Why upgrade? I'm not a lawyer, but here's my take on the differences
to version 2:
* Software patents: better protection against abuse of patents to
prevent users from exercising the rights under the GPL. I doubt
we'll get hit with a patent suit, but it's a good move just on
general principles.
* License compatibility: compatible with more free licenses, i.e. can
"steal" more free software for use in Empire. I don't expect to steal
much, but it's nice to have the option.
* Definition of "source code": modernization of some details for today's
networked world, to make it easier to distribute the software. Not
really relevant to us now, as we normally distribute full source code.
* Tivoization: this is about putting GPL-licensed software in hardware,
then make the hardware refuse to run modified software. "Neat" trick
to effectively deny its users their rights under the GPL. Abuse was
"pioneered" by TiVo (popular digital video recorders). GPLv3 forbids
it. Unlikely to become a problem for us.
* Internationalization: more careful wording, to harden the license
outside the US. The lawyers tell us it better be done that way.
* License violations: friendlier way to deal with license violations.
This has come out of past experience enforcing the GPL.
* Additional permissions: Probably not relevant to us.
Also include myself in the list of principal authors.
SLOW_WAR has issues:
* The check whether the attacker old-owns the attacked sector is
broken, because att_abort() uses sect.sct_oldown uninitialized.
Spotted by the Clang Static Analyzer.
* Its implementation in setrel() is somewhat scary. It's actually
okay, because that part of setrel() only runs within decl(). Other
callers don't reach it: update_main() because player->god != 0
there, and the rest because they never pass a rel < HOSTILE.
* Documentation is a bit vague.
SLOW_WAR hasn't been used in a public game in years. Fixing it is not
worth it, so remove it instead.
The difference between the two is that PR() buffers partial lines, and
mpr() suppresses output to country#0. Doesn't matter when printing
complete lines to a country other than #0, e.g. the owner of a unit.
Don't tell him that it's his plane, he knows that.
Put a " -- " between "takes N%" and "aborted" / "shot down" for
ordinary flak as well, not just for flak vs. pinpoint bombing.
Reduce abort chance from 100-eff to 80-eff. Ordinary flak's abort
chance was reduced from 100-eff (if eff<80) to 80-eff in commit
0252d4a7, v4.3.6.
Report plane efficiency when it aborts, not 100 - efficiency.
Charge mobility proportional to damage, down to -32.
Before commit a269cdd7, pln_damage() returned zero when the damage was
nuclear, and callers used that to bypass conventional damage code.
Zero value can't happen anymore.
Before Empire 2, nukes could be delivered only with bomb (special
mission 'n', airburst only) and launch (targeting sectors or
satellites only).
Empire 2 made nukes available for any kind of bombing, and for any
missile strike on sectors or ships. This included interdiction and
support missions. Nuclear-tipped anti-sats and bomb mission n were
removed.
Unfortunately, this was done in a messy way, which led to
inconsistencies and bugs. The problem is that ordinary damage affects
just the target, while nuke damage affects an area. Code dealing with
plane damage was designed for the former. Instead of rewriting it to
cope with area damage cleanly, nuke damage got shoehorned into
pln_damage(), the function to compute conventional plane damage, as a
side effect: computing damage blasted sectors in the area.
If the plane carried a nuke, pln_damage() returned zero (conventional)
damage. Without further logic, this simply bypassed the code to apply
damage to the target. This worked out okay when the target already
got damaged correctly by the side effect.
However, some targets are immune to the side effect: when interdicting
a move or explore command, the commodities being moved are not in any
sector.
For other targets, damage has effects other than damaging the target:
offensive and defensive support don't apply the (conventional) damage
to the target sector. Instead, they turn it into a combat bonus.
Without further logic, nuclear damage doesn't contribute to that.
To make all that work, pln_damage() returned the nuclear damage for
ground zero as well. Because a plane does either conventional or
nuclear damage, one of them is always zero.
Most callers simply ignored the nuclear damage, and applied only the
conventional damage.
Bug: land units and ships failed to retreat when pin-bombed or
missiled with a nuke. That's because they received zero conventional
damage.
