Bug 3 possible behavioural bugs?

Edi · #1 March 23rd, 2010, 05:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Quote:

Originally Posted by Edi

1) Oblique missile fire hits less often because the distance is greater. Instead of using the Pythagoras equation for calculating real distance (a^2+b^2=c^2 and then deriving c), the distance is calculated as a+b, so it's much longer. Hence less accurate.

And how is this not a bug? Missiles don't follow the manhattan metric when moving! That the game calculates distance that way is clearly wrong, and should be fixed.

It's not a bug because it has been designed to work that way for reasons known to Johan K. I don't know those reasons, but I do know that it is working as it is supposed to within the framework of the mechanics. It just uses the Manhattan metric for calculation and that's not broken.

I agree that it is not ideal and would much prefer for it to use the Pythagoras metric, but again, I have no idea whether fixing it would be more trouble than it is worth. I have no idea whether that would break something or not, but chances are that it could very well do so.

The difference between bugs and features is often one of perception, but from the standpoint of bug management, this is currently a feature.

Squirrelloid · #2 March 23rd, 2010, 11:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Edi

Quote:

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Quote:

Originally Posted by Edi

1) Oblique missile fire hits less often because the distance is greater. Instead of using the Pythagoras equation for calculating real distance (a^2+b^2=c^2 and then deriving c), the distance is calculated as a+b, so it's much longer. Hence less accurate.

And how is this not a bug? Missiles don't follow the manhattan metric when moving! That the game calculates distance that way is clearly wrong, and should be fixed.

It's not a bug because it has been designed to work that way for reasons known to Johan K. I don't know those reasons, but I do know that it is working as it is supposed to within the framework of the mechanics. It just uses the Manhattan metric for calculation and that's not broken.

I agree that it is not ideal and would much prefer for it to use the Pythagoras metric, but again, I have no idea whether fixing it would be more trouble than it is worth. I have no idea whether that would break something or not, but chances are that it could very well do so.

The difference between bugs and features is often one of perception, but from the standpoint of bug management, this is currently a feature.

This is one of those things that should be prominently advertised in the manual.

I'd call it a bug because its not documented by the manual, and *no one* would expect ranged missile distance calculations to work like that without prior knowledge of what the game is doing. (Which, since the manual doesn't say, would require extensive testing or code hacking/diving).

I'm sure Johan did it, per other comments, to save computation time, but i'm not sure why the game doesn't compile or just have stored a matrix of all possible 'true' (pythagorean) distances from a fixed point to a variable point. It would be easy to calculate once and then quick to look up because its stored in a matrix. If I was trying to minimize distance calculation operations, that's what I'd do.

lch · #3 March 23rd, 2010, 04:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

I'm sure Johan did it, per other comments, to save computation time, but i'm not sure why the game doesn't compile or just have stored a matrix of all possible 'true' (pythagorean) distances from a fixed point to a variable point. It would be easy to calculate once and then quick to look up because its stored in a matrix. If I was trying to minimize distance calculation operations, that's what I'd do.

Lookup tables are even more effective (and more oldskool!

) than that, yes. It would be interesting to see how much hosting time those would save if they were used instead of the current distance function.