[SCRIPT] NPC Bailing Addon v1.7.8 [2010-09-21]

[Scoob]

Hi,

Nice script

Is the feature to destroy ships that have remained unclaimed still in place? The reason I ask is because I've had ships in several sectors which bailed game days ago yet are still there as detected by SEWN.

Cheers,

Scoob.

[Knight of the Kingdom]

Here you go, i temporarily uploaded it somewhere else for you

http://www.filedropper.com/npcbailingaddon-v14-31102008

Thanks man (assuming you are one, lol, just...yea, lol thanks, I just odn't want to offend you if you're not), I appreciate it!

[ThisIsHarsh]

Is the feature to destroy ships that have remained unclaimed still in place? The reason I ask is because I've had ships in several sectors which bailed game days ago yet are still there as detected by SEWN.

Yeah they should explode after 2 game hours unclaimed. I'll look into it in case something has gone wrong. Cheers for the feedback.

[ThisIsHarsh]

Is the feature to destroy ships that have remained unclaimed still in place? The reason I ask is because I've had ships in several sectors which bailed game days ago yet are still there as detected by SEWN.

Yeah they should explode after 2 game hours unclaimed. I'll look into it in case something has gone wrong. Cheers for the feedback.

Thanks for spotting this, there was indeed a glaringly obvious bug in the ship explode code. I've fixed it and am packaging a new version with this and other minor fixes.

[ThisIsHarsh]

Update v1.5

Fixed unclaimed ships exploding after timeout.

A few other small fixes.

[Scoob]

Hi ThisIsHarsh,

Thanks for the prompt update...just wait for my next post where I complain about the ship I was just about to claim EXPLODING on me!

Cheers,

Scoob.

[Khaak_Slayer]

Here you go, i temporarily uploaded it somewhere else for you

http://www.filedropper.com/npcbailingaddon-v14-31102008

Thanks man (assuming you are one, lol, just...yea, lol thanks, I just odn't want to offend you if you're not), I appreciate it!

lol, no worries mate. And yeah, man is correct.

[A5PECT]

I'm also getting some No Pilot, unclaimable ships in my game. They only appear during missions (station defense, to be precise), so I think the problem related to those.

There are some problems with NPC salvagers, as well. The salvagers fly about their capture as if they're trying to close in to claim it, but are thrown off course by the AI's collision avoidance routines. This all occurs in-sector, of course.

[Baleur]

lol "lowered default bail rate to 60%"

Its still waaaaaaaay too high, but who cares since we can change it ourselves
Even 10% is too high, i know some of you guys get like 50% bail rate in "vanilla" x3tc, but i get like 1% bail rate lol.

I have a question about that and the huge ship bail rate settings though...
Do they ONLY apply to npc vs npc combat?
And how does the pilot bravado stat affect it? If the bail rate is at 100%, and the bravado is at 80%, whats the actual bail rate then? 20%? If so, i can understand having such a high default bail rate value.

[Graxster]

Has anyone found empty ships that have decent hull left? So far every ship I find is between 1% and 5% hull left, with a very random ship that may have 10%-15% hull. Just wondering if it's bad luck, or the calculations don't allow for freighter/wimp pilots to bail at 30-80% hull. Thanks.

-Grax

[ThisIsHarsh]

@KloHunt3r: Thanks for the heads-up on the NPC salvager issue. I take it they only have problems when the abandoned ship is right next to a station or asteroid or something, or the ship is particularly big? I'll look into it, but it's a minor issue for now - as you say it works fine OOS.


@Baleur: I've done some fairly rigourous testing and at 10% you should get hardly any bails, what you may be seeing is the aftermath from when the setting was higher. The bug recently fixed meant that ships wouldn't disappear after a period of time (though if you installed NPC salvagers the issue would be almost entirely moot), so for a while there may be an excessive buildup of ships.

The bailing applies to "any vs. any" combat, not just npc vs. npc but: player vs. npc; npc vs. player-owned; npc vs. asteroid; etc.

OK some numbers - but first I'll point out bravado isn't percent, it's out of 300, but almost all ships lie between 20 and 90. Civilian ships and some traders tend to be around 20, whereas most military ships are around 90. Traders and some pirates and patrols most often fall somewhere in-between.

Spoiler

Show

Bravado = 80
- bail rate 100% -> 11% probability of bailing
- bail rate 50% -> 6% probability of bailing
- bail rate 10% -> less than 1% probability of bailing

Bravado = 50
- bail rate 100% -> 17% probability of bailing
- bail rate 50% -> 9% probability of bailing
- bail rate 10% -> 2% probability of bailing

Bravado = 20
- bail rate 100% -> 33% probability of bailing
- bail rate 50% -> 20% probability of bailing
- bail rate 10% -> 5% probability of bailing

Hopefully that helps. As you can see the probabilites aren't that high even for the most liberal setup.


