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1994-04-05
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<H1><A ID="SECTION00040000000000000000">
Bugs / Bugs</A>
</H1>
<P>
Most of the bugs can be circumvented in one or another
way. The only bug that really annoyed me is the crash that happens after you
have unloaded a mining machine and leave the system (PC only). This bug
makes the mining part of the game unplayable and should have been found if
the game had been beta tested at all. The many program confusions and
crashes during heavy fights are a nuisance that can only be partially
avoided with frequent game saving.
<P>
<UL>
<LI>The german translation is a complete mess. Most of the time it gives
you crippled nonsense texts and hides important information in a
ruined screen layout. Game and manuals are full of spelling errors and
sometimes you have to translate text back to English to be able to
understand it at all.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The protection scheme sometimes gets confused and asks for the first
letter of e. g. page 8238, line 27764, word 29263.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The attack and missile warnings and the ``photograph taken'' message
stay on the screen much too long, hiding vital scanner information. In
case of an attack warning you can stop time as soon as the warning is
given, select the attacker and start normal time again. The warning is
sometimes repeated, but then you already have some hints about the
position of the attacker.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>In some systems (mostly large systems with more than one sun, e. g. Cegreeth [-1,~-3]) the reference mass selection is broken and will not
switch to the nearest planet or station. In some cases it is
sufficient to avoid the autopilot and fly by hand. In some systems
even this does not work (because of discretization problems if the
reference mass is too far away?) and the target will jump around
wildly. Sometimes it helps not to use maximum time acceleration or fly
by hand. If this does not help either:
<OL>
<LI>Avoid such systems.
</LI>
<LI>If you absolutely have to dock or land in such a system use the
autopilot to accelerate under maximum time acceleration, switch
off your engines until you are 1-2 AU from your target and
reactivate autopilot (still under maximum time acceleration) to
decelerate and teleport to your target.
</LI>
<LI>If 2. fails, try again from another angle.
</LI>
</OL>
Reconnaissance missions to such systems are very difficult, because you
cannot use the teleport-and-decelerate trick. Furthermore the drawing
of the target planet gets totally inconsistent with the drawing of the
station to be filmed, resulting in ``flying'' stations that seem to be
located above the planet and other strange effects that make
navigation by hand a matter of pure luck. I got such missions to
Micanex C,Da [3,~-4] and Hoethcan A,B3b [3,~-5].
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Bombing missions for systems like Candaess [2,~-4] lead to problems
too. You cannot hit the flying station above Candaess A,B1b because
the nuclear missile seems to have a fixed velocity between 15, 000
and <tex2html_verbatim_mark>#math152#25, 000 <I>km</I>/<I>h</I>. Because the gravitation reference is never
switched to the planet, you have to adjust your velocity relative to
Candaess C,D. In my case I had to select around <tex2html_verbatim_mark>#math153#28, 000 <I>km</I>/<I>h</I> to be
able to approach the station at all. Whenever I fired my missile it
somehow decelerated and never reached the station. The only trick that
worked was to fire the missile from a distance around 900 <I>km</I> and
use the missile-hit feature/bug to destroy the station. You can do
this only from a great distance because you are unable to switch to
full time acceleration if the interceptors are near you.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>In systems with a central supergiant, the simulation of this sun is
broken. In the Betelgeuse system [59,~14] I got no gravitational
effect of the central sun and could fly right through it. The
displayed disk sometimes transformed into a rotating rectangle (e.~g.
at 1.39 <I>AU</I> distance) and sometimes vanished completely (e.~g. at
0.8 <I>AU</I> distance). The supergiant was never selected as reference
mass.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you are near a planet that was not selected as reference mass (see
above), you can watch the same effects for this planet as have been
described for supergiants.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Sometimes the scanner may fail without damage report. All systems seem
to be ok., but the scanner doesn't show the attacking ships. It has
been reported that you can fly through these ghost ships without
damaging them or you. This seems to happen mostly in the near of the
famous ``flying'' stations above planets that have not been selected
as reference mass. The attacking ships also fire at you but seem to be
unable to hit.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Be careful not to accept delivery missions to systems without bases or
space stations. You might not be able to deliver.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>You sometimes get reconnaissance or bombing missions from the military
that are impossible to accomplish, because there is no planet in the
denoted system. These missions are cancelled as soon as you select
them but they stay in the mission list.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you are stuck in an underground base but have enough fuel and
your engines are ok., there is no safe way to start but you can try out
a few alternatives that have been reported to work in some cases:
<OL>
<LI>Use maximum time acceleration just after you have got launch
permission. When you get the message that your launch time
expired, switch to maximum time acceleration again.
