Is a colony frigate required under the first page of frigates in entrenchment 1.03?

from Sins Forums

This seems like a change that was done in 1.03 for entrenchment, however it seems that the game will minidump against an AI if a player_XXXX.entity does not have at least one frigate on the first 'frigate' page that has the line

 

frigateRoleType "Colony"

 

in it. I may be mistaken that this is an absolute requirement, however I did change the tech colony ship to a non-colony roletype and recieved an instant crash and also when on a custom race had no colony ships availble and received a minidump when playing against an AI of that race.

 

 

If this is a reqirement for the AI I understand it, however what other types are required by the AI? undocumented requirements like this make modding very frustrating as we have no easy method of debugging mods that are being updated to new versions. I would encourage the IC devs to please inform us of these types of requirements. (or not have magical constants/cases in their code :-p)

 

my original intent was to assign a custom race a large colony cruiser and not give them a small colony ship, thus delaying the races expansion until they had built up to larger ships, obviously the same could be done by research, but in this case the ship did not make sense as a frigate.

 

modding
7,638 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Hmm, this would be relatively easy to isolate: just make a mini-mod and move the Tech Colony frigate into the Cruisers section of PlayerTech.entity and play a game against the AI. If it crashes then it's proven.

I'm overseas until Friday night otherwise I'd test it myself.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

I can assure you that having the "Colony" ship on the second page works fine. So you must be running in to another issue

Object Desktop - Get all of our enhancement utilities in one suite
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

I have just done the test that jasonfj suggested, and no crash within 40 minutes game time, from what I remember reading in the forum it is a requirement for the colony ship to NOT be locked by research, the test that I tried was moving the colony frigate into the second page for EACH of the races player entity's and NO OTHER changes from reference, the TOTAL mod was just the changed player(racename).entity files in gameinfo under the mod name

harpo

 

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

I do know that the AI looks for certain ship roles to use, if it doesn't find the role it needs, it will throw a tantrum and crash the game.

 

 

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

I just did the experiment with a clean copy of entrenchment, no other mods installed, but with a custom race file (a copy of the TECH player entity) when I removed the colony ship entirely I recieved a crash immediately after loading, when the colony ship is present there is no crash, however to specifically detail one more issue both the colony frigate and the resource capturing ability need to be present somewhere on the cruiser and frigate pages, my problem was that I did not include the resource capturing role type in the either, they must both be present, but not necessarily on the same ship.

there was another issue, but it stems from the same documentation problem. We really need the enumerated lists of valid values and the hardcode 'must haves' documented, IE any constant that has an external dependancy. (and what is the point of a loading screen if you aren't going to actually check dependancies? at minimum any external references need an try/catch around them to allow debugging.)

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

:)  Hmmm.... interesting. I wonder if you could assign the "colony" roletype to the frigate, just make it cost so much or take soooooo long to build that the larger ships would be built by then?

I will have to test this to see, i haven't changed the colony's very much so my experience is low here, but interesting problem.  :)

-Teal

 

 

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Of importance- I'm not sure if this applies to colony ships (probably though), but for a support roletype ship to have more than ONE weapon type, it must have the 'light' or 'heavy' roletype assigned to it.