Yay, I managed to free up the rails!
I disconnectied the rail speed control computer from one of a couple rotators and my station came back to life again.
It's amazing something so small like a connection can cause such drama for all the rails on the entity and the first level of docked entities.
Oh, that is a really haunting one.
Hard to find the cause, and even harder to identify, without enabling "show all logic links", as this may give a hint.
Thank you soo much for this. Much appreciated :D
However: I notice that shoot out rail clocks no longer work reliably. I don't expect there to be much concern from Shine regarding this, however, I worry that this is a result of new bugs, and not from Shine deliberately removing this capability.
When building a simple shoot out rail clock some of the rails C+V links would randomly disconnect, and sometimes the rails wouldn't switch from shoot-out to pickup or vice versa. It always ended up resulting in the docked entity being unlocked and shot-out.
Like I said, I don't think Shine is too worried about shoot-out rail clocks not working, I'm just concerned that this may be the result of bugs that may need to be addressed.
Thanks Again, and keep up the outstanding work.
Sorry to disappoint, but regular clocks work at 2 signal changes per second max. The shootout clock can easily achieve 6 or 8 signal changes per second. We added an anti-spam feature, that prevents signals from queuing up too much. So a short burst of shootout clock fires will work, but if it starts to influence the server it will get throttled immediately. (Causing the catch, replace, fire back procdure to stop where it just throws off the entity.)
It always disappoints me when exploits are hidden from the general public during alpha games. I feel like an integral purpose of alpha testers is to find the exploits that exist, refine them, then get them removed; by restricting access to the exploits that have been patched out, you only screw yourself over in the long run as the exploits that could be found sooner will be found later when the code has already progressed farther.
To sum up my feelings: "Hooray I found a game breaking bug that shouldn't have made it through Alpha and I'm in the Beta!"
Well, some of those exploits were not directly reported, but found while testing.
Another good set was a long hidden secret and it took us some investigation and help from servers to get hands on ideas how they worked and finally ways to reproduce.
Just recently we got hands on some ships containing multiple exploits and were able to fix those cases too.
However, from the sole exact steps to reproduce, you could find other exploits, and sadly:
They wont get reported, but used in PvP or other frauds, I doubt more than 10% of the discovered exploits get reported in the first place. They usually land in some "last resort tool box".
And way more important:
If we reveal the exact way to use the exploit together with the news, or even before, it would leave
every single server that did not update yet open to this exploit. That would be some evil 'force to update immediately', right? =)
A while ago, we uncovered some exploits from 6 months ago that had been fixed.
But a change in code nearby, made them become working again, and they were immediately used against servers or factions again. And we gave them the instructions how to do so.
- Andy
