Gamers Delight 2

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Text File | 1994-04-05 | 17KB | 441 lines

<H1><A ID="SECTION00040000000000000000"> Bugs / Bugs</A> </H1> 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. <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. </LI> <LI>The protection scheme sometimes gets confused and asks for the first letter of e. g. page 8238, line 27764, word 29263. </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. </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]. </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 km/h. 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 km/h 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 km 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. </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 AU distance) and sometimes vanished completely (e.~g. at 0.8 AU distance). The supergiant was never selected as reference mass. </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. </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. </LI> <LI>Be careful not to accept delivery missions to systems without bases or space stations. You might not be able to deliver. </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. </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>. </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. </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. </LI> <LI>Mountains are sometimes placed directly on the landing pads of a starport on planets with a breathable atmosphere. </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. </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#>and<#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 (?). </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. </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. </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 (?). </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. </LI> <LI>If, as a result of your asteroid mining operation, many objects appear in your neighborhood, the game may crash (?). </LI> <LI>You have not fulfilled a killing contract if your victim crashes. </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. </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. </LI> <LI>You can fly through mountains, transparent domes, buildings and the walls of spaceports. </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. </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]. </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. </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. </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. </LI> <LI>A jump into the Beta Lyrae system [-146,~85] crashes the game. </LI> <LI>The attempt to get system info for the Andolqu system [-76,~29] crashes the game. </LI> <LI>If you select system info for an unexplored system, you get the info for the last selected explored system. </LI> <LI>If you select population info for an unexplored system, the game may crash. </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! </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. </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. </LI> <LI>The ships section of the documentation contains at least 19 errors. </LI> <LI>The masses of Panther, Kestrel and Hawk do not add up to the total mass of 1775 t, 20 t and 18 t respectively. </LI> <LI>The reverse thrusters of the Eagle MkII are way too weak to be meant this way. The available 4 g should probably be 14 g. </LI> <LI>If you switch between the status screens of your display, your ship may get drawn erroneously on the contract list page. </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. </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. </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. 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. The effect can be ignored and will vanish after you have refueled and taken off to the next starport. </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. </LI> <LI>The ejection system may be triggered if you try to rough land with a large ship (?). </LI> <LI>If you crash during a failed attempt to rough land, the game may crash with a memory exception. </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. </LI> <LI>When you have docked at a station using maximum time acceleration, the system map still shows your position outside the station. </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. </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. </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. </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. </LI> <LI>Released mouse keys sometimes keep autorepeating. </LI> <LI>The joystick cannot be calibrated and is way too imprecise (even with a high quality joystick) on a 40MHz 386 PC. </LI> </UL>