[AP] Badly designed Stock Exchange docking location causing ship loss

[goslin]

I'm not certain if all Stock Exchanges use the same model or not, but on several occasions I have had my ship destroyed when undocking from one. There is a large white colored ad-billboard piece of geometry which has collision directly covering one of the docking sites. There is barely enough space between this piece of geometry and the docking clamps to even fit a ship in so docking at it in the first place would be extremely difficult, if not for the Docking System upgrade, which will indeed sometimes put your ship here. However from the docked ship's vantage point you are not aware of this fact until you undock, at which point most ships larger than an M5 will be immediately destroyed do to collision and most M5s will recieve serious damage and nearly be destroyed. On one occassion this nearly resulted in the loss of my DiD game in which I had over a day of playtime invested in.

AP 2.0 unmodified + Bonus Pack

[Alan Phipps]

Yes a known but unresolved bug that cannot easily be resolved by a patch once a game has been started and saves are in use. See this and this.

[goslin]

The fix is really simple, remove the collision geometry from that sign piece. How would doing this invalidate anyones save games? Currently people are losing their DiD saved games do to it being there.

[Alan Phipps]

I think your simple fix would necessarily involve all ad signs everywhere and even then would not necessarily remove the collision avoidance that drives AI-ships to swerve into parts of stations instead.

I also think that if it were trivial and free of consequences then it might have been done by now. Let's see for the future anyway.

An aside: just out of personal interest I rammed a station ad sign travelling straight at it at top speed (321 m/s) in my personal M3 in vanilla X3TC 3.2 a few times and only lost a max of 1% of shields (equiv to a loss of 2 x 1 MJ shields). No obviously huge DiD worries in that particular set of circumstances with a non-AI pilot. Is X3AP all that different in that respect?

[goslin]

I believe the insta-death tends to occur because when you undock many ships are already interpenetrated with the collision geometry. Also this is occuring when you do not even have a reason to be causious because usually happens when using Docking System and you aren't aware of what is behind you.

But the free-standing ad signs which are in TC are not actually very similar to what this is (a large flat panel physically attached to the stock exchange station). Thats why I think this can be fixed by only modifying that individual model and not really have any effect on anyone else, this is part of the station model. And hitting it is more equivalent to running direclty into a station than the test you are describing. Or... even more equivalent would be while a fighter is in the process of landing on your carriar you take control of it and explode do interpenetration with your own ship.

Likewise I do not know enough about the engine to say if it can be changed in a minimally invasive way or not, but in most game engines I have worked with this would be a simple art change. It is easy for these things to slip through accidently but easy to fix if brought to your attention, which is what I am trying to do

[goslin]

Of course the real-correct fix is to remove the dock point as it clearly wasn't intended to even be there; there is another one that is easily visible and has no issues. Anyway like I said I don't know enough about this engine and am only saying that there is a really good chance that this is something that can be fixed in a minor patch without breaking anything else, so it is worth looking into, for someone.

[Alan Phipps]

Ah OK. I didn't realise the Stock Exchange ad signs people were hitting/avoiding were part of the station and not free-floating like the usual ones. Now I understand, as any parts of a station (even docked ships!) are potential ship-killers in a ship collision situation. Yes that would be a Stock Exchange model issue that could be corrected I suppose.

I don't know if the usual 'avoid station collision on undock trick' of undocking under AI control (idle, fly to, etc) has collision detection off for long enough to avoid this issue.

(Note to self: Spend a bit more time actually playing X3AP and less time on the forums and not really knowing the game as well as maybe I should!)

[goslin]

The undocking tick would be worth trying if you realize your in this situation, the problem is you have no reason to think anything is amiss, then boom.