Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

To Geo, et. al.

I'm not sure what to make of this yet...

During my Last two turns, 2403.3 and 2403.4, I have given many ships the order to "retrofit to X class." Upon generation of the next turn, the order was ignored, with no orders showing for the ships when the next turn was generated.

Also, no retrofit message of any type appears in the log the next turn. Nothing happens.

I also had this problem the first two retrofit attempts in my Last game, but the third attempt (and beyond) worked, so I never raised the issue.

I was very careful to check:
No other order was given to conflict
Was not more than 50%
Was obviously not in a fleet
I had plenty of minerals in storage

I usually would not care, but this is a pretty critical juncture in my game, and the fact the retrofits did not work really significantly hurts my chances.

Any ideas? Is it possible to analyze the turns?
Thanks

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

See if you can replicate the issue in your own simultaneous/different machine games (where you make the game just like for a PBW game, but you process it). It is unlikely that it is a bug with PBW itself, because PBW would not change your plr file at all. If some orders are executed but others are not, it most likely has nothing to do with PBW itself.

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

Are there some components that cannot be retrofit? I'm thinking maybe a spaceyard component? I'm not sure, just got this nagging feeling at the back of my mind that I read something like that here.

Edit: From History.txt - > 8. Added - Added "No Retrofit Adding Of Spaceyards" and "No Retrofit Adding Of Colony Module" so players can set whether the game will enforce these rules.

[ May 08, 2003, 02:02: Message edited by: DavidG ]

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

You mentioned that the ship was not part of a fleet when you gave the retrofit order. I have noticed that if you fleet the ship after the retrofit order in the same turn, the retrofit order is cleared.

Slick.

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

Geo is taking a look at it.

Fyron, I'm not sure how I can specifically reproduce it. Are you suggesting I do a save game, and run the game turn on my machine? FYI, I am playing in several PBW games, and I have not noticed this problem in any of them.

DavidG, the components I was trying to retrofit are very standard; I've done this one hundreds of times before. You may be right about restrictions, but I've never tried the components you've mentioned.

Slick, that is true; adding and removing a ship to a fleet will clear the orders. I'm sure that was not the case, now in my paranoia, I almost always select "clear orders" before I issue an order to any ship. I'm pretty sure the retrofits were the Last thing I did that turn.

[ May 08, 2003, 03:43: Message edited by: Stone Mill ]

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

I hesitate to mention it, but something similar happened to me... and even much more foolproof. All I did was unmothball a ship. Next turn it was still mothballed and no orders in queue. I just passed it off thinking I had intended to unmothball but never got around to doing it, but sure have a memory of giving the order. This has happened in the past and again I just passed it off. This may be one of those sporadic glitches that occurs now and then for seemingly no reason.

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

By playing with the files from this game I was able to duplicate the problem and have it occur every time I ran the particular turn. The design being retrofit to is a legal design. If you wait a turn later you can retrofit to it fine. It's only on the exact turn you make the design you can't retrofit to it. But this doesn't happen to every design obviously or we'd hear more about it, so there is some other bit of information that is causing the problem.

After much testing and a little help from SJ in the understanding what was happening, I have resolved the cause of the bug, and have some work arounds to avoid it in the future.

Every ship design in Se4 has a class name, but it get's tracked internally by an index number of some kind. These index numbers are apparently given to each design sequentially during the game as the design is first commited "to paper". However, in a simultaneous game since each player is doing their turn at the same time the game is giving each design the same index as the players do their thing. Then apparently later during the host turn the game reconciles this and removes duplication by changing some of the indexs. Not 100% sure that is exactly what is happening, since I can't see the code, but the symptoms fit the hypothesis.

The result of this reconcilliation on the host is that all the designs created during that turn get shifted around like a game of musical chairs. A long time ago we had this bug and the result would be that sometimes players would end up retrofitting to a design that belonged to another player. Even if they didn't have the tech for all the components. This was bad and resulted in a ship that could not be repaired, and free intelligence about what the other player had tech wise.

Apparetnly the bug was not completely fixed. Now instead of getting the wrong design, the one player will get his retrofit order cancelled with no error message or any indication that anything is amiss.

This problem always flows in the direction from the Last player to the first. The Last player will never have it happen to them, the first will have it happen more frequently. Thos in the middle may have it happen occasionally depending on the circumstances from turn to turn.

There are two workarounds. The first can be done at anytime, but is not 100% foolproof. If a player is designing a ship and has to retrofit to that design immedietly that turn, they can add several designs and pick the Last of the new designs to retrofit to.

This will work most but not all of the time. For example, if player one adds 5 new designs, and gives an order to retrofit to #5, it will work unless the other players make a total of five designs as well.

The second workaround is foolproof, but requires a little advance planning. At some point prior to the turn the new design is needed, the player can add some new designs and not use them for new constroction or retrofits. Then on any later turn those prototype designs can be edited to anything they wish and they will already have index numbers from the previous turn and so will not be affected by anything the other players do during that turn.

Geoschmo
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">If you have a spefici instance of this occuring I'd liek to see it. It doesn't appear to be the same problem Stone Mill was having.

Geoschmo

[ May 08, 2003, 18:27: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

I ran into this problem before and had my ships retrofited to my opponants design.

I worked around it by:
FIRST placing the new design in a planets build que. It does not have to be built or worked on and can be removed on another turn.
NEXT I gave the order for retrofiting.

I wonder if this technique would work now?

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

Geo- you are the Man , as usual. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Thanks for your excellent research and workaround suggestions, which sound plausable.

Wardad, you suggestion sounds easy enough. I too wonder if it would work...

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">That probably would work. Being in a build queue seems to "anchor" the design and make sure Se4 finds an index for it. As shown by the fact that two empires can make designs the same turn and both can build them succesfully. It doesn't suffer from the same symptom as retrofits.

Thanks Wardad, that's three workarounds. And that one should work all the time and not need any pre-planning. The only drawback being the need to have a free space yard slot. Not a sure thing in every game, especially early on.

Geoschmo

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

From Geoschmo:
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Maybe not. I think you just need to place it in a queue. You can have 20 research centres in front of it. Once it's there for a turn, it's "initialized" and can be safely pulled.

Oh, and I will look for an example of the disappearing unmothball order.

(Edit: punctuation)

[ May 09, 2003, 01:25: Message edited by: Grandpa Kim ]

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

Actually, the only drawback is..... not Editing Your Design.

I imagine that pulling the design out of a build que to edit it could cause problems for prior retrofit orders.

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

I had the same problem with unmothballing in Paranoia. I finally decided I really didn't want the ships anyway and scrapped them. I just figured it was user error, although I tried for nearly a game year to get it to work. It was probably ~25 turns ago, though, so I can't reproduce it.

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

I've experiance Both of these problems. The retrofitting problem fixes itself the next turn as explained below. But I've had the unmothballing thing very rarely, it's happened enough that I try to avoid mothballing sometimes.

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">This isn't a problem for me. The thing I like about this particular workaround is that it can be used for a newly created design and you don't have to edit it. Once you retrofit a ship to a particular design you can't edit it anymore anyway.

Geoschmo

Re: Retrofit Bug During PBW Games
 

I read about that work around on this forum.
Maybe SJ or some else posted it.