replay:Sir_Destroyer/12-14-2009-17-28-9.SupremeCommanderReplay
It was in the game linked above, and I have no idea why, but simply by dropping my ACU, when both transport and ACU were on around half health, in a totally enemy free zone, my ACU just explodes randomly.
This is probably some sort of known bug, but if it is can someone explain how to avoid it in future (since i'm going to try that tactic a few times in future too), and if it isn't, can anyone theorise why that might have happened?

you either didn't get picked up properly (something about ACU's walking or twisting their torsos are known to have an effect), or you dropped onto an object and that caused it to explode.

Having looked back, the way my ACU was positioned in the transport was weird, and he dropped at a weird angle.. I guess I was fighting at the time of pickup, so maybe I was turned around? Could that cause it on a seraphim commander?

Yes, I hev heared of this before. It can happen if you pick the ACU up during a fight.

I didn't watch your rep... but I had a game where my acu landed on a hydrocarbon and exploded.

has it ever been fixed by Brute, and the CBF crew?

i'm sure it'd be possible to jam in some bone-orientation code in whatever OnPickUp event function is called.

It's definitely a known bug, and I think it might be fixed in CBFP.

You can also have transports shot down and units miraculously live, for whatever god damn reason.

pretty sure that one is an actual feature.

Exactly and it only happens to Seraphim ACUs.
To prevent it simply put your ACU on hold fire before the transporter picks it up...

Nope.

Bug can also happen if the trans was the last thing built from an airfac before it was destroyed, although in that case the trans just disappears and the units falls to its death.

Is this when using 'ai_instabuild' in the console, or do you see this in regular games?

There are some weird bugs I've seen with ai_instabuild and factories, including that one, but I've never noticed this happening in normal play.

It happens in 3599 to the last unit built from any factory, if the factory dies (if I understand correctly, it's that the factory's lastunit handle is added to the trash and not properly nilled in the construction completion callback). CBFP fixes it, and I think 3603 did too?

I say feature too, though rare.

It is a feature. I remember Taylor talking about it in one of the pre SupCom videos.

It is a feature, it's specific to each transport (a transport can opt out in its script), but the actual destruction and random chances are performed by the engine itself:


As far as I can tell, all transport scripts have it true.

Edit: Correction, only UEF and Cybran transports detach their units. Presumably, the rest kill all of their attached units, although this isn't explicitly performed in any of the scripts.

Regardless, I don't think the odds of your ACU being detached safely from a dying UEF/Cybran transport are very good, assuming that engine method doesn't make a specific (negative) exception for ACU detachment.

It's be cool if units could always detach and then just take fall damage based off of their size.

making all units drop is easy to do; just re-write the TP's OnKilled event and have it iterate through all attached units and manually detach them.

now, the part about crashing into the ground... i'm not sure how to do that.

I might very well be going utterly mad, but I thought the dropping of an ACU when the transport was killed happened all the time in one of the versions of vanilla I played (but that might have been me seeing the bug and assuming it always applied)

'self:TransportDetachAllUnits(false)' will safely detach all of them, but yeah I guess you need to iterate through a table of them one way or another to apply fake fall damage. It wouldn't be difficult to do, and you could just calculate damage based on their footprint or collision bounds or something. Fork a thread on each detached unit with a delay that should damage it when/shortly after it hits the ground (assuming they don't undergo a layer change from 'Air' to 'Land', which they might).

hehehe, that's exactly what i'm coding right now.

however, i thought that flagging that argument as false would kill all units. hmmz. this needs testing.

i just discovered another bug... well, maybe.

the documentation for TransportDetachAllUnits states that passing false as the argument makes everything fly free; when it doesn't.

Oh wow.. That seems like a serious bug.. but I guess it's saved by the fact that individual units rarely count for much in SupCom.. Still, this would mean that you could lose something as important as a t3 Bship if the naval yard was destroyed.. that's sucky.

I only noticed this in sandbox mode because there's a (seemingly) related bug when using the AI_instabuild command. The Seraphim factories always keep their build beams attached to the last built unit even after it exits the factory (and regardless of range).

hehe, that was funny.



i've seen random units survive, mostly percivals from suicidal mass drops.