In my experience, it is possible to eventually achieve a positive identification of the Planetary Patrol Vessels on planets like Ningues. But it is EXTREMELY unpredictable and rare. You can buzz within 100m of the ship scanning feverishly. You can hang back at 1km scanning feverishly. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason as to why these ships are "resistant" to being positively identified, but then can on rare occasions be positively identified. A related issue: often times, if not always, once one of these PPVs are scanned, it places a moving map marker on the map, meaning: the map constantly updates where the ship is. Related to this: it is often the case that ships in Space Sectors which are well within range are not scanned, or take much longer to become scanned than things like mineral deposits. In other fairly uncommon instances, a ship that is 15 or 20km outside of scan range is miraculously identified. If this is just game mechanics not working as intended, can we have a talk about it, and how we might help with pinning down the malfcunctions and fixing it? If it is intended behavior then is there any explanation for the rationale for it and why, in terms of game lore, it is considred valid for it to exist? If Stealth technology were a mehcanic and there was a set of lore and or technology to be explored, unlocked, mitigated, or reverse-engineered, then these dynamics would be far less annoying. But as it is, it adds an element of random *BANG* your dead which is neither fun in general, nor fitting with the reset of the game. Just the other day on the Anvil Season 6 server, a user spoke up in chat to report that he had just had his CV wrecked by a Stealthy Zirax ship as he was mining.
RE has a lot of stupid mechanics for stupid reasons. (Disclaimer: It's a great mod plagued by stupid things.) Things not being scanned is one of them. Savor the joy of scanning for poi's on plasma planets.
I thought this was vanilla glitch; are you sure that this is actually a specific MECHANIC that is intended in RE? If so, then I hate to say it but yes: I agree; not a good mechanic. But I vaguely recall asking Ravien about it in the past and him telling me that it was a vanilla issue. It has been so long since I've played vanilla I honestly don't know.
The detection range of ships and POIs can be manually set on a per-poi or per-patrol vessel basis, however no, in RE patrol vessels with "stealth" are limited to an extremely tiny number of ships for special encounters (scrapyard raid and some combat sites where the patrol vessels hang around a central marker). Honestly I am tired of people blaming me for this. I see this question pop up pretty regularly and every time someone comes in and says RE does it instead of, you know, taking the 2 seconds to ask me on Steam or Discord if I actually did make patrol vessels have stealth.
Well I'm sorry that it is annoying and I can empathize with that. But here is the thing: it IS annoying to player. For those of us who never play vanilla, it is unclear if the bug is a result of either (a) vanilla; (b) RE; or (c) some sort of emergent dynamic between EGS+RE. Also, it isn't even clear if it is WAD or not. There needs to be clear communication on this so that maybe some solution can be considered and a way forward explored. Even in the response I've quoted here, you don't really make it clear what you know about the "bug," where you think it comes from, or how you think it should be addressed. The impression one gathers is that you just don't really care, and would like it if people just stopped complaining about it. Which is understandable, but it doesn't help either you or the people who play the game with your scenario. One thing I do not know is: if the "stealth" effect happens in vanilla play or not. If it does not, the clearly it is a result of either (b) or (c) above, which would mean that, you or Vermillion are going to be instrumental in addressing the topic and (assuming it is not WAD) "fixing" it. If you did not intend the "stealth" effect with NPC warships, then just say so? If you don't believe that anything you've done with RE settings is the reason for the "stealth" effect, then also, just say so? I say it as often as possible, but I'll say it again: what you guys have done with RE (and with each your separate portions of that too) is absolutely incredibly! I'm quite sure I would have stopped playing Empyrion long ago if not for RE. Reforged Eden is one of the finest "mods" for a computer game I have ever encountered. But it isn't perfect, and the stealth ships is an example where there is a long-standing issue, which as you note yourself, many players have complained about. Let us HELP YOU to figure out what is going on, and how it might be "fixed."
There is nothing we can do to fix that issue. Of course it's not intended but there's no way for me to fix it. I cannot comment on what is or is not a game bug, as I can only fix what is possible to fix within a scenario.
And it's not that I don't care, but that the issue needs to be reproduced in a vanilla save game and then reported so if it is a game bug it can get added to the list of known issues and possibly fixed or marked as intended. I've personally experienced the issue myself ever since the detector ping was added to the game, so it's been around for a long long time. But even if it is an issue with the scenario, it wouldn't be possible to fix because there's no way to change how the detector works, you can only change the ranges at which it does which won't fix inconsistent detector behavior.
