Ship Wiggle and Ship Overlap

[kmunoz]

Two issues, neither one critical but both visually significant:

1) Some ships (usually the bigger ones) will wiggle when they're at kite distance but not moving. Video attached of an example. Usually the wiggle is a lot more pronounced, and usually happens in tandem (many corvettes at once, etc.)

2) Ship overlap is really significant. It's especially noticeable with the bigger vessels, and compounded by the fact that the selection circle is so bright.

[I-KP]

While we're on the subject of visuals and overlap...

1) Nothing points at what it's shooting at. For big ships, and moving ships, that's explain-away-able I suppose. Less explainable for turrets - particularly the ones with honking great 'barrels'. Minor quibble.

2) Ship auto-relocation to avoid overlap often behaves oddly. Sometimes a ship will relocate a huge distance away from where it was to avoid resting overlap. Also, the resting overlap avoidance only seems to kick in once the entire movement deceleration curve has zero'd, and it's a very long curve (relatively speaking). A thing can appear stopped but still has a second or two before it actually stops. What this often means is that a ship 'looks' like it's happy with its new resting place, so you move on to other actions, only to come back to see that it hadn't actually stopped moving and had relocated itself (sometimes miles away - see above). It's a minor point but it becomes a real problem when you're Forcefields wander off because of this.

[x4000]

With the wiggle, can you post a savegame where I can repro that?  Ships rotate when they are going to move to a new location, but they need to not rotate if their destination is under a certain distance away.  I tried to fix that, but didn't have a save to replicate the issue with, and apparently did not fix it.

For the ship overlap, is that something in old savegames or new ones?  In old ones where we resized ships, that's just an unfortunate aspect of us changing the size of things.  If it's happening in new savegames (ones since all the ship visuals were finished), then that's something I'd love to see a save of, too.

Turrets pointing at what they are shooting at would be nice, it's good to throw on mantis for at some point.

The ships decollision logic is something that can only run but so fast, although I'm not sure why the ships are hanging around THAT slowly unless there's really a ton going on.  It's throttled by the galaxy activity amount to some extent, so the fuller and larger the galaxy and more stuff moving around, the more likely it will take more than the usual half second.  Forcefields themselves shouldn't ever be moving away from their position unless they're overlapping something stationary or a fleet leader; though I think they're even supposed to pre-empt fleet leaders, IIRC.  Repro cases for those things would also be welcome.

These are great things for mantis if you don't mind; mainly because I need to finish the tutorial framework and the other critical usability issues, and then circle around to things like this.  So it may be a month or two before I tackle this and I don't want to forget.  But if something is hindering usability, then that tends to jump up the chain of importance (like forcefields moving).

Thanks!

[kmunoz]

I think my current game is from within the last 1 or 2 updates, so it should be past the updates you mentioned. But since I'm getting absolutely walloped in that game right now I'm going to start a new save and if it happens again I'll post it.

[kmunoz]

Ok, here's a new save, it started happening almost immediately. The battle on Hebron is where I spotted it. The shield frigate and the corvettes wiggle, and most of the ships overlap significantly.

[BadgerBadger]

I've put in a tentative fix for the ships wobbling problem. Your save game no longer wobbles.

[x4000]

Thanks so much for that, Badger!  That was definitely a super annoying one.