[posila] Biters freeze just outside of flamethrower radius

[vanatteveldt]

I've had this happen a couple of times:



It seems to be some sort of framerate optimization that 'inactive' biters don't move. Normally this is probably a good thing, but if they do it just outside the effective range of a flamethrower turret it will keep firing at the biter, wasting quite a lot of oil. In the image above it will just keep streaming flames at the biter until I move in to trigger its movement.

Possible solution/hack could be to always unfreeze a biter if it is targeted by a turret?

Link to save game: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ll7y9dmsvsn3c ... n.zip?dl=0. The problem seems to stlil be there if I reload, but not sure it depends on e.g. available CPU.



(sorry if this is a dupe, but I couldn't find anything related)

[Anyone]

I've noticed biters "freezing" in general. I also had a biter that kept walking in circles in a not too dense forest. Seems like they are a bit buggy now (or smart enough to avoid fire/detection...).

[posila]

Thanks for the report.
The frozen biter is interesting. Not sure what happend to it yet.
Anyway, I removed "shooting in prepare range" from flamethrower. Intention behind that was that turret starts to shoot before enemies get into range so the fire stream hits them as they get into the range ... but I don't think it works that well and creates this weird behavior too often.

[vanatteveldt]

OK, thanks!

I've never seen the biters freeze like that on-screen, it only seems to happen when I'm somewhere else, so I'm assuming that the game has some sort of heuristic for when biters should be 'active' to save resources?

[BlakeMW]

OK, thanks!

I've never seen the biters freeze like that on-screen, it only seems to happen when I'm somewhere else, so I'm assuming that the game has some sort of heuristic for when biters should be 'active' to save resources?

It does. Hit F4 and select "show active chunks", the map will then show which chunks are active and which are inactivated, causing all the biters to freeze. Player machines tend to keep their own chunk active, but can shoot at things in adjacent chunks, which may be inactive.

[MrGrim]

Thanks for fixing! I know this has been classified a few times before as not a bug, so thanks for reconsidering.