[#160]Boarding Pods fail to initialize when piloted by marine "still in transit"

[RubyRezal]

It is possible to launch Boarding Pods with "in transit" marines assigned to pilot them. This appears to cause bugged boarding pods and can occur even if there are other marines on board if a ship crew has any "in transit" marines when a pod is launched. Marines that are "on board" do not appear to be prioritized when the game selects a captain to pilot a boarding pod.
This affects boarding ops as well as attempts claim abandoned ships.

When a marine that is "still in transit" is selected as a boarding pod pilot the debug log records an error similar to the following.

Code: Select all

[=ERROR=] 2596.24 Entity Liom Naser [134224314] is not the 'Captain' control entity for ship Boarding Pod [101686588]. Can't initialise.

At this point the boarding pod effectively becomes bugged. The pod pilot and any other marines assigned to the pod are lost. The pod will travel to its assigned destination and freeze. It will never land on the target ship, cannot be moved by collision, and cannot be recovered. It can be targeted and destroyed by hostile AI or manually shot and destroyed by the player, otherwise it will remain where it stopped until destroyed.

To reliably reproduce this problem load the attached quicksave and follow the steps below.

1. Pause as soon as the save has loaded, all subsequent steps will be performed while the game is paused.
2. Find the player owned Nodan Vanguard in The Void, it is waiting next to an abandoned Drill.
3. Transfer a marine from Elite Vanguard to Nodan Vanguard.
4. While still paused and with the marine still in transit, Claim the Drill in The Void.
5. Check the debug log, it should record the error indicated as soon as the Claim command was given and the Boarding Pod launched.
6. Unpause the game and observe the Boarding Pod travel to the Drill but the boarding operation never completes.

Following the steps above should reliably reproduce a bugged boarding pod. The same marine will successfully land if the player waits until the marine arrives on board the Nodan before issuing the Claim command.

In transit marines logically should not be available for boarding operations until they arrive. If a ship only has marines in transit and none actually on board then the Claim and Board commands should not be available. However, the game allows this and will launch boarding pods with invalid crew. This appears to be the root cause behind complaints about bugged boarding pods failing to land and getting stuck adrift in space.

Attachements:
Quicksave
Debug.txt

[Alan Phipps]

@ devs: Previous discussion thread for additional background.