The mission code flies planes and missiles and tallies their damage.
This mission damage included nuclear damage at ground zero (except for
missiles sometimes, see below), to make support and commodity
interdiction work. Unfortunately, this broke other things.
Bug: when bombers interdicted ships or land units, nukes first damaged
the ships or land units by the side effect, then again through mission
damage. Interdicting missiles had a special case to avoid this.
Bug: when interdicting move, explore or transport, nukes first damaged
the sector by the side effect, then again through mission damage's
collateral damage.
There may well be more bugs hiding in this mess.
The mess is not worth fixing. While the idea of interdicting and
supporting with nukes sounds kind of cool, I believe it's pretty
irrelevant in actual play.
Instead, go back to a variation of the original rules: nukes can be
delivered only through bomb mission 's' and launch at sectors.
Make arm reject marine missiles in addition to satellites, ABMs and
SAMs, and clear the mission. Make mission reject planes armed with
nukes. Oops when they show up in mission_pln_equip() anyway.
Make pln_equip() allow planes with nukes only for missions 's' and
't'.
Clean up pln_damage() to just compute damage, without side effect.
Change strat_bomb() and launch_missile() to detonate nukes. Simplify
the other callers. Parameter mission of msl_launch_mindam() is now
unused, remove it.
Missiles exploding on launch no longer set off their nukes. That was
pretty ridiculous anyway.
The various bombing functions silently skipped planes not carrying
bombs. This sanity check was wrong: it checked capabilities "tactical
or not cargo" instead of "tactical or bomber", and failed for
non-tactical cargo bombers. No such planes exist in the stock game.
The broken check comes from Chainsaw; it replaced an equally wrong
"not cargo" check.
Because pln_sel() lets only suitable planes go on a bombing run, the
broken sanity check is unnecessary. Drop it.
Plane flying commands first select the planes to fly the mission and
their escorts, then equip them. They all fail when no planes to fly
the mission can be equipped.
Unlike bomb and paradrop, commands drop, fly, recon and sweep had an
additional check that made them fail when no planes to fly the mission
could be selected. Because "none selected" implies "none equipped",
the additional check is redundant. Remove it.
While there, break lines in calls of pln_sel() more tastefully.
Before, bomb selected any plane, but planes with zero load could not
be equipped. Cargo planes could be equipped fine, and they flew bombs
to the target, where they silently vanished.
Closes#1388263.
pln_arm(), pln_equip(), mission_pln_arm() mission_pln_equip() took a
mission parameter encoding the kind of sortie (strategic bomb,
pinpoint bomb, transport, ...), a flag parameter to further specify
the plane's role, and a parameter ip to specify the load.
The flags argument was always either P_F (intercept), P_F | P_ESC
(escort), or zero (any other role).
With non-zero flags, mission and ip argument were not used in any way.
Use mission 'e' and null load for escorts, and remove flags.
Intercept can still be identified by mission zero.
Also change pln_mobcost() to take a mission parameter instead of
flags, so that pln_arm() and mission_pln_arm() can simply pass on
their mission.
The commands to fly planes read the planes into a plane list, and
write them back when they land. If a plane changes in the file while
it is in that plane list, the changes get wiped out when the plane
lands, triggering a seqno oops.
This is not an issue as long as the complete sortie runs
uninterrupted, because that code takes care to update flying planes
only through the appropriate plane list.
However, the bomb command suspends the planes on a pinpoint bombing
run mid-air over the target sector to let the player choose targets.
This lets code run that *can* update flying planes, for instance the
edit command.
Fix by aborting changed planes, taking care not to clobber the
changes.
When bombing ships with a force containing both planes with and
without capability ASW, pin_bomb() could fail to report presence of
submarines, and could refuse to bomb ships when there were only
submarines. The culprit is pin_bomb()'s check for capability ASW: it
checked whether the first plane in the plane list was capable instead
of checking whether any plane in the list was capable.
4.0.9 changed flak not to use up shells, but they still had to be
present. Drop that, because it doesn't really provide any value.
Moreover, this gets rid of the buggy flak shell supply code (seqno
mismatch oopses, lost supplies).
