2024-03-30 Lockup Bug, Billion Hit Point Buildings

Lockup Bug Two different cases of program lockups were reported. One occurred at the moment the avatar gave the vulcium knife to Xian at the University, something I have done hundreds of times. The other lockup occurred at the moment a spacecraft entered a wormhole, another activity I have done hundreds of times. Both of these juicy bugs were captured in save game files.

I lumped these two bugs together because the same program error was causing the problem. Oddly the bug was introduced some time in 2015. It is fixed.

Billion Hit Point Buildings Pirate buildings report billions of hit points. This makes them very difficult to destroy.

This problem is caused by an inconsistency between the building subsystem volumes and the overall volume of the building itself. This error also afflicts some spacecraft blueprints.

I updated the building and spacecraft blueprint finalize functions to catch this situation and report it as an error. It also tells you how to fix it, which simply requires a refresh of the obstacles data and then to Ok the properties. A careful look at the subsystem volumes is recommended.

I also fixed the total hit points function to return a reasonable number when this situation occurs.

The default building and spacecraft blueprints should be reviewed and republished as necessary. There is no time for that today. I'll do it some time next week.