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Author Topic: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.  (Read 4723 times)

sqrt(-1)

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #45 on: September 17, 2021, 03:53:55 PM »

Because you refuse to accept that you're wrong about it doing so "pointlessly".
If there is one thing I refuse to accept here, then it is that you have ever written down a single argument.
The very first thing you told me is that what I ask for isn't a feature (what fruitful sharing of wisdom) which you have simply spammed repeatedly ever since, followed in the same first post with an intend to ridicule all my arguments with a comparison that I allegedly expect a saw to do the same as a hammer. And then you seriously dare to accuse me of being the toxic one here!

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Yeah, it's almost like they should put a big pop-up notification somewhere on the screen that the AI is now in control- Oh wait!
Yeah, one line in a fast stream of text that virtually everyone is ignoring because of its totalitarian verbosity of dullest state changes which should be clarified graphically and persistently by the UI instead (as in virtually any other game), about that an autopilot has been activated, TOTALLY makes clear that those damn paying noobs should expect that some autofiring setting will be disabled when issuing a command to go to point B!
« Last Edit: September 17, 2021, 05:02:26 PM by sqrt(-1) »
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #46 on: September 17, 2021, 04:17:08 PM »

That you start this nonsense again of explaining how some aspects of the pointless autofiring mode override, that I entirely want to eliminate, works, right after I have just explained to you why this is absurd, only shows that you too entirely lack a genuine intent to even try to understand what I am saying.
I'm trying to explain that you can't just do away with the auto fire toggle. It's fundamental to how the AI is designed and if you simply lock auto fire settings without changing anything else, the AI no longer works in a reasonable way. The reason it's designed that way is to give the AI the same level of control that the player has so the AI doesn't have an unfair advantage controlling all weapons manually. In order to change that, you need to fundamentally rework the AI. If you think it's such a simple change then make a mod and do it yourself.

The reason that linked fire doesn't work the way you want is because what you want is really complicated. Managing weapon cool-downs to sync bursts is super non-trivial to generalize across any possible combination of weapons that could be put in the same group. Again, if you want it, make a mod and do it yourself.
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sqrt(-1)

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #47 on: September 17, 2021, 04:44:12 PM »

I'm trying to explain that you can't just do away with the auto fire toggle. It's fundamental to how the AI is designed and if you simply lock auto fire settings without changing anything else, the AI no longer works in a reasonable way. The reason it's designed that way is to give the AI the same level of control that the player has so the AI doesn't have an unfair advantage controlling all weapons manually. In order to change that, you need to fundamentally rework the AI.
The AI is performing the switching and toggling within milliseconds, which you can easily observe directly.
Complaining that too many manual firing groups would allegedly destroy an AI's handicap, when I suggest to not disable autofiring, is just absurd. Autofiring should obviously work identical for the human player and AI.

Multiple manual firing groups could obvisouly be handicapped just as well as a single one, if that was truly intended. But again, this has nothing to do with what I am suggesting anyway because my intent is solely that the AI should not disable the autofiring & linked mode that the player has defined.

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If you think it's such a simple change then make a mod and do it yourself.
I am overwhelmed by the degree of constructiveness, care to make the game better and overal expression of good intent with your 'suggestion'.

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The reason that linked fire doesn't work the way you want is because what you want is really complicated. Managing weapon cool-downs to sync bursts is super non-trivial to generalize across any possible combination of weapons that could be put in the same group. Again, if you want it, make a mod and do it yourself.
That the AI shouldn't ignore a linked fire mode setting is complicated?

It is bizarre how you still insist on your misunderstanding that I want some new, complicated management of anything!

All I suggest is that the AI should stop overriding the firing mode and no one has presented even the slightest valid point why this would cause any negative side effects and do anything other than making everything related much simpler, easier to understand and more controllable.
« Last Edit: September 17, 2021, 04:54:03 PM by sqrt(-1) »
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #48 on: September 17, 2021, 05:19:08 PM »

I've just explained to you multiple times how making the auto fire toggle locked in its initial condition would make the AI perform much much worse without any other changes to the AI. You need to rework the AI for the change you're suggesting to even do something like want you want.

I'm trying to tell you that what you're suggesting won't work the way you want it to, and it would be a ton of work to do what you want without even any guarantee that there would be improvement, and also the downside of a significant increase in the amount of decisions the player has to make (and the number of mistakes a new player can make) in setting all these toggles that have a huge impact on AI performance where they currently are mostly just decisions for convince on the player ship and the AI will do just fine regardless.


I've also been trying to explain that in order to get the behavior that you want from the linked fire toggle (weapons always firing at the same time), you need a much more complicated system that manages weapon cool downs, otherwise the weapon group will inevitably be fired at moment when the weapon arcs aren't lined up or the weapon cool downs aren't all ready and the weapons will end up out of sync. Once again, the change you suggest won't result in the behavior you want.