The ancients designed interception dead simple: when you overfly a
sector, you get intercepted by the sector owner. Fine print
interception rules govern which planes intercept.
Then complexity got piled on top of it.
Chainsaw 2 added an extra interception by surface ship owners, in the
target sector only.
Chainsaw 3 added an extra interception by land unit owners, in the
target sector only (Empire 4 later merged this extra land unit
interception with the extra surface ship interception).
Chainsaw 3 added an entirely separate kind of interception: air
defense missions. When you enter a sector in some air defense op
area, you get intercepted. Fine print air defense rules govern which
planes intercept. These rules differ significantly from the
interception fine print.
Additional complexity comes from these facts:
* Air defense mission interception happens in addition to non-mission
interception. You can boost your total interception by setting up
air defense. Which means you must set it up, or forgo an advantage.
* Air defense planes are not available for non-mission interception
duty. You need to decide on a split.
* In contrast to non-mission interception, interceptors flying air
defense get intercepted.
Moreover, the air defense code breaks one of the plane code's design
assumptions, namely that just one plane sortie is active at a time.
The air defense sortie runs while the sortie it intercepts is in
progress. This leads to two interceptions being active at the same
time: the one intercepting the original sortie, and the one
intercepting the air defense sortie. The same plane can fly in both
interceptions, and damage received in the interception of the air
defense sortie is wiped out, triggering a seqno mismatch oops.
The previous commit already simplified non-mission interception: you
get intercepted by anyone who owns the sector, or a surface ship or a
land unit there, whether it's the target sector or not.
Now simplify mission interception, by merging air defense back into
ordinary interception: when you overfly a sector, you get intercepted
by anyone who owns the sector, or a surface ship or land unit there,
or has an air defense mission covering the sector. That's all. No
multiple interceptions, no separate air defense rules.
Remove air_defense(). Simplify ac_encounter() and sam_intercept()
accordingly; both lose their last parameter.
Change sam_intercept() and ac_intercept() to intercept in mission op
areas. New parameter only_mission to suppress non-mission
interception. Pass zero when the intercepting country owns the sector
or a surface ship or land unit in the sector.
ac_encounter() can't efficiently predict whether a country intercepts,
so it needs to call ac_intercept() unconditionally. This kills the
optimization to collect interceptors only when needed; simplify
accordingly, replacing getilist() by getilists().
Since the previous two commits, ac_encounter() checks its
mission_flags argument only for proper mission flags PM_R and PM_S,
not for plane flags P_A, P_S, P_I.
This makes the code to put plane flags into mission flags useless.
Remove it from bomb(), drop(), fly(), para(), reco(),
perform_mission(), mission_pln_arm(), air_defense(), pln_arm().
Much of that code was useless even before: P_X and P_H since Chainsaw
3 option STEALTHV became mandatory in Empire 2, and P_MINE since
commit cc0c3e4f (v4.3.0) cleaned up mine drops.
pln_nuktype is redundant; it can be computed from the nuke's
nuk_plane.
Make plane selector nuketype virtual and NSC_EXTRA. It should have
been NSC_EXTRA all along. This changes xdump plane.
Don't set it in arm(), disarm(), build_plane(), pln_damage() and
nuk_fixup(). The latter no longer does anything, remove it.
Deprecate edit key 'n' in doplane(), and don't show it in pr_plane().
The key never made much sense.
eff_bomb(), comm_bomb(), ship_bomb(), plane_bomb(), land_bomb(),
strat_bomb(), mission_pln_equip(), air_damage(), msl_hit(),
pln_equip() tested pln_nuketype to check whether a plane carries a
nuke. Test nuk_on_plane() instead.
pdump(), plan(), trade_desc() print whether and what kind of nuke a
plane carries. Adapt that to use nuk_on_plane().
Behave like plane_bomb() and land_bomb(): deal with leading whitespace
and signs in the input, print a message when asked to bomb a ship that
is not there.
land_bomb() failed to reduce flak proportional to efficiency. Missed
in commit c7f68f2e, v4.3.6.