</LI>
<LI>Build up a little motion, pull up your landing gear and use
maximum time acceleration to warp through the wall.
</LI>
<LI>Buy lots of shields and fly through the wall.
</LI>
<LI>Perform takeoff as if all were normal (up gear, increase
throttle, pull up nose) this might result in your ship starting
normally.
</LI>
</OL>
For some of these methods a few retries might help (save the game
before you try anything!). If nothing else helps, select a target for
a hyperjump and force a misjump via <tex2html_verb_mark>2<tex2html_verb_mark> + <tex2html_verb_mark>3<tex2html_verb_mark>.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Some versions of the game for the Amiga don't allow you to jump into
the van Maanens [0,~1] system. Neighbor systems are reachable without
problem, the star map shows the system as reachable but you cannot
trigger the hyperjump to van Maanens.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>On planets with a breathable atmosphere you are sometimes cleared for
landing on pads that are already occupied by other ships that seem to
have landed far from their destination pad.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Mountains are sometimes placed directly on the landing pads of a
starport on planets with a breathable atmosphere.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Sometimes a starport is reported to be busy even if there are free
landing pads and no incoming ship exists that may have been assigned
to the pad.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you do not have enough crew and a fugitive passenger on board,
someone might attack you from outside a station, preventing time
acceleration to wait for enough crew <#129#><EM>and</EM><#129#> (through the passenger)
also the selling of your ship. The only way to solve this dilemma
seems to be to use the missile bug to shoot the attacker from inside
the station (?).
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The autorefuel system may magically empty your internal tanks if you
try to fill them by hand. I had this effect in a Panther Clipper once
even without the autorefuel system.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>When a passenger gets impatient waiting to be delivered and leaves at
the next starport, you get cabins that are falsely reported occupied,
preventing you from selling your ship or using the cabin again. The
only way out of this situation seems to be to buy an escape capsule
and use it at the next opportunity. You will lose your ship but you
can at least buy a new one.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you have more than one MB4 mining machine, you must always deal
with the last one on your list first. If you by accident destroy or
even sell another one first, the game crashes (?).
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Do not leave a system with mining gear left behind. The game will
crash. This seems to be a problem that appears only in the PC version.
As in the missile fire bug on the Panther this is a bug in the EMS
handling that hits you whenever you hyperjump.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If, as a result of your asteroid mining operation, many objects appear
in your neighborhood, the game may crash (?).
<P>
</LI>
<LI>You have not fulfilled a killing contract if your victim crashes.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you fly towards the horizon of a planet, strange graphical effects
may happen, showing pie slices of the planet flashing everywhere. Also
the horizon may jump wildly up and down.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The same effect happens if you are in the midst of a fight at the
right height above a planet. Your enemies will wildly jump around
making them impossible to hit. Interesting enough they don't seem to
have the same problems.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>You can fly through mountains, transparent domes, buildings and the
walls of spaceports.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>On some star ports ships of contract targets seem to be unable to
start without crash. This happens preferably on planets with gravity
comparable to earth gravity or higher. Example: Lion Transport in
Manchester City on Matthews World in Behoqu [2, -4]. The only
workaround I have found is to avoid contracts to such targets.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The height calculations are broken on some planets, e. g. on Hoopers
World in 82 Eridani, where I got a distance reading of 0.65 km for a
target that was at the starport (not yet started!) and my height was
shown as 2345 meters. Another example is Mitterand's World in Liabeze
[2, -4].
<P>
</LI>
<LI>For the upper gun turret on the Tiger Trader at elevation angles above
50 deg, 5 MW beams fill the whole lower screen or strange crossing
beams are shown, hiding possible targets.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Missiles that are fired from a Panther Clipper crash immediately
without hitting anything except the own ship. This makes many bombing
missions impossible to accomplish with a Panther. The bug only appears
after hyperspace jumps (EMS access on the PC) and you can avoid it if
you dock at a station or land at a starport before you try to fire a
missile. You can shorten the extra time you need for this if you use
the Autopilot Break to reach the point of your intermediate landing as
early as possible. This makes bombing missions to systems with
spaceports possible but still leaves a lot of impossible cases.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The trajectory drawing for planets or stations shown in the system map
sometimes gets confused and draws straight lines from one point of the
trajectory to the screen border.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>A jump into the Beta Lyrae system [-146,~85] crashes the game.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The attempt to get system info for the Andolqu system [-76,~29]
crashes the game.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you select system info for an unexplored system, you get the info
for the last selected explored system.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you select population info for an unexplored system, the game may
crash.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Sometimes you may get a starport reported to be located on a sun.