That's why I say 'do it yourself', it doesn't seem like you will accept these things that everyone is saying, unless you find out for yourself how things work, and no one has the time to make all these changes just to prove to you that what you're suggesting won't work the way you want it to.
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Histidine

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #49 on: September 17, 2021, 07:43:28 PM »

Since the proximate cause of the weapon group overrides is the AI (briefly) taking control of the player ship when the player ship is given orders on the TAB map, it would have been far more efficient to suggest that the player ship not receive TAB map commands in the first place, except when already on autopilot.

The sole purpose of autofire is to enable a higher, practical firing priority over other weapon groups. For example, that the AI overrides the autofire of Heavy Blasters in an Aurora, and instead prioritizes low projectile damage weapons to consume the last drops of flux capacity so that my Heavy Blasters never fire near flux limit, ruins my intent to take down armour effectively and ruins the chance of overloading an enemy ship with my guns in most critical situations.
If the ship is fluxed enough that firing small guns interferes with its ability to fire Heavy Blasters, and your expectation is that it continue to fire the Heavy Blasters regardless of any other consideration, then all I can say is the AI ship understands this better than you do and directly improves its own chances of survival by disregarding your intent. (Not that it should continue firing the small weapons either, arguably). At best, it's going to be forced to drop its shield, and at worst, it risks an overload from any hit on the shield.

Do you have a guess why one e.g. would enable autofire for a kinetic weapon group and disable autofire for a HE weapon group?! When you have found the answer (which I am tired of repeating again and again) ask yourself why you believe that the motive for this is allegedly different for a manually and AI piloted ship!
This is exactly what I do when I fly my ships, albeit mainly because I can't easily control the firing of two weapon groups at once. I let the kinetics autofire because they're good against the more common target (shields) and also decent against broken armor, while HE needs manual control for opportunity shots when shields aren't in the way.

At the very least, only PD weapons should ignore the linked firing mode when engaging fighters or missiles, even though I disagree with this because there is also a purpose of linking PD weapons with matching arcs against shielded fighters.
What I'm reading here if you got what you wanted (PD weapons also have the proposed behavior where LINKED mode requires all guns to bear before firing), I would have to divide my PD net into different groups for every quadrant, otherwise none of the weapons would ever fire because some of the other weapons in the group can never reach the target.

Or, if implemented in a less stupid way: they could all be in the same group, but no PD weapon would ever fire till all the weapons that could bear on the target have done so. Which is totally optimal and desired behavior when I have a Harpoon swarm incoming and every microsecond of DPS counts. Also wide mount arcs could become actively detrimental for PD weapons because they add someone else to wait for before opening fire.



Actually, that gives me a thought. Let's consider this with a picture:


Suppose the Legion's Mk.IXs are on linked mode with autofire on. In this situation, what should autofire do?

a) Fire the right gun, don't fire the left gun
b) Don't fire the right gun (because left gun is not on target)
c) Do A in this situation, but do B if the Sunder had been in front of us where the arcs overlap
d) Something else
« Last Edit: September 17, 2021, 07:45:09 PM by Histidine »
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SCC

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #50 on: September 18, 2021, 12:42:40 AM »

Gotta post fast, before the thread is nuked for shot flinging.
Quote from: sqrt(-1)
I don't understand what you mean with that.
That your preconceptions about purpose and function of autofire and fire modes is nothing but a product of your imagination.

Quote from: sqrt(-1)
If you want to let the AI make situative decisions on weapon firing then disable autofiring.
If you want to toggle autofiring for groups then do so.
After some thinking I agree it isn't such a huge concern, though it would still require making different weapon groups for AI and for the player. This isn't that different from some loadouts already, though.

Quote from: sqrt(-1)
Frustrating side effects, which even Alex has to check for, like the changed autofiring mode when getting manual control back from common, unintended AI triggering (which is a clearly bad implementation too), is obviously unacceptable
Those aren't side effects. Control over weapon groups' autofire is how AI manages its weapons. Selecting the flagship and giving it an order is meant to turn autopilot on. You could argue well your flagship shouldn't be selected when mass-selecting ships, but you would best create a new thread about it.

Quote from: sqrt(-1)
As I have explained before, as someone who takes down more than tenfold larger enemy fleets by piloting vanilla ships with all kinds of loadouts, toggling autofire during combat is an edge case for lame flux battles with lame capital ships by lame pilots who cannot cope with switching between weapon groups.
Woo, I get to play "I'm a better Starsector player" card! So, as someone who has played this game since 2012, every version, vanilla or modded, fleet admiral or ace pilot style, with enough efficiency to fight random fleets just because and profit from it, destroying fleets and stations with a single ship... To me, it sounds like you would rather have the game changed to suit your playstyle more, than put the effort yourself,  learn how the game actually plays and become a better player.