@Graxter: The hull damage is one thing I'm pondering about changing.

Right now the hull damage has no randomness. The probability % given in the spoiler tag above doubles as the maximum hull % the pilot will bail at (will probably be less as the ship will continue taking damage for a short while before the pilot has a chance to bail). I left it like this since noone seemed to complain.

A small minority of ships have a very very low pilot bravado so you will find some ships with over 30% hull, but most will have less than 30% when they finally bail. This to me makes some sense, since it would be an exceptionally cowardly person indeed who would bail prematurely. Such pilots do exist in the game, but are rare.

[Graxster]

Thanks for the explanation. I don't mind about repairing the hulls, was just wondering, since in the vanilla game it's possible to get a bail at anything 80% hull and below. Had to make sure I wasn't buggy, lol. BTW, it's working great for me. Love it! Thanks for all the hard work.

-Grax

[Baleur]

Wow thanks for that info, now i understand it alot better, back to 80% it goes!
No wonder i had never seen any bails from this mod yet, lol. Less than 1% in actual "real-life" situations

[Graxster]

LOL! Just be careful what you wish for!

I turned Big and Huge ship bailing on, put bail rate at 80%, and adjusted the hull% they'd bail at.... oops! Had a Xenon mini-invasion in Treasure Chest and this is what I claimed after the Argon Military cleaned up the Xenon J and I killed a bunch of L's, M's, and N's:

[ external image ]

Well, except for the one named *storage*... he's there to collect all the wares/missiles. look at the hull% that the Argon Military Colossus bailed at, rofl. There were astronauts everywhere!

-Grax

[999-JAY-999]

So what is may I ask the most realistic setting(s) ?

[ThisIsHarsh]

So what is may I ask the most realistic setting(s) ?

I would actually be very interested to hear people's opinions on this.

Personally, I'm now using 60% bail rate (standard and big ships) along with NPC salvagers at default (10 min) response rate.

I have perhaps 1/2 galaxy covered with adv sats and my Universe salvager tends to remain in standby most of the time, finding a new ship to claim once every few minutes.

[Baleur]

I'm using 80% for small ships and 60% for large ships, havent seen any bailed ones yet, but im not doing combat that much right now

[A5PECT]

@KloHunt3r: Thanks for the heads-up on the NPC salvager issue. I take it they only have problems when the abandoned ship is right next to a station or asteroid or something, or the ship is particularly big? I'll look into it, but it's a minor issue for now - as you say it works fine OOS.

Actually, the salvagers have trouble with claiming small ships (M3/4/5), even in open space.

I also haven't actually seen any salvagers working OOS, but there aren't any large pile-ups of derelicts in unexplored sectors, so it seems like they're working.

[KRM398]

Ok, I first read the info on page one about settings to 100%..and I didnt even think of downloading, thinking, who would want to guarentee ships everytime, no challenge and even scripters have to think thats easy. Then I came back a few days later and read the whole list of pages, and see that theres never a sure thing, which is good. I belueve that fighters might have a 10% chance of bailing, corvettes, maybe 7% and cap ships around 5%..but it would be posible. This I believe is close to a realistic number, fighter pilots have less time to consider, corvettes still want to live, and no matter how big the ship is, the Captain, (one man) makes the decisions, and if he gets worried, you bail.

A sliding scale would be great but since thats probably not posible then just adding a 5-7% chance to big ships would give us the same thing, because fighters already bail more often, but anything above an M6 doesnt at all..so this adds something good, making it at least a chance of happening where none was before. Still havnt tryed it, but if I do later, (after killing a few more marines in boarding) then the 50% setting looked about right, never more than a 6% chance at a big ship.

[Graxster]

Well, I'm still playing with bail rate (re: what's realistic). I wrote a little script that returns bravado and checked a bunch of freighters and military ships. Based on those numbers, I'm now going to test the following:

if $pilot.bravado <= 35
$ship.hullpct = $pilot.bailchance * 3
else
$ship.hullpct = $pilot.bailchance

This will give higher hull % on wimpy ships, like freighters, while keeping fighter/military/etc. hulls at the current level. As I'm currently playing what I consider a "hard" game (I ran a script that destroyed all the free ships, and I'm not following the plot or taking assassination missions), I'm probably going to go with a 50% bail rate for small ships, and maybe a 30% chance for Big and Huge ships. Probably won't get many (if any) Big/Huge ship bails, but I want to play with the new Marines/Boarding thing.

I think in the end, "what's a realistic setting?" is going to be a personal choice based on one's own opinion.

Huge props for making this script package as good as it is. I always wished for something like this in X3R. Just not realistic that NPC vs NPC would never bail, and that Big/Huge ships would never bail.

-Grax

And yeah... I reloaded my last save before the Colossus bailed and changed the settings.