Custom Map PUG on October 11, 2000 BST / 2100 CEST / 1500 EDT / 1200 PDT

Bit of a misconception here. You don't cool down faster when stationary if you try and move while overheated; your heat is locked at 100 for 3 seconds for the duration. What does happen is that after those 3 seconds, you're allowed some tiny percentage of throttle, which gives you a tinier percentage of heat reduction, which lets your tiny acceleration get a bit larger, until your heat is under the penalty threshold and you're cooling and moving as normal.

Honestly, the only reason I think it possibly works is due to numerical errors in the calculation. There should physically be no way. On the code side with fission engine, when your finished being overheated, you lose 6 heat, then gain 6 heat, then lose (throttle * 8) in heat, except throttle is 0 because max throttle is zero. So you should end up having 100% heat regardless of all that, yet pushing forward on the throttle gives you some amount of throttle regardless of all that, which means that the only reason I can possibly comprehend on why it even works at all is because the server gives you some almost-but-not-quite-zero amount of throttle due to the lack of infinite precision arithmetic, which gives you some almost-but-not-quite-zero amount of heat dissipation.

 

I concur this.

In fact, you guys were so serious that during the game I even alt+tab'd out to check if this was a scrim.

 

It goes on record that pugs are now better than scrims.

 

Wait, so the fact that the vehicle doesn't cool while stationary doesn't matter at all?

Also there were a lot of posts in threads talking about how fission is pretty much impossible to use, with stories of tanks having to be abandoned while overheated. I know you've been busy but other devs have commented in those threads. Am I really to believe that none of them actually has tried this engine, or questioned its use?

 

If there's any game that can get away with minimal testing, it's this one.

We have a small population and the technology to roll back to previous versions at the press of a button.

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty silly when no one notices that unupgraded guided has the best dps in the game. Some goofs are preventable, some aren't. Either way, we can't let the fear of fucking up one tiny part of the game holds us back from making the rest of it much better.

 

Actually, you've got it entirely backwards Spartacus. This game heavily relies on testing or the minimal population dwindles to nothing. In bigger games, feedback becomes quite evident, but in a game such as this, people's objections and feedback can go unnoticed for extended periods because there aren't a lot of devs with time on their hands.

As evidenced by this current issue.

This engine issue is not tiny in any way shape or form. Its fix is simple enough, but its repercussions extend throughout the physics tree and beyond. I'll grant with cost gone most problems have a much lesser impact, otherwise this issue could have been classified as near gamebreaking.

Am I saying you can't commit something to test it briefly? No. The problem here is Trickster used to have a lot of time on his hands and was a very good dev, but when he's more out of touch than I am, there's a big issue. But then again, he's wise enough to have appointed a successor/helper, which should help.

I don't want to reiterate my original point, so I won't.

 

I wonder how long did it take for people to find out that Candles goofed and nerfed Bio ML.

People just don't pay attention to details.

 

I'm honestly fascinated with the idea that you can change a gameplay mechanic and it can have no affect on behavior.

For example, cannon recoil hasn't worked since the port, but I haven't heard a single person mention it.

 

See I thought it worked how Candles said, but you're telling me a different story Ikalx, and that's why I'm confused here. if it's working as Candles said, then that's the intended situation. You were telling me that the engine simply won't cool down at all if there's no throttle input, which is totally what shouldn't happen. Obviously there was a version over a year ago or something where that was the case, but I fixed that, so it should be working the way Candles is stating.

I understand the way things are meant to work, but I don't always get the opportunity to see if things are playing out as intended. Another issue with Fission is that it was broken for quite a while, so it's actually quite difficult to convince people to research it now, so it doesn't get used quite often. I generally play a few hours each week when I'm at home in the UK, but during those few hours, I get told of numerous issues that would never reach me otherwise. I respect the fact that having your ear to the ground (i.e. playing) is the best way to find out about stuff, but it shouldn't be the ONLY way. If people spent a fraction of the time they spent in spec bitching (e.g Steve_UK) actually reporting the issues, then they'd get fixed far quicker. I don't know of any other game where developers are expected to fix issues without bug reports.

You only need to look at the reported issues on the forums to see that most of them either get fixed, or at least answered by a developer. If an issue never makes it there, then it isn't going to get fixed. I brought Spartacus on board for different reasons than you seem to realise. I wanted someone who was willing to develop the scripts at a faster pace than I was, who was willing to be at the other side of the development spectrum. Whereas I generally just updated the scripts every time Candles was ready for a release, Spartacus will be doing outright script releases at his own pace, allowing him to try far more experimental avenues, should he want to, which leads me on to:

Actually, Spartacus is entirely right, as long as you have actually have someone who will commit those changes. That's why he's taking over. If I make a fuck up with the scripts, it's generally not going to get fixed until the next code patch. At the very least, if I'm going away to work, it doesn't matter how urgent it is, I can't do anything until I get back, so then it means I have to find someone else to do the fix anyway. Spartacus will be in a position to change whatever he wants with little to no testing, purely because he knows he can just fix it the following day if there's an issue.

