Spoiler
Alex, took me two or three battles but got the perfect video:
After i turned off the recording i STILL nailed one or two shots in the same frigate. Basically i got it down from full health to 45% hull just on my own. As you can see, ship standing almost perfectly still, no movement minus some tiny drift. Still, one Gauss and one Hephaestus shot smack dab into it.
Still this isn't /really/ indicative of the other cause i was having issues about, the frigates actually staying in your firing line. Will try and see if i can document that as well tomorrow.
LE: Lol, said i'd finish the battle, ended up shooting up my frigates even more. Vid here, same thing, leave it a few mins, still upping/processing:
And one more:
this one was shooting at the Doom now, so i don't think it's related to shooting fighters. Offtopic, this is a ship with full range skill bonuses and integrated targeting unit, so that /might/ be screwing things up.
Last last one: This one shows clearly popping three shots in my own frigate:
Notice the last videos are all with 0 drift, no manual fire and just shooting autofire from a fixed position.
And this was all /one/ battle.
For the sake of completness here's my save:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4037018/save_SeeronNorvar_94979586624160517.zip just fight the big fleet with the Doom/Astral i think on the Tritach planet.
Either way, if there is a 80% chance i'll kill my own frigates with my own guns on autofire, either i'll quit using omnishield frigates, quit using autofire, or quit using frigates? Though i've heard a lot of people have problems with other ships aswell.
Alright! Took a good look at this and fixed a bunch of issues.
First of all, there was a bug where if a ship's engines were flamed out, it would be much more likely to hit it. (It was using the ship's maximum speed as a factor in deciding how much room for error to allow. When that was 0 due to the engines being offline, things got bad. (Looking at the videos, this appears to be the cause of all but two incidents.)
Second, doubled how frequently it re-calculates the risk.
Third, I was wrong about the chargeup time being considered - it was, but only for burst weapons. It wasn't considering it for 1-shot weapons like the Gauss Cannon. So, fixed that too.
Finally, it now also allows for the possibility of a ship being out of range but moving into range while the shot is en route (previously, it only accounted for potential sideways movement).
After all these changes, I took the save out for a spin, deploying 3 Tempests and the Conquest, and sitting by and "Defending" an objective so that the Conquest was providing close fire support for the Tempests as much as possible. Basically, trying to get it to shoot them as much as possible, while playing the battle through to the end
The end result was 0 friendly-fire incidents, with every Tempest surviving until the end. It's still possible for friendly fire to occur, of course, but it should be a great deal less likely, especially for ships that have disabled engines.
The unnecessary backing off seems to happen the most with continuous beam (laser) weapons; the AI seems to hang right at the edge of firing range, and will sometimes even stand just out of range firing the beams but not hitting anything, or the autofire ai will fire weapons that can't actually hit. It's almost like they are counting on the extra bit of carryover range that you get from non-instantaneous weapons, or maybe they are just firing close enough to hit where the shield would be if it was up.
That's a little different; the game uses the collision radius of the target ship (multiplied by various factors as appropriate) as a shortcut for some range computations. What you're seeing tends to show for long and narrow ships; it's especially visible in some mods.
@Thaago, Nooblies: Yeah, definitely something I'm aware of. It's non-trivial to fix since it still needs to do some flanking if it's not the only thing pursuing the ship.
