PD Bug

New bug?

I've discovered a new(?) PD bug.

If you have multiple PD weaps on a ship, higher ranged weaps will engage at the (lower) range of the PD weap with the lowest RID#

So, if you have a long-range PD weap and a short-range PD weap, make sure the longer range weap has a lower RID#, otherwise the long-range weapon will only fire at short-range if the player buys both.

This post has been edited by Desprez : 30 March 2008 - 08:33 AM

Wow, thanks for the heads up.

So if the PD weapon with the higher range has the lowest RID, and the weapon with the lowest range has the highest RID, then they'll both fire at respective ranges, correct?

Correct. As least that's what I've seen so far, I almost wonder if something else is going on as well.
A dedicated test may be in order.

That's a kinda weird bug. Though I suppose weird bugs is what you get when you keep pushing the envelope of what Nova can do. It might be worth testing whether some or all of this stuff will actually work on the opposite platform before you get too far with it. PC Nova is particularly notorious for breaking on things that Mac Nova can handle fine.

Is the deal with the PD weapons that the higher ID weapon adopts the range of the lower ID weapon, or simply that it does not fire at all until the enemy is within range for the lower ID weapon? That is, does it retain its original range, but does not fire until the ship is in range of all PD weapons on board? It'd be a bit hard to test this if you're still using that invisible PD weapon.

Does the same occur for point defense beams?

On a side note, my questions in your other thread weren't so much for figuring out why the problem was occurring. Rather they were attempts to elicit more information out of you about the behaviour of extremely long-ranged submunitioning weapons, on the off chance that someone else were to try a similar thing.

The longer-range weapon retains its long range, but doesn't fire until in range of the shorter weapon.

Interesting bug... possibly with an interesting use. If you wanted to limit the maximum range PD weapons can target, then I see:
Have a PD weapon with ID 128 (that's the lowest, right?) and set it up to fire invisible shots, no damage, etc. and have the range you want. Give it to every ship. Either make it an invisible outfit or give it a name like "PD Scanner."

From there, you could take a few routes. I've listed the four most obvious in order of difficulty.

• Make it unsellable

• Be able to sell it, but require it for PD turrets

• Unsellable, but bigger ships have PD "scanners" (with lower ID numbers, just in case) that have longer ranges

• Sellable and comes in multiple variations (more expensive for longer range)