small weapon of any kind in a medium omni slot. One or the other is a bug if this is not an intended drawback of omni slots.

3) During combat, the AI does not recognize disabled ship wreckage. If there is a wreckage between the AI and an enemy, it will waste ammo hitting the wreckage, and if there is any objective that is past a wreckage, the AI will crash into the wreckage and damage itself trying to get there. This lack of collision detection is also true for asteroids.

4) The AI is very bad at shield and flux management in general, but especially:

    > Disengages shields when too close to the enemy. It probably shouldn't let shields down when an enemy is on its radar at all, due to the extreme distance of some weapons, and how ineffective certain shield types and sizes can be when long range fire approaches.

    > Doesn't understand that larger ships' shields engage more slowly. A capital ship that relies on massive shield surface area is going to get wrecked by MIRVs and missile barrages from more than one direction (and even somtimes from head on), hit-and-run fighters/fast frigate groups, and even the most lackadaisical flanking maneuvers because it doesn't engage its shield the moment a blip hits the radar, and sometimes not even before the enemy's salvo is within spitting distance. I'm looking at you, Astral carrier.

    > Apparently seems to think it has omni shields when it doesn't. I do a lot of feed watching the AI during combat, and their general behavior seems to suggest this. Shields with fixed directions and limited coverage often seem to try aiming its "mouse cursor" as priority instead of turning. This might just be a flaw in my observations though, and they could just be preparing their PD weapons.

    > Just does not back off or stop firing its weapons when its flux approaches critical or near critical levels before dropping shields and/or venting. Even a paragon-class should probably stop bouncing its uber rapidfire 700-flux-per-second laser cannons ineffectually off the enemies' shields when it is being blasted from all sides, if only so it will last until some backup arrives to take the heat off, instead of helping to overload itself and venting right in the thick of it, thus exposing its gooey center to one hundred million bullets. Prioritizing weapons by their flux generation when things get heated would generally be a good thing for the AI to learn.


5) I'm not sure if this is the case with any other weapon, but currently if you try to fire one or several antimatter cannons and you don't have enough flux left to handle it, your flux maxes out and you don't fire anything. Even if this isn't unintentional, it would probably be better to just play a brief failure noise and prevent anything from happening at all, even the flux generation.

6) There are many inconsistencies with the standard ship loadouts and what the ships can actually handle. I've seen this mentioned in the case of overstepping the ordinance bounds, but many of the default loadouts equip the wrong weapon size or category into its slots as well. For example, the Aurora-class default loadout equips an LRM rack (large category) into its top-right missile slot, which is a small missile slot.

7) In various places (mostly ingame, not in main/settings menus), random letters in text are missing. For example, in combat, the first three to four letters are missing from certain orders, or a single letter in the middle of a word is missing in other orders. In the fleet menu out of combat, the "scuttle" command or whatever it is, is displayed only as "uttle hip", or somesuch. There are many other instances. Possibly related, there are several little intermittent graphical glitches in the planets, fleets, and other objects that seem most prevalent when zoomed out, but they are barely noticeable.

8) The game stutters fairly horribly in all places sometimes, both with graphics and sound, simultaneously. The computer I play on (my friend's, but he barely uses it) isn't THAT ancient, with a 1.9ghz processor, 1gig of RAM, windows XP, a PCI ATI Radeon 9550 or something like that, with the best and most up to date drivers possible. It runs 3d games like morrowind on max settings and oblivion at minimum settings just fine, but can't run Space Pirates and Zombies at all due to how slow it is, for comparison.

I'll edit with additional examples as I find or remember them.