1.3 RC1 feedback and issues

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Deathifier
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Joined: Wed, 6. Nov 02, 20:31
xr

1.3 RC1 feedback and issues

Post by Deathifier » Sun, 21. Nov 21, 10:30

I've done some testing with v1.3 RC1 and have some feedback and issues for the developers to consider.

!move.resupply.self and docktraders generally
The updated script looks good and I saw ships go off and resupply.
I then watched a couple of docktraders fly around some more however they seemed just to go from dock to dock, over quite considerable distances sometimes (and without using their now fuelled jumpdrive), without actually trading anything.
I'm not sure if that's just because of a lack of goods to buy or some other reason however the ships are at least moving around again.


Kariudo updates
It seems the solution to it having no piracy command was to remove its ability to fire boarding pods.
As this is not the change I expected for this issue (I didn't even notice until I had setup a test, couldn't find the piracy option, then found I couldn't even manually fire the pods now) I suggest putting it in the patch notes.


M7D's repairing ships regardless of damage
It is good to see that M7D's can now repair ships that only have slight damage (i.e. hull >= 90%).
I found it works however I had to manually reissue the command to get the process going.
This may have been due to there only being slightly damaged ships in sector at the time I loaded the save from v1.2 and it may be worth putting a comment in the patch notes.


Station upgrade kits and net worth
My trade report shows ~5 billion in upgrade kits (mostly for XL) purchased (in v1.2) however this is not reflected in empire net worth.
I take it the counting of applied upgrade kits only tracks any applied after the v1.3 patch and, if so, it would be helpful to have this in the patch notes.


Property menu not showing marines in training on player owned marine training barracks
I noticed this in v1.2 and it is also present in v1.3 RC1.
The property menu that shows personnel will show marines on ships and marines in training in NPC stations however it does not show any marines in training on a player owned Marine Training Barracks.
It may be that the script which collects the info for the display is skipping over player owned stations since pre-X3FL players could not train their own marines.
I'm hoping it is not more complex than that and perhaps the developers could fix this as a nice little quality of life improvement.


Rare Blueprint Collector and Master Collector Achievements
As noted here the Rare Blueprint Collector achievement requires the unobtainable UFO blueprint.

The Master Collector achievement may also have an issue however further observation suggests that it is checking Steam's achievement status on a timer, as when I obtained the station blueprint collection achievement there was quite a delay before the game updated the counter for Master Collector.


You've been duked - general
Overall the changes look good and address the core issues.
I verified that the boarding task force now covers and uncovers correctly so it no longer gets destroyed when it idles around (well technically there is sometimes a delay in the cover change so ships camping the gate might engage briefly).
The marine collection now gets smaller batches of marines at a time, which is good, and I noticed there are some safeguards to ensure that the marines all get unloaded before the TP leaves to find more.
I did not test if Duke's Haven deletes some of the unloaded marines as others have claimed.

I did find it a bit hard to test if I was in-sector as something kept interrupting the script and it constantly went from idle to moving somewhere to immediately idle - the M7M wouldn't even dock at Duke's Haven when first spawned.
This doesn't seem to be caused by the boarding scripts and everything ran fine once I personally left the sector (leaving other ships of mine in sector was fine - just me being there personally was the issue).

The reduced skill requirement is nice, though still a little bit high in my opinion, however with further experience on the quality of the marines that NPC stations produce I think it's a least viable to now get enough marines created in a somewhat reasonable timeframe.

There are still issues with the lack of other skills - most marines produced in NPC stations have negligible hacking or mechanics which means the boarding task force is still going to have a very tough time taking over anything other than M6's (they attempted to take over a Xenon I of mine that I disarmed when the task force approached it. They used marines I'd given them with 50 hacking skill and failed to hack the core).

The lack of firepower remains an issue as in one test the script chose some Paranid ship and the entire task force was destroyed pretty much the instant they engaged (I watched from OOS).

Overall the changes look to have dramatically improved the prospect of seeing a boarding action and obtaining the achievement, albeit still requiring significant player involvement to trigger.

I still can't get the achievement to trigger locally in a modified game though :/


!job.collect.marines - Issues
For the marine collection script I noticed a couple of issues that may have been overlooked before.

1. The script is not actually finding all possible marines it can collect.
I noticed that the Marine Training Barracks in Lasting Vengeance actually had a couple of marines that the TP's should have already acquired.
The barracks itself was idle as the game had helpfully deleted the two stations in-sector supplying it with pirate sidearms and space fuel however 2 of its 4 marines met the old 70+ fighting skill requirement yet were still there when I arrived in v1.3 RC1 to start testing.

The issue seems to be that the command to find stations stocking Mercenaries does not actually return the training barracks in Lasting Vengeance.
The training barracks, and a number of other stations, actually stock the "Marine" ware and not the "Mercenary" ware that the script currently checks for.
So it looks like the script needs further adjustments to find all stations that stock Mercenary and/or Marine, merge those lists together, then do its sorting and searching for the specific marines it wants.

Addressing this is important as the most likely way a player is going to get the related achievement is to make use of that training barracks.

2. No destination is set in the script or in !move.movetostation so it is hard to figure out where a TP is going once it does find something to collect.


!job.dukes.boarding - Issues
Two items that I missed previously, both cosmetic.

1. There is a blank "do if $DEBUG" statement in sub.CheckRequirements
It doesn't seem to affect anything and usually these are for logging so it seems the log command got removed but the if check did not.

2. There is no "do if $DEBUG" wrapping a write to player logbook for "Ready for target".
Thus when the boarding task force does go out the player is told of this when they aren't supposed to know.


General
In general v1.3 RC1 seems to behave normally - my complex still produces stuff, ships still fly around and fight, the HQ looks to be functioning normally, the rep system still does its thing, and the universe still seems to function ok after maybe a couple of hours game-time.

I have only focused on the issues above so I may have missed something else, and I did not test for a lengthy period of time, however things seem to be ok overall.

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