BTR New Shuttle Bug

[seydlitz_slith]

In my Campaign game with Swift, I had a new shuttle bug pop up that I have not encountered before.

It is late OCT 43, and I had plotted 4 units of Liberators from the 8th AF to fly a shuttle mission to Italy. I assigned all of the P38L units that I had in the 8th (about half my 8th AF fighter strength) to fly escort. The fighters should have turned back shortly after the bombers hit their target, with the bombers returning to the UK, and the bombers landing in Italy.

This was a busy raid day and, as often happens in PBEM replays, the tape stopped displaying icon information about mid-way through the day's missions. Everything looked normal right up to the point where the tape stopped showing unit positions, so I thought everything looked good.

However, when I began checking the air units to see how many planes were flyable, I noticed the Liberators had returned to base in the UK. No problem, I thought, until I discovered that the mission escorts had NOT returned to their UK bases and had flown on to Italy and landed. Now it looks like half of the 8th's fighter units are now trapped as detachments of the 12th AF in Italy.

Anyone had this happen before?
Any ideas on how to get them home?

With the current strategy that I am pursuing, this shouldn't be a game stopper, but I sure was surprised when it happened.

[wernerpruckner]

[X(]
ooooohhh - the good old detachment chaos.
this has been in the game forever !! ( the ability to use the BC in shuttle bombing was eliminated in 1.01 exe I think, because it cause so many problems )

from the btr booklet:
.........As soon as the raid reaches its shuttle A/F , it immediatly reattaches itself to the new command, under which the shuttle a/f is assigned, and will be able to function normally in the future......
....One important note to make is, that if you do assign a shuttle a/f to a raid, it is possible that units in the raid may become "disbanded"......

I think that happened to you - no fully operational bombers in those detachment groups - and [:D]back[:D][:'(] with all the damaged A/C into the replacement pool, and a quite empty parent unit at home.

Be aware that there are also other problems with detaching units:
you can detach detachments and create dededede...tachments - this can dry up your replacement stock.
Also sometimes detachments wont regroup with their parent unit.
And one of the uggliest things: detachments are not good for your top pilot listing.

Werner

[seydlitz_slith]

Actually, the fighter detachments arrived intact at the shuttle base, and the bombers went back to their original base. That is what made this a wierd variant of the bug. I still have units, it is just that the fighters flew the bomber route and the bombers flew the fighter escort route. Never seen that before.

Oh well, it will just be more TAC AIR to pound your panzers in Italy until I can get them home or get the bombers down to them.

[harley]

if more than half of the unit turned back - at any time - then the unit will not have officially made it to the shuttle base.

As for the det Fighters - I think when the det hits 0 planes the unit is regrouped - just change them to another plane type...

If it's bigger than that, then I offer a limited "help" system for PBEM. I can fix up any aspect of a PBEM game that you can do with the editor in a stand alone game...

PM me, or swift can email it to me... Any mods need to be agreed by both players - so if you work something out, then email me the details cc'd to the other player

[seydlitz_slith]

Thanks Harley,
I am going to ride it out for a bit and see what happens. I looked at the situation again after doing another turn. The original B24 units that looked like they returned to England may have just disbanded instead, leaving the fighters to continue on. Why the units would disband after facing no opposition enroute, who knows? Although, as Swift quoted from the rulebook, that is a risk that I took by shuttling.

Maybe it was a secret weapon of the luftwaffe....a deathray or radio controlled JU-88 loaded with a small nuke.

[Capt Cliff]

Then I can assume by this posting ... DON'T SHUTTLE!

So, wait till August 45' and if they have not surrendered, drop the A Bomb on Berlin and kill that paper hanging SOB![:D]

[Hard Sarge]

Well
first game I won as the Allies, it was bombers based in Russia that got the final score to win the war

it don't always work right, but it does work and can have uses

it has it's uses, but it also has hassles

[seydlitz_slith]

I have to agree with Hard Sarge.

Shuttles can cause problems, but they do serve a purpose.

1. Historically accurate to have them.
2. It allows you to hit targets you couldn't otherwise hit.
3. It means that the Luftwaffe player has to take shuttles into account when planning his defenses.
4.It allows you to concentrate forces in one theater or another if you need them.

Hopefully the next release of BTR will have the shuttle routines bullet proofed.

[Hard Sarge]

one of the thing with a number of the bugs that have been found over the years with BTR, is that some of them could be fixed with in the data files, but others were in the Exe files and could not be fixed by JC

we could id them, find them, find out why they happened and what was making them happen, but not to fix them

now, JC has a chance to work with the Exe and the Data base, so we have high hopes as to what we can fix and improve

(of course, if this is like any other game, the fixes will break 20 other things, and those will have to be fixed, and fixing those, will break 20 other things and so on and so on)

[seydlitz_slith]

If I recall from our original beta testing of BTR v1.00 back in the day, most of the bugs related to the Belfast bug behavior had to do with the fact that the upper left corner of the screen was location 0,0. Gary never said anything beyond that. It looked like the planes were flying to Ireland, but in reality the flight path had changed to 0,0 and they were trying to get there.

Probably not relevant now, but If JCL hasn't found how it relates yet, I thought that I would chime in that piece of history.

[Hard Sarge]

Hi Seydlitz

well, thanks for the hint, but to be fair, we (Believe it was Harley) found that a long time ago, the hassle is what and why it is doing it, and how to make it stop

(which is why part of it is called the Belfast bug and others called it the Dover bug, really, really strange, I have just a little awhile back, seen the true Belfast bug, I had never seen a unit fly to 0,0 before in all my games)

Any other bugs and why you remember

[harley]

Yeah, I thought it was the 0,0 thing originally, but if you test across Britanny or Normandy you see it's not everyone flying to 0,0, but everyone flying at 315 degrees.

Hmmm.... Thinks.... <never mind what, just accept that I'm thinking...>

[seydlitz_slith]

It could be that the original bug mutated as Gary worked on trying to fix the problem. Originally the problem was pretty bad affecting British night bombers. I remember sending sample turns where the bombers were plotted to go across denmark and turn south into Prussia. Many bombers were getting stuck on the way home. Some flying to 0,0 and others flying back and forth on the top part of the map like they didn't know where to land. Eventually they would run out of gas and crash.

I wonder if the whole time the database lost the destination coordinates for the mission and that caused the problem.

Another issue that was map related had to do with 0,0. For a good part of early development, there was what looked like a single red pixel in the upper corner of the map at 0,0. If you clicked on that pixel, you would crash the whole map. I know Gary fixed that one, but the fact that it existed and was corrected is important because I have no idea how he did it...code rewrite or additional code to workaround.

You guys have found a lot of the other bugs, including some that we never found in testing.

I still think that it is possible on ground unit attacks to bomb the troop strength into a negative number. It used to happen all the time and was adjusted. But I have still seen it some in the game that I have been playing with Swift.

I also think that if possible, it would be worth looking at the code that Gary used to draw circles on the map. I.E. Radar range arcs and also the Urban area circles. I seem to faintly remember that these were placing a heavy load on cpu usage and I think Gary made some changes in how they were drawn to reduce cpu load. However, whenever I play BTR, something still makes my CPU fans kick in pretty heavy only a few frames into the turn.

[harley]

Ground units don't go negative, but the allied view of them can still show negative. I think it's because it takes the Allied Estimated Strength, and the Allied Estimated Disruption and works out how many things can fit. If a 250str Pz Div has 50% disruption, then with 30 AFV (150points), 50 ART (150 points) then Troops must be -50.