Okay, good to have it all clarified. Do you think it has been reported as a vanilla bug, or what search strings I might try to see if it has already been reported? If it has been reported before then it makes sense to work forward from that older report. It might also clarify what difficulties existed in Eleon replicating the bug and thus assisting with addressing it. I would assume the gold standard for trying to provide the most rock-solid report on a bug like this would be: use a vanilla single player session, find a playfield where an orbital or planetary ship was exhibiting the bug. Log out, turn on a video capture session, resume play video the bug happening. Save the game. Post the video to YouTube (or where ever). Post the bug report with the save file and the video link? Would using changemode in order to skip over the need to level up to a durable ship be a bad idea in the sense that it might garble the save file and make Eleon more skeptical that the bug is a general occurrence? I ask this because: ideally, one would operate in an extremely robust CV which could handle taking a good bit of close-range fire in order to fully demonstrate how the bug tends to manifest. The prospect of playing for 20 or 30 hours ++ to level up a character to being able to field such a CV is not very appealing, when I'd much rather be playing RE and progressing on my "real" singleplayer session (and maybe FINALLY "finishing" the RE story arc!). The idea would be: generate a brand new single player default settings vanilla session (so that the galaxy seed has the parameters to populate playfields), switch to creative (and save and relog) to level up the toon to max, spawn in a strong ship, plus supplies; changemode back to survival (and save and relog), then proceed to go hunt up some Zirax Stealth ships. If Eleon is gonna look at the save file and say "Nah, we cannot confirm the bug with this because you used change mode" then I don't think I'm up to the task. I mean a lazy mofo so I'm even shaky IF they'll take the bug report with a changed moded save! But I figure: IF there is a real chance that it might cause them to look at it, and maybe even solve it, I'll give it a whirl.
In survival use these commands instead of change mode.... level = 25 gm fly itemmenu sbp give credit 99999999 pretty much creative mode at this point, but with all survival properties unaltered. just can not set the time of day easily or stop time.
I've run into this bug in vanilla. Flying up to a ship and wondering what it is, because pinging radar over and over again shows no name plate. Then getting within 50 to 100 meters and suddenly the name shows and the ship starts firing (I've only had it happen with the Zirax, and oddly the ship seemed somewhat AI dead, only traveling in a straight line). This was years ago though and the game has been through many changes, so I wouldn't really take my above statement as being relevant to today's game. I do know it was talked about on the fourms at the time, but probably couldn't find it now even if I tried. And again it was so many game versions ago, I doubt it would do any good even if I did find it. A saved game is worth a try, but I doubt that would work to track down the bug. Nearly every bug I've run into in Empyrion is "solved" by reloading. It's worth a shot to try, but I believe it will be a hard bug to fix since reloading often does the trick.
Having used console to give myself a decent ship and some supplies and played a bit in vanilla, I have to say: I have my doubts that the bug occurs in vanilla. I say this because: the way in which the detector functions in vanilla seems to be quite different from how it functions in Reforged Eden. First off, there is only one type of CV detector instead of the two or three in RE. Second, that detector has "range = 24 km," although that is not entirely accurate. What it does is: it will detect "something" for every POI, ore deposit, and vessel at out to 24km. In order to get a positive identification on the target one must approach to a lesser distance. Several of the nice features in RE are absent in vanilla, e.g., the script in that shows the faction identity of the target. I came up on a "Harkonnen Sunseeker" (which I thought was a Polaris vessel type) that was red, which fired at me, and I have no idea what faction it was. Same for some POI called "Cyrano." I would assume that these differences in functionality between RE and vanilla are accomplished by changing the text files to which portions of the UI refer? It would seem that, the way in which detectors work in RE is using an older mechanic, which is still in the game, but is no longer being used by the vanilla game detector mechanic. So I would guess that, unless there is a desire to "rewire" how detectors work in RE, the bug is just there to stay. I'm a bit surprised that simply changing values in config files, or using alternate files as references for expressions that refer to an asset can produce that amount of divergence in functionality. The other thing that really surprised me (and keep in mind here I had not fired up a vanilla session for at least 2 years and had not played more than 20 hours of vanilla in probably 4 years) the basic look and feel and visual experience in vanilla seemed quite different than in RE. Now granted, I rarely ever visit the easy temperate starter planets in RE and in this case I made Akua my starter world. But There is ACTUAL GRASS (that lays down when you tramp on it) on the vanilla Akua planet. Eleon have REALLY been focusing hard on more immersive graphics, and I suppose that RE is still making use of older texture files? Not a big deal to me, as the appeal of Empyrion was never in its naturalistic look and feel, and in many cases I find that the "increased realism" takes away from gameplay as much as it adds to it (changes to elevator functionality for example). Without diving into the actual RE directory to see what is really going on here, that is about all I can say; but I guess I have a bit more understanging . . . speculative understanding at least . . . for what is going on.
There is only one way that detectors can work. There's also multiple versions of detectors in vanilla too. We cannot use the new planetary decoration system in scenarios yet. Well, technically we can but there's no documentation and it's been recommended that people don't use it in their scenarios so it's not feasible to make use of.
