Warped Enemy Not Returning to Starfield

[Icehawk78]

I unfortunately don't have reproduction steps for this because it was quite late and I wasn't honestly paying attention to what I did beforehand, but I didn't see any other topics on this issue in these forums.

At two points, I've had fights where I was chasing a Rebel Advance ship, who eventually was able to FTL warp away from the battle. In both cases, (I think - the memory is a bit hazy) I was using the Zoltan ship and had a beam weapon selected but *not* actively targeting the enemy ship (ie my cursor was either the "aim weapon 1" or the "anchor aiming line", rather than having a set target already on the enemy ship).

While in that position, the enemy activated their FTL and warped away. However, instead of showing the "they got away" dialog (or any other dialog), the ship was simply gone, but the two-ship battle interface remained. I was able to select weapons and place targeting orders, could order my crew around the ship, and could open/close doors (I think - I'm not certain on the last two), but neither my weapons nor my FTL would power up (both remained at whatever levels they were at when the enemy FTL warped out of the battle). Eventually I had to quit the game via the escape-button menu, but was unable to save & quit because the game still thought I was in a danger-mode situation.

I will try to do some additional testing later tonight to try and recreate the situation, and will reply with more details if/when I find them

[Matthew]

Sorry about that. I've never heard of that happening, odd that it happened twice to you. More information would definitely be appreciated.

Why were you unable to jump away? Were you out of fuel?

[Pappy588]

thought the same thing happened to me... the game was paused. i am not a smart man.

[Icehawk78]

Sorry about that. I've never heard of that happening, odd that it happened twice to you. More information would definitely be appreciated.

Why were you unable to jump away? Were you out of fuel?

Nope, I had fuel, but the game thought it was in a limbo battle-but-not-really, so the "warp" command never replaced the FTL spin-up bar (it was early enough in the battle that I couldn't have warped my own ship out early), but never "increased". The "Jump" button literally never appeared, since it was still showing the icon when you enter a battle and your engines are still warming up.

I did verify that the game wasn't paused or anything similar, and even tried alt-tabbing in/out of the application.

My guess is that it likely has something to do with the differences in my play style between using lasers and beams. Typically with lasers, I let them charge up, and then set the target, and possibly shortly before/after, pause to do other micromanage-y things. With beams, I tend to do the opposite, and pause to line up the shot *just so* and then after it's set, unpause. However, I wouldn't be surprised if I'd bumped the space bar while lining up a beam shortly after pausing from shooting a laser to take down the shields.

My guess would be that the game doesn't expect you to be in the "aligning beam attack" mode the exact instant that the enemy warps out, so it can't show the "they got away dialog" and without being able to show that, it doesn't switch over to "not in danger" mode. I've got a few ideas on how to recreate it that should be fairly easy to try, so once I'm able to, I'll let you know what I find out.

[GoldenShadowGS]

Are you sure your engines weren't un-powered. That can happen.

[Icehawk78]

Are you sure your engines weren't un-powered. That can happen.

Yep, I verified all of the obvious things. It was definitely a bug, because I've had other ships that warped away where I didn't have any of the same issues. It wasn't in a sunspot/asteroid field, either, so the warp normally would instantly become available after the dialog which never appeared was dismissed.

[Icehawk78]

Well, unless there's a difference in how it's handled on Windows vs Linux, I seem to be unable to recreate this. I tried doing lots of weird pause/unpause toggling and firing/not the beam, but none of what I thought I did was able to reproduce it.

If I come across it again, I'll let you know, unless you'd like me to reboot into my windows partition. (I'd really rather not, though, unless you have any reason for thinking it might be platform-specific.