Hovering Avenger

[Warboy1982]

i closed it because it was a duplicate

but yeah, i've been trying all day to replicate this one with no success whatsoever. if someone comes up with a save that shows this in action, i'll give you cookies.

[Arthanor]

AH!! That makes more sense Thanks for the explanation.

As far as I know, it is impossible to save this behaviour. If you had interceptors hovering above a crash site and not going anywhere, saving and reloading will actually send them home, since upon reload, the game checks their destination, notices that they're there and can't do anything, so sends them back (or prompts for the ground battle if it is a fighter transport).

That's why I thought Meridian's LP clip was neat, because it shows the bug in action and we can see everything that leads up to it. But it doesn't help me reproduce it either

I'll try to play an interception game tonight, see if I can make it happen. Maybe it has something to do with having waypoints first, and only targeting a UFO with the craft later, while in flight? If you send your interceptors straight from base, I don't think it happens. But if you redirect a bunch of time (like Meridian did in his LP linked above, to deal with the 2 terror ships), something gets confused. That also would make sense that we see it more in Piratez, where patrolling and redirecting occurs more often than in vanilla.

[Warboy1982]

true, but i can manipulate the code to avoid that.

[7Saturn]

Did you also link to the post in your report from the bug tracker 7Saturn?

First Posting on the second page of this thread. Yes, I did. =) Not at first, but later.

I was sort of thinking that would happen, since we don't know how to make the bug happen, but hoping that seeing it in Meridian's LP would be enough proof that it would be considered a bug under investigation, rather than "Not a bug".

Problem is, I'm playing the game a lot, keeping track of what I did before this problem occurs and I really don't know, what's provoking that bug. There's no pattern, I can see. Some days it nearly doesn't happen at all, then the other day, it happens around every third crash-site.

I'll try to play an interception game tonight, see if I can make it happen. Maybe it has something to do with having waypoints first, and only targeting a UFO with the craft later, while in flight? If you send your interceptors straight from base, I don't think it happens.

Yes, it does. In comparison, I use waypoints rather rarely. Almost always I send them straight to the ufo. It even seems not to matter, in which order you do send them. Having multiple Avengers on targets simultaneously, most of them simply shoot the ufo down, asking to land. But then, one of them simply doesn't trigger that question-window.

[Warboy1982]

i've got my money on floating point precision error, who wants to take null pointer?

[Meridian]

true, but i can manipulate the code to avoid that.

Well, if you can manipulate it, then here is a save I made just now.
RAVEN-1, RAVEN-2, RAVEN-4 and RAVEN-5 were attacking all at once... after shooting UFO down ravens 4 and 5 stayed on place, raven 1 and 2 were returning.
Of course, after making this save and reloading it also ravens 4 and 5 started returning.

OpenXcom: openxcom_git_master_2015_08_11_1441.zip
Mods: only FMP v1.6.2, no other mods
Config file: also attached

Sorry for FMP, but I don't have saves from vanilla game at the moment and it would take a lot of time to get there.

[Meridian]

Here's a save "before" the incident... send ravens 1 2 4 5 after the UFO-57 and make them all attack at once (aggresive attack)... in about 20 such attempts I got the bug twice.

[Meridian]

OK, I was able to reproduce it (at least I hope it is the same thing) with 100% success.

Here is the video how to do it: https://youtu.be/SICBrduP4TU

Starting save is attached.

[Arthanor]

Nice work Meridian!

So it happens when the interceptors are slightly off the UFOs when they enter combat.. that was strange to begin with. Didn't craft just appear to be right on top of the UFO in vanilla while you had the interception window minimized?

[Warboy1982]

try again with the latest build, i think i can see exactly what went wrong in meridian's video, so thanks for that.

sorry, but i'm not gonna install the FMP over a debug exe, 10 minute load times aren't conducive to me getting anything done.

[7Saturn]

I'll try it as well.

[Solarius Scorch]

sorry, but i'm not gonna install the FMP over a debug exe, 10 minute load times aren't conducive to me getting anything done.

Does it take so much longer in debug mode? Ouch.

[Arthanor]

Everything takes longer in debug mode. I tried it once thinking it would help me when the game crashes because I messed up something in the XAE, but it was painful. Even playing the game gets slower because it tracks a lot more stuff.

[Warboy1982]

Does it take so much longer in debug mode? Ouch.

just to be clear - debug executable, not debug mode in the config.

if it's any consolation, piratez is worse

[Meridian]

This is gonna be a complicated post, but please bear with me and read carefully.

1/ the functional issue with interceptors staying on place after shooting down UFO is now fixed (or at least I couldn't reproduce anymore)

2/ there is still a visual issue that some interceptors are exactly over the UFO, but some are visibly some distance from it... I don't care as long as it works, but it looks funny. Visual issue can be seen here: https://youtu.be/3vngZKRhrWg

3/ this visual issue (and also the description of the bug in the tracker) reminded me that I also had an issue with skyranger following UFOs which land... the skyranger for some reason didn't start the mission after the UFO landed... and I could reproduce this now also on the newest build

Again I used the same trick with "1 Day" speed, but I have seen it also on much lower speeds (e.g. "5 Min"), there is even a proof somewhere in my LP, but I don't know which episode. Anyway, this video: https://youtu.be/sE7k7foX98s shows the issue... I am doing the same there 3-times, first on "5 Min" speed, then on "1 Hour" speed and lastly on "1 Day" speed. First two speeds correctly result in a mission... but the third speed causes that the mission never starts.

If useful, the save used in the video is attached here. Uses nightly build from today (version visible in video) and FMP 1.6.2, nothing else.

PS: @warboy trying to look smart, I guess you may need to add another condition for ufo.isLanded() just like you added ufo.isCrashed()... but of course, that's just my wild guess