[Lou] [2.0.15] Railgun is shooting other Railsguns

[Orum]

I'm still seeing issues with this even on 2.0.39. I'm trying to get a recording of it happening, but it occurs rarely (and I'm not even sure exactly where on my platform it's happening), so it may take a bit.

[Muche]

I'm still seeing issues with this even on 2.0.39. I'm trying to get a recording of it happening, but it occurs rarely (and I'm not even sure exactly where on my platform it's happening), so it may take a bit.

Could you post a blueprint of the platform or the savefile?

[Orum]

I will upload a save when I get back home. There are two things that make reproducing this very annoying, however.

First is that this seems to occur very rarely. When I tested a trip all the way to the shattered planet, which takes my platform around 2.1 hours, it only happened once. As for what happened, the railguns killed one of the asteroid collectors they shouldn't have been able to hit. How do I know it was railguns and not asteroids? Well, the game doesn't make any alert sounds when something is killed by friendly fire, and I heard nothing—not to mention harmful asteroids don't get anywhere near my platform.

I reloaded an autosave before it happened, in the hopes I could see it happen again, but this is where the second issue comes into play: non-determinism. Even though I never did anything during the entire flight to the shattered planet (other than bringing up the production stats screen), after reloading the save and finishing the flight to the shattered planet again, it didn't occur. As such, reproducing the issue is extremely hard, at least in a timely manner.

Further exacerbating the problem is video recordings of the front of my ship require insane amounts of bitrate to prevent it from turning into mush. As in, literally hundreds of Mbit/s. I'm looking at setting up loop recording in OBS so that I don't have to keep hours of video at this bitrate, which I don't have the space for. And finally, the game also runs very slowly unless I use graphical mods to reduce the load on my GPU, so doing this in an unmodded Factorio is basically out of the question.

[Lou]

...
Further exacerbating the problem is video recordings of the front of my ship require insane amounts of bitrate to prevent it from turning into mush. As in, literally hundreds of Mbit/s. I'm looking at setting up loop recording in OBS so that I don't have to keep hours of video at this bitrate, which I don't have the space for. And finally, the game also runs very slowly unless I use graphical mods to reduce the load on my GPU, so doing this in an unmodded Factorio is basically out of the question.

The save could be very useful even without the recording.

[Orum]

Oops, I forgot to upload the save file a while ago. Well, better late than never: link.

Note that this is saved without the performance enhancing mods enabled, the most important of which is "Remove Asteroid Particles". I also have used "FPS Friendly Thrusters" and "Remove Weapon Particles" but the performance enhancement from them is minor compared to removing the asteroid particles. The FPS hit is worst when zoomed out as far as you can be (before it turns the graphics to just rectangles of mono-colored pixels) and looking at the front of the ship & the asteroids in front of it. I'll also note that I'm using "Texture compression" set to "None" as I noticed artifacts even when it's set to "High quality", and this probably doesn't help things (as I suspect it's probably memory throughput bound, even on my 4080 Super).

Anyway, just go to the platform parked at the shattered planet and tell it to leave, and if you get unlucky (or lucky, depending on if you're trying to reproduce the bug or not) it might shoot part of itself with a railgun on the way back.

[Orum]

Any update on this? It's still an issue on 2.0.47:

friendly-fire.png (664.75 KiB) Viewed 509 times

[Lou]

Any update on this? It's still an issue on 2.0.47:

friendly-fire.png

Oh, it is still happenening? On the same save, if not, please send it to me. (There were some changes (127656) since the last time, so it should be more reproducable now).

[Orum]

Yes, the same save I uploaded earlier. That said, I saved before telling the ship to leave, and it doesn't happen every time the ship makes a trip.

So if it would help, I can make a save after the ship has left and see if it reliably shoots itself at some point. If so, I can then make another save a minute or so before that happens, in order to make things easier to debug on your end.

Edit: I attempted to do just that, but unfortunately the friendly-fire damage is still non-deterministic.

[Lou]

Did cca 45 in-game hours of playtime and no rail gun on rail gun action happened. One collector got destroyed by explosive rocket though.

Marking this as pending until some better reproduction is discovered

[Orum]

Did cca 45 in-game hours of playtime and no rail gun on rail gun action happened. One collector got destroyed by explosive rocket though.

Interesting; how were you able to tell what actually killed it? I'll admit I'm not sure it was a railgun, I just assumed it was because the asteroids don't get that close, and even if they did, I didn't think a single rocket could kill collectors/walls/railguns.

Marking this as pending until some better reproduction is discovered

I've noticed the best chance of reproducing it is by leaving the Shattered Planet, letting the ship get up to full speed (and the asteroid density at max or near maximum), saving the game, and then loading that save. Once the save is loaded, I look back at the ship to view the kills/losses, and maybe 20 to 30% of the time I'll see some losses due to friendly fire (as no audio alert is played). So, something happens immediately after the game is loaded that seems to cause the issue.