Quote from: sqrt(-1)
No one here, even Alex, even had an idea for two days what could have caused the issue and now everyone pretends as if this is dandy!
Indeed. I, for example, thought "it could be he switched autopilot on by accident - but surely he must have noticed the ship moving on its own and the 'autopilot enabled' text in the upper left corner. It must be something else, something not so obvious".

Quote from: sqrt(-1)
Autofiring should obviously work identical for the human player and AI.
And it does. It ignores fire modes for both player and the AI, it can be freely toggled in combat for both the player and the AI, linked fire mode fires only weapons that have the target in their arcs for both the player and the AI and autofire ignores fire modes for both the player and the AI.

sqrt(-1)

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #51 on: September 18, 2021, 02:02:42 AM »

intrinsic_parity: Continuously and entirely ignoring the arguments I have repeatedly replied to your eversame repetitions of irrelevant and false claims, and then pretending to be the one trying constructive discussion, while blaming me, is amusing at best.


Since the proximate cause of the weapon group overrides is the AI (briefly) taking control of the player ship when the player ship is given orders on the TAB map, it would have been far more efficient to suggest that the player ship not receive TAB map commands in the first place, except when already on autopilot.
Yeah, I have suggest the same too. The AI should never take control implicitely.
However, this is just resolving one nasty side effect. The AI should still never override the firing modes because it pointlessly ruins control.

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If the ship is fluxed enough that firing small guns interferes with its ability to fire Heavy Blasters, and your expectation is that it continue to fire the Heavy Blasters regardless of any other consideration, then all I can say is the AI ship understands this better than you do and directly improves its own chances of survival by disregarding your intent. (Not that it should continue firing the small weapons either, arguably). At best, it's going to be forced to drop its shield, and at worst, it risks an overload from any hit on the shield.
That the AI overrides my autofire setting (right away by the way, even at 0 flux) and primarily consumes the flux threshold with the firing of smaller weapons when near the flux limit, is exactly contrary to the intent of burst builds with high mobility.
Autofiring alread does consider that it should not directly cause overloading. Things like shield management are not related to autofiring.

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This is exactly what I do when I fly my ships, albeit mainly because I can't easily control the firing of two weapon groups at once. I let the kinetics autofire because they're good against the more common target (shields) and also decent against broken armor, while HE needs manual control for opportunity shots when shields aren't in the way.
Right!
That the AI disables my loadout setting to autofire (which is nothing else than an intent to prioritize) and disables my loadout setting of linked fire even against single ship targets, e.g. the linked firing of two Heavy Needlers and instead fires Light Assault Gun's or just single Needler bursts near flux limit, deminishes or even ruins the effective utilization of this for AI ships.

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What I'm reading here if you got what you wanted (PD weapons also have the proposed behavior where LINKED mode requires all guns to bear before firing), I would have to divide my PD net into different groups for every quadrant, otherwise none of the weapons would ever fire because some of the other weapons in the group can never reach the target.

Or, if implemented in a less stupid way: they could all be in the same group, but no PD weapon would ever fire till all the weapons that could bear on the target have done so. Which is totally optimal and desired behavior when I have a Harpoon swarm incoming and every microsecond of DPS counts.
Right. Firing in linked mode should only be executed if a target can be reached by all guns in the group. Particularly with the upcoming increased group count, a much more effective PD could be fine tuned if the linked fire wasn't ignored.

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Also wide mount arcs could become actively detrimental for PD weapons because they add someone else to wait for before opening fire.
It is a matter of balancing disadvantages and advantages when deciding whether a certain groups should be linked or not.
For anyone who isn't into such fine tuning or is worried to cause too many disadvantage for a certain ship's loadout should simply refrain from enabling the firing mode.


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Actually, that gives me a thought. Let's consider this with a picture:


Suppose the Legion's Mk.IXs are on linked mode with autofire on. In this situation, what should autofire do?

a) Fire the right gun, don't fire the left gun
b) Don't fire the right gun (because left gun is not on target)
c) Do A in this situation, but do B if the Sunder had been in front of us where the arcs overlap
d) Something else
    b
    • Alternating autofire should fire the gun (with priority of non-autofire groups) that has a target in sight. Any gun in this group that can't reach the selected target should try to aim at and shoot another target in its arc, and it should not fire but try to aim as good as possible at the selected target if no other target exist in any gun's arc.
    • Linked autofire should continuously try to aim both guns at the target but wait with firing until the ship has managed to line up which then causes the target to be in the arc of both guns so the guns are fired - with a higher priority over non-autofire groups.