Also change it to round randomly instead of down, to match
ac_landflak().
Change planesatxy() not to list embarked planes, plane_bomb() not to
bomb them, and land_bomb() not to bomb embarked land units.
Curiously, embarked land units were not listed as targets before, but
could be bombed all the same.
pin_bomb() computed the number of foreign subs as number of ships less
number of foreign surface ships. This counted own surface ships as
subs.
Change it to count foreign subs directly. Closes#906040.
However, shipsatxy(), the function for counting foreign ships, also
lists them. Add a parameter to suppress that, and change its callers.
Planes normally sit in their base (sector or carrier), where they can
be spied, damaged, captured, loaded, unloaded, upgraded and so forth.
All this must not be possible while they fly. There are two kinds of
flying planes: satellites in orbit, and planes flying a sortie.
Satellites in orbit have always been marked with flag PLN_LAUNCHED.
Works. What didn't work was tracking planes flying a sortie.
If you look at one sortie in isolation, up to three groups of planes
can be flying at any point of time: the primary group, which carries
out the sortie's mission (bomb, transport, ...), their escorts, and a
group of hostile planes flying interception or air defense.
The old code attempted to track these planes by passing those groups
to the places that need to know whether a plane is flying. This was
complex and incomplete, and broke down completely for the pin-bombing
command.
It was complex, because the plane code needs to keep track of all the
call chains that can lead to a place that needs to know whether a
plane flies, and pass the groups down the call chains. This leads to
a rather ugly passing of plane groups all over the place.
It was incomplete, because it generally failed to pass the escorts.
And the whole scheme broke down for the pin-bombing command. That's
because pin-bombing asks the player for targets while his planes are
loitering above the target sector. This yields the processor and lets
other code run. Which does not get the flying planes passed.
The new code marks planes and SAMs (but not other missiles) flying a
sortie with flag PLN_LAUNCHED (the previous commit laid the groundwork
for that), and does away with passing around groups of flying planes.
This fixes the following bugs:
* Many commands could interact with foreign planes flying for a
pin-bombing command as if they were sitting in their base. This
includes spying, damaging, capturing, loading, or upgrading them,
and even getting intercepted by them. Any changes to those planes
were wiped out when they landed. Abusable.
* The bomb command could bomb its own escorts, directly (pin-bomb
planes) or through collateral damage, strategic sector damage,
collapsing bridges or nuke damage. The damage to the escorts was
wiped out when they landed.
* If you asked for a plane to fly both in the primary group and the
escort group, you got charged fuel for two sorties instead of one.
* pln_put1() and pln_put() now recognize planes that didn't take off,
and refrain from making them land. Intercept (since commit
c64e2149) and air defense can do that. Making them land had no
ill-effects, but it was still wrong.
There's one new problem: if PLN_LAUNCHED doesn't get reset properly,
due to game crash during flight or some other bug, the plane gets
stuck in the air. Catch and fix that on game start in ef_verify().
Use it in pln_put() and ac_planedamage().
This changes ac_planedamage() to deal with a destroyed airbase.
Before, aborted planes happily landed there. This bug could not
actually bite, because the code neither yields nor does damage to
potential airbases between checking the landing airbase before takeoff
and aborting planes in ac_planedamage().
It changes pln_put() to cope with dead planes. Before, it made them
land as if they lived, fortunately without ill effects (complaints
about not being able to land were suppressed for dead planes).
ac_planedamage() removes dead planes, but pinflak_planedamage()
doesn't, and these end up in pln_put(). pinflak_planedamage() no
longer has to take shot down planes off their carriers, because
pln_put() now takes care of that.
New lnd_att(), lnd_def(), lnd_vul(), lnd_spd(), lnd_vis(), lnd_frg(),
lnd_acc(), lnd_dam(), lnd_aaf() replace the struct lndstr members with
the same names.
Make land unit selectors att, def, vul, spd, vis, frg, acc, dam, aaf
virtual.
New pln_att(), pln_def(), pln_acc(), pln_range_max(), pln_load()
replace the struct plnstr members with the same names.
Make plane selectors att and def virtual.
