Question on sensors

I did some testing on sensors, and some things follow the documents, and some don't. Can anyone offer insight?

I created a tug with a brightness of 1.0 and min_brightness of 1.0.

Then I created a player passive_sensor with range=50000 an identification_range=25000 and a sensed_brightness=0.3

I expected that my tug would show up at 50,000 and get a faction and name at 25,000. That did not happen. Instead the tug showed up with a name at 35,000. I realized that Flux was subtracting the 0.3 from the tugs brightness and then calculating the range. Changing sensed_brightness to 0.0 proved this was true. The tug was now sensed at 50,000 meters.

However, it is identified at 50,000 meters as well. Can anyone offer an idea of how identification range works?

The issue is that I would like to prevent the AI from firing missiles at targets it cannot identify. But I need to be able to calculate that range, because the standard AI offers no such features.

[edit] I should have noted that I pulled the active sensor subsystem off the player ship for this test. So the active range improvement should not matter.
-Gtrout

I've got to run right now, but tonight I'll go through my old notes. I remember I encountered some sensor wierdness during the rebalance, but cannot remember exactly what it was.

I don't think I ever found a solution... I chalked it up to another "phantom" component of the caculation.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

presice callulations would be great if possiable.

Jwk...comander of =HEMP HUNGRY MONKEY=
www.i-war2.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=310

Isn´t the identification range used only for stations? Whenever a ship shows up on sensors it´s identified but the stations are at first marked as unknown, you get the name and faction of the station only when approach it. Asteroid base with another base orbiting it some 100 klicks away is perfect place to see this: ships arriving and leaving the other station are identified but the station itself is "unknown".

"Fighter pilots make movies. Bomber pilots make history"

Sorry, my old rebalance notes only say that the identification occurs too early, like in your example GrandpaTrout.

I'd set up several new systems which had differing id ranges, and the problem I encountered is that the id range never seemed stable.

In my tests the ship was sometimes identified 18 kilometers before it should have been... at other times 5 kilometers. My notes chalk it up to the actions of the ships increasing or decreasing the brightness, which in turn affected the id range. But that's just a wild guess I had at the time.

I think I'd decided to calibrate the new systems as close as possible and then move on. I apparently never dug into this too deeply.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

Thanks for looking! It is always hard to tell if I have broken something, or it never worked in the first place.

The behavior with some stations is exactly what the document say should happen. Which is what led me to believe that ships could work the same. Although I swear that I have seen freighters arrive with question marks and then get id later. But I cannot get that behavoir to happen.

Darn, another good idea shot in the back. While EoC had the potential (and often the intention) for subsims modeled as completely as star shatter, it just never happened. And with a mission based structure, I can see it was not really needed. I mean if your sensors get shot out the mission is over, just as totally as if your ship was destroyed. Ok, no point whining (more than I have!) just need to focus on all the cool features that do work.

-Gtrout