    Since the Heavy Autocannon only has a minor burst property and because the Legion is turning so slowly, I would not enable linked mode for them, but I would enable autofiring because I always want to prioritize HE pressure against enemy ships.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2021, 02:32:09 AM by sqrt(-1) »
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sqrt(-1)

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #52 on: September 18, 2021, 02:30:46 AM »

That your preconceptions about purpose and function of autofire and fire modes is nothing but a product of your imagination.
That's still not an argument but just a blunt accuasation.

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After some thinking I agree it isn't such a huge concern, though it would still require making different weapon groups for AI and for the player. This isn't that different from some loadouts already, though.
Why do you believe that a distinct weapon grouping for AI and player control would be required?

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Those aren't side effects. Control over weapon groups' autofire is how AI manages its weapons. Selecting the flagship and giving it an order is meant to turn autopilot on. You could argue well your flagship shouldn't be selected when mass-selecting ships, but you would best create a new thread about it.
No, that I get a ship back into control with an alternated loadout because I have asked a group to go to point B is a laughably absurd mess of side-effects that is perfectly eliminated by not letting the AI override my loadout settings.
It is similarly unacceptable that my firing mode settings are overwritten when I explicitely activated AI control.
That the autopilot shouldn't be activated implicitly in the first place doesn't change this.

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Woo, I get to play "I'm a better Starsector player" card!
No, I am saying that the human behavior of bad pilots shouldn't be seen as reason that the AI should override the firing modes.
Your instinctive negative interpretation of what I have said perfectly exposes your and the others outright hostile attitude and systematic dismissal against the vast majority of suggestions express by countless people here for changes of long standing implementations, because you just can't cope with the possibility that what you have enjoyed for so long was in fact not optimal and can be improved.

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So, as someone who has played this game since 2012, every version, vanilla or modded, fleet admiral or ace pilot style, with enough efficiency to fight random fleets just because and profit from it, destroying fleets and stations with a single ship... To me, it sounds like you would rather have the game changed to suit your playstyle more, than put the effort yourself,  learn how the game actually plays and become a better player.
Then go ahead and come up with a specific describing what playstyle my suggestion allegedly would deminish!

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Indeed. I, for example, thought "it could be he switched autopilot on by accident - but surely he must have noticed the ship moving on its own and the 'autopilot enabled' text in the upper left corner. It must be something else, something not so obvious".
Yeah, one line in a fast stream of text that virtually everyone is ignoring because of its totalitarian verbosity of dullest state changes which should be clarified graphically and persistently by the UI instead (as in virtually any other game), about that an autopilot has been activated, TOTALLY makes clear that those damn paying noobs should expect that some autofiring setting will be disabled when issuing a command to go to point B!  ;D

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And it does. It ignores fire modes for both player and the AI, it can be freely toggled in combat for both the player and the AI, linked fire mode fires only weapons that have the target in their arcs for both the player and the AI and autofire ignores fire modes for both the player and the AI.
Repeating this total dismissal of arguments with pretentiousness again, which I have answered to countless times, only further exposes your hostile attitude and total disregard of intent for a constructive discussion.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2021, 03:05:38 AM by sqrt(-1) »
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Deshara

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #53 on: September 18, 2021, 04:04:51 AM »

All I suggest is that the AI should stop overriding the firing mode and no one has presented even the slightest valid point why this would cause any negative side effects and do anything other than making everything related much simpler, easier to understand and more controllable.

bc the AI is designed to make those calls itself, and disabling that portion of the AI would do more harm to the game's quality than good. ur asking for the ability to lobotomize the AI; there are situations in which that would be a desirable outcome but those are so far & few between that they shouldn't be the focus of the fire mode's design
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Quote from: Deshara
I cant be blamed for what I said 5 minutes ago. I was a different person back then

sqrt(-1)

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #54 on: September 18, 2021, 04:31:04 AM »

bc the AI is designed to make those calls itself, and disabling that portion of the AI would do more harm to the game's quality than good. ur asking for the ability to lobotomize the AI; there are situations in which that would be a desirable outcome but those are so far & few between that they shouldn't be the focus of the fire mode's design
You could have condensed this simply into "ur wrong bc that's just the way it is."

Verdicts and accusations are something entirely different than arguments, my friend.
Everything you have said was debunked by me multiple time with specific arguments. You should at least bother to read what I have already said and counter my arguments.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2021, 05:16:00 AM by sqrt(-1) »
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Grievous69

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Re: Autofire and Fire Mode loadout is still being randomly ignored.
« Reply #55 on: September 18, 2021, 05:37:36 AM »

The weather outside sure is pretty good today.
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Please don't take me too seriously.
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