Fixed Turrets continuously fire on dead NPC's outside of render range [7526]

This is a frustration bug post - this bug has been in every version since I started playing at Alpha 4.

Turrets on bases, CVs, HVs, and I imagine now SVs will keep shooting at things that are already dead when they are a long distance away. The only way to get them to stop when they start doing it is to either turn them off, or to walk (or move the vessel) closer to the already dead thing so the turrets can recognize that the thing is already dead. The game itself obviously knows it's dead - why do the turrets continue to waste ammo?

I'm frustrated at the moment because my CV just burnt through several thousand rounds doing this while I was fighting inside a base. Again.

 

Maybe it wasn’t >really< dead...only >mostly< dead...

 

Is it possible that turrets are shooting at a spawner?

 

In one of @jrandall last Videos->




he mentioned that the Turrets of his Tank are shooting sometimes. They did. Several Times. He even looked at the Point of the Impact but you couldn't see anything. The possibility of shooting a spawner...maybe...open country..

 

Maybe it wasn't dead but pining for the fjords..

 

Noob question, but I have to ask. Do they actually shoot at spawners?

 

Well "technically" it could be shooting at "critters" at the exact spot they are spawning, but because of distance they are not "rendered" so turrets appear to be shooting at "nothing" - because the code check may completely ignore if an object is rendered for purpose of determining its presence in a playfield.

 

Definitely not. It happens with random Zirax and/or predators that spawned away from POIs.

 

The location where an enemy or critter can spawn is not a set point in space (like spawn plates in POIs) but a radius from a point (player, POI) unless I'm mistaken.

Did you "see" where the enemies spawned from ?

There is no logic to have to move closer to a dead enemy so "turrets can see it too". It has to be something the turret relies on that changes with distance, and not "visual" since turrets have no eyes - they catch the distance from the code, not from the screen.

Then again, in this game, we never know...

 

I think that the game either unloads terrain "chunks" (whatever they are called in this game) or just stops processing events at a certain distance from the player - but that distance is still within range of the turrets. The turrets keep operating on the last-known data, which is that a valid target is standing there. This is something that my friends and I have all seen and commented on multiple times over the years we've played this game. The behavior is very consistent.

 

Did you notice if all turrets kept shooting, of if one stopped (the first who got the signal), and the others continued ?

 

Seems like they all stop at once.

 

I will certainly try. I think the condition persists across saves, but I'm not 100% sure.

 

I spent some time trying to duplicate this in an SP game, but it doesn't seem to happen there. I'm admin on a dedicated server that my friends and I use for co-op play. I'll see if I can capture it there. I was trying to avoid that because it's more hassle.

 

I tried, but I think you're going to have to mark this one 'cannot reproduce'. It happens often to me in MP only, but the condition didn't survive the disconnect/stop server/copy save/start server/connect procedure.