"Backporting" Vanilla Bug Fixes in Litcube's Universe to vanilla

[TechSY730]

So I was checking out Litcube's Universe, and noticed these three bug fixes.

- Ships now respond properly to SIGNAL_ATTACKED from attacks from Pirate race owned ships
- Jobs now properly select all variants of a ship class when choosing a ship for a job
- Mission spawned pirate ships no longer have inactive turrets.

Does anyone know if an official patch ever fixed these?

If not, does anyone have a general idea of how Litcube went about fixing these, and a general idea of what files needed to be changed?

I am not going to just straight rip-off his fixes (unless he gives me permission), but I am interested in taking a stab at fixing them in my local.
Or maybe someone else already backported these fixes, and I can just use that.

[X2-Illuminatus]

If not, does anyone have a general idea of how Litcube went about fixing these, and a general idea of what files needed to be changed?

These are most-likely engine (read hardcoded) changes, which you cannot port easily.

[RoverTX]

From what I understand those engine changes result in changes to the structure of type files. There is also a whole new job engine which I am not sure how it is managed.

I also asked about this in the LU thread. I got a very cryptic answer from Litcube himself. At the time I thought he was just being a jerk, but now I think he didn't want to say anything else because if he explained how everything hooked together with the mod and the type files that he might give some information away that would break what ever dev net agreement he signed.

In other words the engine changes aren't open sourced, and the optimization and fixes are highly coupled to Litcube balance and game changes.

[X2-Illuminatus]

Bernd gave the permission to modify the .obj files, which contain what we normally call the "hardcode" (i.e. the compiled game code) around here, years ago. The TotT mod team also modified the .obj files already. So it isn't a problem of permissions. However, Egosoft never released any official tools for decompiling and compiling these files nor is there any documentation available. While there is a custom made (de)compiler, editing files with it still comes with a lot of problems. So even if someone managed to made changes, it's probably not that easy to explain them to others in a step by step / how to tutorial.

[Litcube]

So I was checking out Litcube's Universe, and noticed these three bug fixes.

- Ships now respond properly to SIGNAL_ATTACKED from attacks from Pirate race owned ships
- Jobs now properly select all variants of a ship class when choosing a ship for a job
- Mission spawned pirate ships no longer have inactive turrets.

The last one can be fixed by scripts. The others can't. The first one is a bug that still isn't fixed by Egosoft. The second one, I consider to be a serious design flaw, but I threw it in bugs anyway.

[FriendlyFirePhoenix]

@Litcube

Hey man, I reckon you'd be the most qualified person to answer this question, being that you've trawled through the source code. On a scale of 'Hello World' to 'Frostbite Engine', how would you rate the competence of the coders at Egosoft?

From my experience of X games, they seem to be utterly awful.

[Litcube]

They are better than I am.

[Xenon_Slayer]

From my experience of X games, they seem to be utterly awful.

Shots fired!

The last one can be fixed by scripts. The others can't. The first one is a bug that still isn't fixed by Egosoft. The second one, I consider to be a serious design flaw, but I threw it in bugs anyway.

I'll take a look later and make sure they're at least listed. Can't promise when there'll be another patch. Could you detail what had to be changed please?

[FriendlyFirePhoenix]

Great now I feel like a dick. @Xenon_Slayer Sorry. You guys make awesome games, even if they aren't built very well. Better a flawed gem than all the well built games that sit unplayed in my steam directory.

[Jack08]

@FriendlyFirePhoenix Do keep in mind the engine running TC/AP is like, >16 years old, receiving updates along the way, its a bit of mess now and still runs on a version of C++ from 2005 (if you look at the DLL deps in dependency walker)

@Xenon_Slayer
In regards to the second change on the list:
IIRC an overhaul of TShips was required to ensure the new ship selection routine didn't spawn invalid/bogus entries - everything that is a "valid" ship has a valid maker race, everything else has unknown. If you were to import that change to the official game, it would cause havoc to every mod on the forum that changes TShips.

The change in a nutshell was, previously, only the first index of a given ship variant & subtype was considered a valid spawnable ship, so only [Argon Nova Vangaurd] would spawn, even if there was another [<Argon M3> Vanguard] available in TShips, it was changed to keep an array of all valid entries for Vanguard (mapped by race/type tables) that was generated from Tships every time the game loads.

I dont remember the other changes, Litcube might - but
@Litcube: What about the command preload script reloading? something about the preload map not clearing because something else was cleared twice.

[TechSY730]

Oh wow, I was not expecting a dev to chime in

Well, if you are wondering about bugs, I only chose a subset of bugs that seemed feasible to backport given my newb modding skills. Here is the complete list from the Litcube wiki's list of Vanilla bug fixes:

• Ships now respond properly to SIGNAL_ATTACKED from attacks from Pirate race owned ships
  Jobs now properly select all variants of a ship class when choosing a ship for a job
  Several scene and model issues have been fixed with ships (misaligned turrets)
  Mission spawned pirate ships no longer have inactive turrets.
  Player no longer refreshes laser energy when jumping
  No longer able to sell to equipment docks if the dock doesn't trade in that ware

[Litcube]

From april 30th, 2014:

Hold on, Rover! I can explain one of those bugs:

"Mission spawned pirate ships no longer have inactive turrets."

Scenario: If you get a mission, and pirate ships are spawned in the sector you're currently in, the pirate ships will not have turret commands.

Cause: In the script !plugin.gz.missile.def.mk3.xml, there's a check for owership change of the host ship. This happens in the above scenario, so the turret script exits.

Easy fix.

[Xenon_Slayer]

My personal take on these two:

Player no longer refreshes laser energy when jumping

Known behaviour which could be used as an exploit. However, I doubt we'd change that so far into a game's lifetime as it would probably upset more people than please. I've *cough*, used it on occasion.

No longer able to sell to equipment docks if the dock doesn't trade in that ware

AFAIK, it was intended to do so. Don't think we'll see that change in vanilla.