The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Look what happened after I forgot shutting down melee for few hours
(http://planet.nana.co.il/sofia2k/images/arilou_stuck.JPG)
Poor Arilou =[

What mode was this? PVP, and you let the spathi drift?

Otherwise, I can't see how that fight didn't end right quick...

Weird - I just tried manually doing it. - No success.

I dont know HOW it happened but in the few hours I left and came back(I was spathi) the Arilou got stuck there and moved left and right all the time. There were two asteroids surrounding the arilou tho, I remember destroying one, but the arilou was still stuck after destroying one of them. So I just copied a screen shot.
The comp was probably in dumb mode if it didn't teleport.
Probably an insignificant bug. =]

But why didn't it finish off the Spathi with its laser?

I've often found the shape of the spathi makes for some interesting encounters. (That and the fact that this game uses pixel perfect colission detection.)
There was one time I used the two front balls of the spathi ("spathi have balls?") to push an enemy earthling into the planet and pin it there until it died, then swirved away at the last second. It was awesome.
This picture looks suspiciously photoshoped, if the computer is playing the arloo, but not unachievable. There is no reason it's lazer couldn't hit the spathi and kill it, but if it's PvP, I could imagine an inoporune asteroid making this shot a real, "Well he11, look at that" moment.
Another one of those moments was when my Ur-Quan's pylon got caught inside another ship's sticky out part (I think the top of a Melnorme, but it's been a while) in a clipping error and they bounced back and forth a million times in a second before shooting off in opposite directions at a million miles an hour. It was great.

You wanna see a show?

Grab a chmmr and any ship that can withstand a beating against those zapsats. Keep it on HvsH for easier handling.

Now, tractor that ship in and make it collide with you.

Dont thrust.

Once your fuel has regenerated, tractor it in a fashion that it imparts momentum to you.

If you do this correctly, and get the enemy ship up to enough steam, the imparted momentum will be so great that the zapsats will not be able to keep up with the chmmr and will vainly chase it through space :)

It's a wonderful, albeit comical, sight for sore (and bored!) eyes ;D

It is so great to do stuff like that, especially with the synth vs chmmr... it gets bunned in 2 sec ;D
Too bad it only works for me in sc2, not uqm :(

According to the diagrams in SC1, guesst, the balls on either side of the machine-gun are "decoys", and the ones on either side of the BUTT launcher are where the crew actually is...however, getting one of the decoys hit does count as a hit all the same! MAybe some Spathi figure that someone does know about the true crew pods, so they go into the decoy.....just a weird suggestion...or maybe if the decoy gets hit, Spathi die of intense fright.

~Ra'akone

....or maybe the makers did not want to make the battles end in a single lucky shot.

What exactly isn't clear here?!????
I didn't even have photoshop nor paintshop pro in the computer I capped the shot.
I have no interest of just lying for something like that.

The comp WAS arilou and I even said it moved right and left all the time but didn't move and didn't fire, that's why I said .

It is also possible since it's . and also may .

I hope I made it clear now for you

That still does not explain why the arlou did not fire its laser.

could be an AI flaw, that it doesn't have its priorities straight.

It might only fire if it's within 6 to 0 units distance to the edge of the target, and maybe it thinks it's -1 unit to the edge since it's "inside"?

I was curious and so sat down the other day with a very small melee set.
I was able to duplicate the image (minus the astroid) perfectly on Human vs. Human.
Saddly, before I could get a screen shot, an astroid came through and whacked my Eluder out of the picture. (Figures.)
Though I too am confused why the Skift didn't blow the Eluder to pieces either during or before the collision. Also, why would the Eulder stop there?
Whatever the reason, it's an interesting shot.

The AI follows specific rules to determine what to do next. The behaviour depends on the properties of the ships (such as weapon range), and the situation in combat (such as the position and speed of the other ships).
I suspect that for ships such as the Skiff the behaviour is not to get closer than necessary, and the strategy in the position in the image is to move away.
With more rules the AI could be changed to also fire undirectional weapons in such situations, but we want to keep the gameplay original.
I would not call the behaviour shown a bug; with rule based AI it's a matter of "Is it good enough?", not "Is it perfect?". You can keep adding rules to improve the AI even further for more specific situations. But would you really want a computer player which never loses?
The current AI actually has fairly few rules and does an impressive job with that.