We have so few players that the idea of having a testing team at this point is laughable. Testers willing to actually do things properly have been in really short supply this last few years, with only a handful of people being dedicated to actually doing their job properly and not just fucking about during tests, if they show up at all. It's simply not practical to continue doing testing for script/balance issues which are totally impossible to work out without full scale playtesting, because it never worked in the first place due to never having enough players. If we didn't have enough players for once-a-week tests 3 years ago, we certainly don't have enough for it now.

 

It's behaviour now is that it doesn't cool while static. At least when I try it on my own. Two and a half months ago when we talked about why engines not working due to the unique parts being a too large fraction, the reason I started that conversation was because I researched fission and had people abandoning tanks in the field because they couldn't cool their tanks. I did start by saying that.

I don't quite understand what Candles said, all I can say is when mah tank overheats, it dun cool down. It's my bad if I've got that wrong, though.

If you notice, that's why that statement is proceeded by me saying you had a lot of time, because it's truly a bad idea if you don't.

I'm not saying you have to do playtests, but rather you have to check as much as you can if you're going to commit changes that you won't be around to reverse. If you're right there, however, the playerbase can be (and are) your testers.

So...in retrospect I may owe Spartacus an apology for taking his statement and applying my own context.

 

I think I made things more confusing, so let me try to explain it again.

For the purposes of vehicles and cooling, there are three parts to each state that it looks like people are considering. If the throttle is on or not, if the vehicle is stationary or not, and if it's overheated or not, for a total of 8 states.

The first thing to say is that it doesn't matter if the vehicle is stationary or not, that doesn't factor into cooling at all. A fission engine would cool equally well if it is barreling down S-bend as it would if it got stuck on a wall, it doesn't matter if it's actually moving or not. Empires doesn't care about the actual speed a tank is going for the purposes of heating, it only cares about how fast you're throttling up.

Secondly, if the vehicle is overheated, there is no cooling and no throttle. A vehicle gets overheated, waits three seconds. After those three seconds, it applies the idle heat generation and dissipation in the same frame. After that frame, if it's still at 100% heat capacity, then it remains overheated for another three seconds. Cooling and heating only happens when a vehicle is no longer overheated, let me make that absolutely clear. If you are overheated, you are not cooling nor heating nor throttling up, period.

So all that leaves is the throttle. There's a function I posted earlier in some other thread regarding the entire function for how heat affects throttle, but the short and sweet of it is that for fission, max throttle goes down starting at 90% heat and if you're at 100% heat, your throttle is zero.

Strictly speaking, no tank cools down when it's overheated. Overheated is not the state of being at 100% heat, it's a state that's caused by having 100% heat. After 3 seconds, there is exactly one full frame where you can have 100% heat and not be overheated. With every other engine, because dissipation is greater than idle generation, you'll be under 100% heat by the time the game checks if you're at 100%, so then you leave the overheated state. With fission, because dissipation is equal to idle generation, you'll still be at 100% heat when the game does the check, so it puts you into overheat for 3 more seconds.

So it's not that fission doesn't cool when it's overheated because no engine cools while overheated; rather, it's that it doesn't cool after being overheated unless you hold the throttle down, while other engines will cool regardless of the throttle.

(In case you're wondering about why applying the throttle in cooling doesn't leave you permanently overheated, it's because the heat penalty makes the effective throttle zero, allowing normal heat dissipation to apply as if you weren't throttling up at all, until your heat is low enough that your throttle is high enough that they actually cancel out and your heat holds constant. You can test thing easily enough, just make a vehicle with AC and drive around; you'll notice that somewhere past 90%, your acceleration drops a bit but your heat bar stops increasing.)

 

Tried to be on the PUG but i had to play space engineers with my brother.

 

Not the point, but Steve is the only person in this community that I actually dislike.

The problem is that our community is very small and we have a equally huge but not equally professionally created game to debug. Plus, most people, including vets, don't even know this game to the level that they "can" discover bugs on sight.
I have reported several bugs to Candles almost immediately.

Candles should be online 24/7, work for Empires 24/7, so I don't lose track of bugs.

 

You know you can send messages to offline people, right?

And that's if you don't want to use the forums for whatever reason.

 

AFAIK sometimes the message won't reach offline people.

Anyway, a lot of bugs are good for trolling, I probably don't want them to be fixed. :D

 

There are issues if you're client thinks the recipient is online when you send the message, but they are actually offline, but if someone is definitely offline, then the message will be received.

 

Chances are he blocked you.