While being docked at Gilmour Orbiter in Tau Ceti, system info showed
a starport on the sun Exbephi~B [-1225,~-853]. The starport
vanished when I jumped into the system. Also a population of 100,000
to 1 Million was reported for Ethfala [-2174,~-879] which is a binary
system without planets!
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you recenter the star map to your position you will still get the
system info of the system you looked at before recentering until you
have moved the cursor away from your current system and back.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Sometimes a selected star is not surrounded with the green circle at
the position of the star but at the wrong end of the pin which shows
the system's height with respect to the galactic ecliptic.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The ships section of the documentation contains at least 19 errors.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The masses of Panther, Kestrel and Hawk do not add up to the total
mass of 1775 <I>t</I>, 20 <I>t</I> and 18 <I>t</I> respectively.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The reverse thrusters of the Eagle MkII are way too weak to be meant
this way. The available 4 <I>g</I> should probably be 14 <I>g</I>.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you switch between the status screens of your display, your ship may
get drawn erroneously on the contract list page.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>In the repair section of the shipyard, hull damage is not measured
relative to the actual hull weight and can exceed the actual hull
weight by a large amount.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>After a heavy fight the repair section of the shipyard may get
confused. I once got as a damage report the message of the police
officer that arrests you if you haven't paid your fines. The repair
costs were 26315 credits.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Another effect in a similar situation produced damage reports for all
my thrusters that kept reappearing at each entry of the repair screen
even after repair. Save and restore of the game didn't help. I had to
return to a saved game from before the fight.
<P>
The effect can be reproduced if you buy a new ship and immediately buy
a new drive for it. If you now enter the repair screen, all your
thrusters are reported to be damaged. You can try to repair them with
very strange effects that cause repaired thrusters to get damaged from
the repair of other thrusters. If you have succeeded with the repair
and no thruster is reported damaged anymore, you will get the old
damage reports again the next time you enter the repair screen.
<P>
The effect can be ignored and will vanish after you have refueled and
taken off to the next starport.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>You can get game crashes during a fight. A few times I got strange
beeps from the speaker in my PC that got lower and lower until the
game froze. The exect situation was a fight where I was receiving
damage by an enemy laser when he was hit by my front laser
simultaneously.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The ejection system may be triggered if you try to rough land with a
large ship (?).
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you crash during a failed attempt to rough land, the game may crash
with a memory exception.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The system map allows centering on planets only if the planet is
annotated with its name. The annotation sometimes happens only shortly
before the planet vanishes from the screen. For some planets it is
very difficult to find a rotation/zooming combination that works, for
some planets like Phiagre A,B2 [1,~-3] I have not yet found a setting
that makes the planet selectable.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>When you have docked at a station using maximum time acceleration, the
system map still shows your position outside the station.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>If you hyperjump while traffic control is warning you you will get a
final warning message and a fine from the star system you jump into.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>In early versions of the game for the Amiga there is a bug that may
confuse the bulletin board that then shows parts of the stockmarket
section. One trick to avoid this problem is to always return to the
top of the bulletin board before leaving it. If the damage is done,
you can accelerate time to wait until midnight. The bulletin board
will then be reset and corrected.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The manual states that the game is completely playable via
keyboard, but I have not found an equivalent to a right mouse click on
the keyboard. Therefore rotation control for the system and sector
maps seems to be dependent on the mouse.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>A mouse click that misses a function icon or the scanner display in
the lower part of the screen deselects the current target. As a
consequence you often have to reselect your target only because you
missed some icon by a small amount.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>Released mouse keys sometimes keep autorepeating.
<P>
</LI>
<LI>The joystick cannot be calibrated and is way too imprecise (even with
a high quality joystick) on a 40MHz 386 PC.
<P>
</LI>
</UL>
<P>