Stuck forever on waiting for drones while transferring wares

[xuancong]

Dear X-rebirth programmers,

On X-rebirth 3.53, I ordered my ship to transfer wares to another ship and I have queued 3 items. Initially, I saw some drones moving between the 2 ships and the first 2 trades completed successfully, but the last trade never finishes and after that, I saw no drones moving between the two ship for >1hr. One ship says "executing trade", the other ship says "waiting for drones".

I think when you do the programming, you need to take some safety measures. Never take things for granted, exceptions always happen. The drones can be destroyed, pushed to a very distant place by some big ship, etc, there is no guarantee it can come back, thus, if it does not come back after some time, take it as failed to delivery.

In this case, my 2 ships are next to jump beacon where there are a lot of jump traffic, there are at least 2 possibilities:
1) since collision detection is on, some other big ship can push my cargo drones away, and it will virtually never come back.
2) when some ship jumps in, the coordinate overlap causes my cargo drone to go inside the jump-in ship's hull and it can never come out due to collision detection.
3) ...
Anything can happen, so the program needs to do something to guarantee no deadlock regardless of whether the player is in the zone or not.

[UniTrader]

do any of the Shipy involved do have Cargo drones? if not its not a deadlock, but it will take very long since the captains will transfer wares by hand.

[xuancong]

do any of the Shipy involved do have Cargo drones? if not its not a deadlock, but it will take very long since the captains will transfer wares by hand.

Yes, both of them have cargo drones.
Even if they don't have, the game should not deadlock.

So the programmers made 2 loopholes:
1. even when both ships have cargo drones, because of the various possibilities that can happen to drones as I mentioned, the "waiting for drones" will stuck.
2. even if the ship does not have cargo drones, the game should NOT stuck, it should tell the player, trade failed due to no cargo drones and abort the trade operation. However, no part of the game tells the player that cargo ships must be equipped with cargo drones, otherwise, trade will stuck forever.

From these, we can see that the programmers are very unprofessional in designing game logic.

[birdtable]

I have found the easiest solution is to fly ( or jump if modded) to ship (zone) which then kicks back into action and move to next delivery point (there never was drones needed, delivery had been made)... Very frustrating, I do a regular quick check on Captain details just to see if "waiting for drones" appears. So far I have found no common cause or cure other than flying to ship (just arrive in zone)....Had 15 to 20 ships trading, selling 15 ships did ease the frustration...

[XenonSurf]

To avoid shipyard troubles during trading or repair, you must do:

- your entire CAP crew at 5 stars preferably
- you have a good nr. of cargo and construction drones
- always QUICKSAVE before talking to the Ship Dealer
- Abort the repair if you see red items in the item repair list (go elsewhere)
- Never, never, never get scanned by police if you have illegals on skunk, soon you'll use your quicksave

XenonS

[randomkeyhits]

I have had this but only on trades which are not in the same cluster.

As soon as I fly the skunk into the same sector as the stalled trade it will then start to resolve itself and go into executing trade within a short while.

I thought this was an issue with saving the game mid trade and then it stalls when you reload to continue later on.

Not been able to deliberately recreate it yet though.

[birdtable]

Within 20kms of ship usually kicks it back into action and fly to next delivery/pick up point.

[xuancong]

Within 20kms of ship usually kicks it back into action and fly to next delivery/pick up point.

What are you guys talking about? I am on top of my trade ship, watching them finishing the first 2 trades, getting stuck on the 3rd trade, seeing no more drones for >1hr. It cannot be resolved unless I edit my game file or load a previous save point. The game is very much broken due to inconsiderate game logic design.

[birdtable]

Did you by any chance give the order to transfer wares during a transfer/trade of wares from a previous instruction ...
Have learnt never to give a transfer order until Captain is in a state of "waiting" for the next command/order and for all ( transfer ship, receiving ship and skunk) to be all in the same zone
Not an ideal solution but you have to adapt to the limitations you find within the game....
Many things can break a sequence of pre planned orders, patience ( ) and a willingness to find a working methodology helps to keep your sanity in the long run.

[xuancong]

Did you by any chance give the order to transfer wares during a transfer/trade of wares from a previous instruction ...

No. I queued all 3 orders in one go. Btw, you cannot queue a new trade order once the trade/transfer has already started, even if it is at the same trade port. It's probably a bug that you have to wait until the ship finishes trading with the current port, undock and then you can queue a new trade order with the same station. Very stupid!

