The Case of the Unattackable Bombers

[Ekkosangen]

During a co-op game, we were just cleaning up from taking over a planet, and we found a single bomber attacking our stardock. No problem, we thought, sending in a few cruisers. Alas, it would appear as though our cruisers are not attacking the bomber! How could this be? We began to think of possible solutions, and one MORE bomber came up to the stardock and started attacking away without destruction. Luckily, we were able to destroy it with a few well-placed mines, then scrapping what was left, but an odd bug it was.

I'll have a video of it up shortly, and by shortly I mean 6 hours from now.

[x4000]

That is extremely strange -- I've never seen that before.  I did you try clicking your cruisers directly on it, and then it still failed?  If you have a savegame with those bombers in there, that would also be helpful to me.  What version of the game did this happen in?

[Zulgaines]

Yes, we both tried various ways of attacking it. My tractor beam worked on them but no ship or turret, didn't matter what class or who owned it, could attack them.

Finally threw down mines all around them and that did the trick.

It was on 1.006D, as for a save... well, we've been using autosave most the time, so we don't have any saves from before or during it happening.

[x4000]

Gotcha -- okay, that is a mystery, then.  I'll keep my eyes open for that, but I playtested for around 2 hours on the same version yesterday, and did not see anything like that.  If it ever happens again, if you can do a save and send that to me while the thing is still there and unattackable, that would be very much appreciated...

[Ekkosangen]

Ah, the best I have for you is a video. Or I would if youtube didn't fail at converting the video even though it was an .avi. I'll convert it to something else and re-upload. But yeah, first time I've seen it too. Maybe there were bullets destined to hit it that would kill it, and the bullets disappeared somehow?

[x4000]

Maybe there were bullets destined to hit it that would kill it, and the bullets disappeared somehow?

Oh!  I bet that's what happened.  I don't know how that would occur, but I'll look at the code again and try to make it more airtight on that front.  The challenge with that is to make it efficient so that it scales well to tens of thousands of units, but also resilient so that stuff like this doesn't happen.  I thought I had succeeded, but evidently this is a case where that didn't work right.  Good thought!

[x4000]

Okay, I've made some changes to the next release that should prevent that from happening.  That release will be out later today.

[Ekkosangen]

Okay, I've made some changes to the next release that should prevent that from happening.  That release will be out later today.

Awesome, here's a quick video I took of when it happened anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNeasSumdZg

[x4000]

Ah, thanks for that -- very strange, but hopefully this next release has the remedy. You guys had a clever solution with the mines, I must say.