MiddleStates 7.3 Bug Reports/Discussion

Version 7.3 includes almost all planned features of the public release.

Purchase new ships.
Identity Erase for escaping your past mistakes.
Cargo Fences for handling that pirated cargo.
Pod scrappers if you cannot find a fence.
Station Inventory that depletes and grows back as part of the economy sim.
More station models.
New Emerald planet.
More wingmen to hire.
Pirate bases are hidden.
Location Finder incorporated.
Wingmen stop if they outrun the player.

Please post bugs, install trauma, or general likes and dislikes.

Well, the following of or being followed by of freighters in still causing difficulties. On one occasion the game crashed when I lost track of the freighter on the other side of an Lpoint. My ship seemed to be tracking the ghost of the freighter for a time, then its tracking became jerky, then the game crashed.

Also, as we already spoke of, the sounds of stations are coming and going, in particular the LDS inhibit field sound. Station broadcast sounds, and station type sounds are also not appearing on many models.

I think I found the issue with the station sounds. I think it was moving the sims to avoid collision. About a million kilometers away. It seems to work fine now. I also changed the LDSI sound handling. Long ago we talked about giving the LDSI field a barrier sound as you passed through it. I have the sound code now placing the LDSI sound at the location of the barrier field (and moving it to track the player).

The effect is nice, even with the gong. It gets loud as you pass through, then you cross it, then you get close to the station and the station sound takes over. Before they kind of competed close.

Ok, now I have to see why the planet sounds are going wierd.

[Edit]Found the sun problem: Globals name typo. And there was no distance limit. I have it now fixed at 4 radii from the body. Deep space sounds like deep space again.

Still no clue why you are losing sounds in some systems. Perhaps it was just the messed up station sounds. I will keep testing.

I found the source of the UniGUI bug where it will suddenly stop working. Escape from space to the controls menu, then return to space. Try to open UniGUI and it will fail. Looking at the debug log, UniGUI cannot open the mod INI files. It cannot open any config file at all. Something about escaping out is messing up the INI file system.

I think this is a fatal one for us. I think the bug is in flux, and we cannot reach it. We will just have to accept it. Workaround is restart the game and stay out of the config settings while in space flight.

I have been working on the lost wingmen. I have a solution for system to system jumps. I wrote some code to catch any stragglers after the player jumps and send them to where the player ends up. This works well if you are leading. I have crossed the cluster several times. Watching the debug logs, I would have lost most of my 6 followers several times. They all made it fine. Except local jumps.

It does not help if you are following and get ditched. It also does not seem to work for local jumps. The problem is that the wingman ships use LDS to rush away from the Lpoint. And so I cannot scoop them up. This is clearly going to break any hope of blockades on the leaving side of lpoints. They are all going to need to exist on the arriving side.

If we just accept that problem, then I think I can write some code that will always work if the ships are following the player.

Well, that is very good news about the sound bugs. And yes, losing sounds was likely just the messed up station sounds. I will check when I see have the patches or patched version.

As for the UniGUI bug....well, it sounds bad, but I have never seen it! So it can't be that bad..

I have reproduced the bug, and now that I did I realise I noticed it long ago, prior to Epic, when i was using the original UniGUI. Perhaps we can't fix it, but it is easily worked around. Just don't fool with you sound, graphic and control settings while in game.

Ok, I have a working fix for the capsule jumping issue. It does make it easy for the player to sneak by Lpoints. But I would rather that problem then the player losing wingmen all the time. There is something very broken in the capsule jump code. I have no idea what. But this forces the wingmen to arrive near the player. And that seems to work ok. So far 2 trips cross cluster with 6 wingmen and no losses!

I think I will add LDSI fields around Lpoints to compensate. Big ones.