MiddleStates 7.3 Bug Reports/Discussion

A small thing: When approaching a freighter to hire, then choosing not to hire the freighter, the freighers color turns to yellow. So it is no longer indicating that it is for hire. If I try to hire it I am still able to though.

The blue is to mark that a ship will recieve communications. Once you have talked to them, it turns off to keep your hud from being so cluttered. I am assuming the player now knows he can send comm messages. But if the behavior is unclear, or is someone can think of a better solution - let me know. I can see how it would be confusing.

Ok, I was just unsure if it was supposed to be that way. It is fine the way it is.

Sorry if I sounded defensive. I am not actually. Sometimes what appears to be a rational solution to the programmer is totally insane to anyone else. The trick is that the cyan highlight hides the ships faction color, and I don't care for that. So I turned off the highlight. And the cyan ships are assumed by the game to be mission critical - and special things happen, like hit points put up on the HUD.

I wish there was a way to put a hud icon attached to the ship. A slightly different outline, or colored outline, if you can talk to a ship. I like that the player can see his/her options right away. Without needing to take any steps. It makes it easy to see what you can do in the the game world.

Just reporting a few more that were found:

Selling cargo pods that are docked to a player wingman leaves that wingman unable to load new pods. (I just fixed this one).

Shooting cargo pods will cause the owning faction to turn hostile to the player. (I just fixed this also). But it does bring up an interesting situation. Should the player be branded a pirate for blowing up cargo pods? I am saying no, because it is pretty easy to do by accident. But this will need to be considered for the future, if destroying pods is a mission of some type.

ViewDock causes lockup. If you are docked to a station and you "escape" out to do something like change the volume or adjust your game brightness, when you return you will be trapped in the external director view. You cannot exit or return to your ship. (Fixed - watch task now detects this condition and returns the player to the ship. Still fatal, because you can no longer use menus and must shutdown your game. No known workaround).

A small bug. When trading in system the 'discount' that is applied when purchasing goods is also being applied when selling the goods in the system. This means there is no profit to be made when shuttling goods within a system.