Have learnt never to give a transfer order until Captain is in a state of "waiting" for the next command/order and for all ( transfer ship, receiving ship and skunk) to be all in the same zone

Not true for 3.53. It might increase the chance of a bug but I do have successfully issued trade/transfer/refuel order when the ship is not "waiting" or the two ships and me are in very different sectors/zones/galaxies. The new order will either be queued or cancel all current orders. The game generally works quite ok. The main problem lies in dealing with special events because the programmers do not play the game they themselves, thus, some situations that they assume can never happen can indeed happen, and thus, they're not handled properly. For example:
a) you can actually boost into very high speed, crash into a station or a capital ship's hull and you can never get out. Or sometime, when I hide skunk in between a Taranis 2 engines, as the enemy ship turns/decelerate, I hear a lot of collisions and miraculously entered its hull and cannot fly out unless I destroy it. The game's collision detection logic is not very correct.
b) during a small talk, if you choose talk option very fast, sometimes you will see something different (relationship increased before the other speaker appraises you). The game's conversation sequence logic is not correct. (if the player choose option very fast, it should stop the previous speech if the chosen option will play a new speech)
c) when a ship is jumping in, the entire space region containing the in-bound ship should be reserved (the region should contain no objects and no object can go inside) until the ship jumps in. But currently, I can fly freely around the warp point flashing ball, what if when the ship jumps in and its coordinate overlaps with my coordinate??? So the ship jump logic is not correct either.

Another thing is that you cannot cancel nor modify individual trade tasks. If you want to modify, you have to cancel all trips, which is very incomplete game function.

[XenonSurf]

In your situation, I would try the following:

- Load your game and quicksave / save asap (for the case it doesn't work)
- Order your ships to "Leave my Squad"
- Go far away, use a Super Highway, do something, go on a station, or do a mission
- return and observe if the issue will solve, or order "Join my Squad" and see what comes.

I found that going away for a time and returning will solve most of stucked CAP ships , although I really don't know why. I did never run into your case, so I don't know if it helps here.

I only use mods that don't change savegames, and if I do in the future I'll backup my previous ones manually before.

Also, after about 1 hour of real time gameplay, I leave XR and restart to increase performance (and clear some cache files) and so maybe I avoid running in such 'troubles'. Not sure if this helps either.

But whatsoever, even if this 'workaround' does work, it remains that the code in XR has to be re-written for such special cases, a simple patch disabling this and that is not enough. It would be fine for the gameplay to add some messages for the player (voice or written on-screen), or an Unkeep Mission that gives the player a clue about what he can do and what he shouldn't do or has missed to do. This is true for a lot of game features, starting with repair procedures, ware transfers, cargo collection in space, or other special operations that may not come to an end in a way the player wants. It's then important that the player knows why, and only messages could tell him that.
I expect coders to do their work correctly and test their work through real play, a thing that has clearly not been done in such 'special' cases.
Adding features in a game is fine, but they have to work and be enjoyable for the player.

XenonS

[XenonSurf]

Btw, you cannot queue a new trade order once the trade/transfer has already started, even if it is at the same trade port. It's probably a bug that you have to wait until the ship finishes trading with the current port, undock and then you can queue a new trade order with the same station. Very stupid!

NO!
When you buy the 1st upgraded trade computer, you can do exactly 3 transactions at any time, it doesn't matter at what state these transactions are.
There is a bigger trade computer (terribly expensive) which allows you 5 such transactions.

But this has plain nothing to do with your initial problem which is: transfering wares.
I often transfer wares and even if I have only 5 cargo drones it works all right. I chose the 'List' when asked by Yisha, click on the wares I want to transfer, chose the appropriate ship and that's it, there my drones go for the transfer, no trouble for me whatsoever (3.53). IIRC, it all goes about 5 minutes real time, but this highly depends on the tonnage tranfered of course, don't complain if 5 drones have to transfer 15000 tons...you better do something else in the meantime.

This is also a factor: I make sure that I give both transfer ships the order to "stay in position" while being in my squad, so the distance between them will be all right and the cargo drones have only minimal distances to work.

XR is a very complex game in which one must do a lot of things right to succeed. So it's hard to determine if something really is a 'bug' or not.
I find this an unpleasant side-effect in XR, and only more messages to the player could eradicate this.

@ Egosoft:
Yisha the copilot can be used for that: more instructional messages from her to the player instead of sitting there all day long and gawking like a beef. At least an idea for XR2, X4, or whatever.




