Re: Death of an advanced unit

[Lincoln Peters <peters2000 at mindspring dot com>]

On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 15:05, Hans Ronne wrote:
> The advanced unit code was not written with this kind of "time.g-like"
> upgrade mechanism in mind, so something may well go wrong. I did run your
> "Space Empire" game (which I assume is what you are talking about) on auto
> for a few hundred turns but saw no crashes. The mac is more tolerant of
> null pointers, though, and the AIs never moved any units, just kept
> building more and more troops. Has this been fixed in a more recent version?

I used the "time.g-like" upgrade mechanism because the change-type
mechanism (which I assume would work) was not available.  Once it's
implemented, I can switch over and (hopefully) escape this whole
problem. 

As for constantly building troops without moving them, the AI probably
just doesn't understand the logistics of this game (which are quite
complex).  It's going to need that "Transport" plan as well as a better
"Improving" plan before I expect it to play well at all.  Otherwise,
it'll most likely be unable to figure out how to move engineers and
ground-troops around, and it won't know how to produce starship fuel.

I did try adding a "More starters" variant that gives each side an
antimatter-plant and a shipyard at the beginning of the game, and the AI
does play somewhat better when that's enabled.  Of course, the troops
still tend to stay wherever they were built.

Did you ever see the AI tell a civ-0 (Level 0 civilization) to build a
civ-1 (Level 1 civilization)?  That's when I saw the segfaults, but I
didn't create a point-value incentive for the AI to try to do that.

> 
> In any case, a stack dump from one of your crashes would be really helpful.

I'll see if I can get one for you.

> 
> >As far as moving advanced units go, I gave up on them and re-wrote
> >floating cities to be non-advanced but have their production affected by
> >terrain using the "productivity" table.  No segfaults either way.
> 
> Well, with the patch I just checked in moving advanced units should now work.

And it looks to me like it does work.


By the way, I changed the name of the game to "Space Civilization" when
I realized that there is already a game called "Space Empire"
(space.g).  However, the filename still reads "Space-empire.g".  I'll
change it to something like "Space-civ.g" one of these days.