All Things Remote Control

I've got a survival game I've developed that has a couple bad-guy ships that are supposed to make their way into the center of gameplay several hours after the scenario starts. Each has a preset GPS coordinate locked in (different coordinates several kilometers apart), with precision mode and anti-collision set, and the speed of the two remote control set to 25 m/s and 35 m/s, respectively, so they don't arrive at the same time. Both ships are away from each other when they start.

During testing, sometimes one or both of the ships just stop partway to their respective GPS points, and sometimes they both show up as expected. So, that said, I have two questions:

1. Do I need to keep the GPS point saved to the player's GPS list so the ships don't lose it? I'd sure like to make them go away so the player doesn't know why they're there.

2. Just what in tarnation is going on here? (There's a word nobody uses anymore!) Why are one or both of my ships stopping. Any ideas?

 

#1 : How do you get the GPS to the opponent ships? The bit about GPS point save to player GPS is confusing to me as to why that is needed.

#2 : Enable spectator and spectate their course? Blind guess is they got too close to a cliff and don't know what to do. Altering the course slightly might help.

I've had remote control ships get into a correction loop because they were using precision but their mass was too small for the gyros so they were constantly over-correcting and getting hung up. I resolved this by removing some gyros or changing gyros to be 10%.

 

Sorry, I should have been clearer. The ships are in space traveling to a another location in space. I turn on autopilot before I change the ownership of each ship to SPRT; the ships accelerate to maximum speed (25 m/s and 35 m/s, respectively) and cruise right along. Each hour in gameplay I check using admin controls to see the location and speed of each ship. At some point during the play testing one or both ships are stopped when I check the next time. And sometimes they make it all the way to their predefined GPS location. It seems random. It's just a straight-line path from the starting point until the finish point. Only one GPS location is defined for each remote control.

 

You should really turn on the autopilot after the faction change. Use a timer or something. Changing ownership always screws up Programmable Blocks and messes with pretty much everything. Try using a timer to set up the autopilot after owner change, see if that solves the problem.

And no, you don't need to have the GPS locations saved. My ships work at least with GPS locations that I've removed a long time ago.


Improbable solution below:
Do you have the new option "selective physics" on? I'm quite sure you don't since it's only for Dedicated Server settings but I'm asking just in case.

 

Dang! I never thought of that. I'll install a timer block to turn on autopilot after I change the faction to SPRT. I'll let you know what happens.

I've tested this scenario so many times my brain hurts. I hope this is it. I'd like to publish it and get on with life.

Nothing about "selective physics." I'm playing single-player mode.

(P.S. I used admin control to turn on creative tools and bee-bopped over to the stopped ship. I did a "cut-and-paste" to check the settings. I found autopilot turned off. Go figure.)
--- Automerge ---
Yup. Nope. I set up a timer on each ship set to turn on autopilot after 30 seconds, then reset ownership of everything to Space Pirates. One ship is still cruising along on autopilot, and the other is stopped dead after about 100 km of travel. I hating on this right now.

Wait. Dumb! I'll just use the timer to call itself every 10 minutes. That way if autopilot disengages (as it seems to be doing for some reason), the timer will restart it. Yeah. On with Plan B!

I'll post if this works.

 

Did it work?

 

Still testing. The ships' trips to their final destinations are lengthy, so I've got to let it "play out" to see if they actually get there OK. Here's hoping...