XenonS

[Ezarkal]

I get that "waiting from drones" problem once in a while. Usually, cancelling the queued orders and re-listing them will do the trick.

[CulunTse]

I've recently started encountering this problem as well on the Linux-alpha.

The ships will hang at "waiting for drones", with one I waited at least 5 hours of continuous gameplay (running in background while YAT-autotraders made me money)
add-to-squad / remove-from-squad doesn't reset them, but visiting their zone does.

So far I've seen this with my own trades trying to trade with NPC-stations, my own stations and even a construction vessel.

If there's anything I can do to help debug this, let me know!

[kelmenwong]

any resolution to this?

i have this issue, clearing the planned trip doesn't help, as it just show up again

http://steamcommunity.com/app/2870/disc ... 583600656/

my trader executed transfer ware with 1 of my construction vessel
trader is done, carry on other task
cv captain now stuck at waiting for drone, no drone is in use
can't transfer ware to cv

i transfer ware between this trader with another trader
after 1st transfer, now both stuck at waiting for drone
the 2nd trasfer 47 cargo drones seems lost

i fly in-zone, can't see any drone
replace the cv captain, problem resolved, replace it back, cv now ok

the 2 traders, the 1 i issue the transfer ware, can't ask him to stop
but i can ask the other to stop, however, the last stuck transfer keep show up in both planned trip, even if i clear (both) it, it show up
and both captain stuck with 1/7 planned trip

i order the 2nd captain fly to next zone, clear her planned trip, the task still come back

[JESS 246]

Hi UniTrader and all.

To all I have noticed these type of issues a lot and as mentioned by many if you fly/jump out of zone so any order given to cap ships either trade/transfer and repair always work faster if you are out of zone your ships are in WHY.

For UniTrader as a moderator you must have come across this type of issue a lot, and if we are near our cap/trade ships or in same zone things either don't work or move very slowly and when we fly out of same that zone all works fine or very quickly so why haven't this or these issues been fixed in an of the updates/betas.

[12pak1]

I get this same issue ALOT. It seems to be getting more frequent the bigger my empire gets. To fix it, I'll add both ships to squad, remove from squad, leave zone, come back, wash, rinse repeat. sometimes, any of the steps above will fix it. Which step exactly the fix happens varies from time to time. Don't ask me why, couldn't tell you.
Sometimes, none of these steps will fix it, and at that point, I have to attempt to use the "cancel planned trips" option. Do this for both ships. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.
In the case that it doesn't work, I keep repeating the cancel order on each ship, back and forth, and it will eventually stick for one of them. Again, no idea why. Once this happens, I can never get the captain of the other ship to do anything after that. All options stay greyed out at that point. To fix this, you have to replace the captain, and fire the original captain once they are back on the Skunk. You can place that Captain in another ship, but it doesn't fix him, options remain greyed out. Once you replace him, the ship you fired him from, (so far anyway), will resume normal operation and you can retry the transfer.
Something else that has never worked right for me, is do a transfer "to" a ship, and then a transfer "from" the same ship, during the same transaction. The ships will follow through, but they never do it correctly. One of them will always end up transferring the entire stock of the item I was trying to only take some of. Once I figured out what was happening, I learned to NEVER to a transfer to, and a transfer from in the same trip.
I don't usually have a problem with doing multiple transfers to different ships though. For example, I can do a transfer to ship 1, then do a transfer from ship 2, then a transfer to ship 3 and so on. I can also do multiple transfers of multiple items "to" OR "from" a single ship on a single transaction, as long as I don't try to transfer "to" AND "from" at the same time.

[kelmenwong]

...
In the case that it doesn't work, I keep repeating the cancel order on each ship, back and forth, and it will eventually stick for one of them....

do i need to be fast for this "keep repeating cancel"?

i did that, but the planned trip just keep coming back
do u always manage get this "keep repeating cancel" work? like at most 10 times?
can tell how exactly u managed it? becos i hate to load hours ago game save, and i been trying to cancel it but it just keep come back.

[Santi]

The few times I got the issue, I cancel the trip, then I add to squad and if the "following Skunk" is not displayed, I take out of squad, use com and give him a new task or order, then clear orders and add to squad again. You could always temporary assign the ship to one of your station managers, then add to squad and clear orders as well.

[12pak1]

You could always temporary assign the ship to one of your station managers, then add to squad and clear orders as well.

Ooh, I didn't even think about that. That might be the better way, than the way I said. Might save your captains that way.