EVE General Discussion

I wonder how many Sensor Boosters they have fitted.

almost as good as the belt rat that had structures as ammo.

Yeah I was damped by rats 3500 km away yesterday while fighting another player.

In the end I had to warp out because I couldn't do anything in the fight.

We both laughed about it, but rat ewar too stronk.

Right, ccp i know some npc's are supposed to be powerfull, but getting jammed by gate rats 9015km away from the station is actually a bit to ******* much.....

It's the power of the Schwartz! Orrr... there should really have been more testing before the 8000-ish km visibility was implemented.

Moar story plz?

Arg I really don't have time for this as this is the only day I have free to work on tournament ****, but here goes.

We have a policy of not reusing typeIDs in the game and this is a perfect example of why we don't do that. For those that don't know, a typeID is a unique identifier that references an item. Not an instance of an item, that is an itemID. For example 587 is the typeID for the Rifter (and yes I have that memorized for some reason) while the Rifter you are flying has an itemID of something like 102343249878 and the Rifter back in your home station has an itemID of 102343241111. Both are items with the typeID of 587. The other important thing to understand is that we often reference things by their typeID. So we will say these typeIDs are allowed in this mission, or when you shoot a missile it spawns an item of typeID blah.

That last one is where this story comes in. There was this time long ago from before I was working at CCP so I apologize if I get any of the details wrong. We had a specific NPC shooting some missile. I don't know why but we decided we wanted to delete that missile. So we deleted that typeID. What we failed to do was delete all references to it. So there was still this NPC in some mission attempting to fire a missile that doesn't exist anymore. I mean, that is a problem on its own but this story doesn't end there. Oh no not a chance.

A while later someone created a new structure to go in a mission, one of those large collidable structures. When we create things we don't choose the typeID, that is generated for us by our tools. When this new structure was created we were reusing typeIDs that had been deleted. I mean, why not it has been deleted right? No need to increment that typeID number further than needed. So this new structure was created with the typeID that that NPC used to use as a missile. Well, it was supposed to be a past tense thing. Turns out as I said before the NPC was still shooting that same deleted typeID that is now no longer deleted.

So picture this: An NPC sitting in a mission. You warp in. NPC does its NPC thing and targets you. Normally this is where a missile gets spawned and chases you down in its valiant attempt to kill you. This time however instead of a missile spawning a giant ******* structure appears out of nowhere! What the hell you must be thinking, and rightfully so as this is pretty wacky. It gets better though because since that structure was spawned with the center of it being right on the NPC, the NPC is now in the middle of it. This cannot be allowed by the submarine physics of space! No no no. To correct this the game gives a giant kick to the NPC and pushes him out of the structure at a high velocity. So now along with this structure appearing out of nowhere you have this NPC shooting off at some seemingly random direction at a high velocity. Thing is, NPCs don't really have a targeting range. They have a range they will engage at but not a range at which they lose their target lock. So this valiant NPC, while confused about why the hell he is moving at such a speed is dedicated to the cause of killing all capsuleers! So what does he do? Attempts to fire his missile again. Which does what? Well the same thing as before. Spawn a structure and eject the already fast moving NPC at high velocity. So by the time you even wrap your head around the fact that there are magically appearing structures the NPC is gone. Checking d-scan will reveal an ever increasing number of structures in this straight line away from you. By the time things stop working or downtime comes along if you were to carefully check the system you would have found a string of these structures several AU in length.

There are more, but that one gets me every time.