Fixed 3D Sailing Mode: Enemy Ships Chasing Player despite False Flag

[Hylie Pistof]

A general comment on false flags:

They seem to work for forts, coastal ships, shipyards, tailors, and blacksmiths.

They do not seem to work for store merchants and random fleets met in direct sail.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

They do not seem to work for store merchants and random fleets met in direct sail.

Is what way do they not work? Store merchants are affected by the exact same function as shipyards are.
So if it works for shipyards, it must also work for store merchants.
Not sure if tailors and blacksmiths are included at all.

And what about those random DirectSail encounters? I'm pretty sure they are treated the same as any other ships.
I spent quite a lot of time and effort to include those and WorldMap encounters as well, because they used to be included at some point in the past.
Check your compile.log to see if those encountered ships are indeed listed in there. If they are, then they're being handled by the system like they should.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

They don't work in that I can deliver a cargo to the merchant but then he tells me to get out before he calls the guards.

The randomly generated fleets see me and head straight for me while on the open sea when I am flying a false flag so they should not notice me.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Sounds to me like that particular merchant recognised you.
That can happen. You have a save facing that merchant?

Also for those DirectSail fleets, please post a save.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

No, no saves. So far the only merchant who would deal with me after dropping off the cargo is the one on Cayman.

About the fleets. They seem to be changing their behavior. At first they would attack. Period. Now it seems they either ignore me or sail away.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

No, no saves. So far the only merchant who would deal with me after dropping off the cargo is the one on Cayman.

Maybe you're being particularly unlucky? If I have a save, I could double-check if indeed you were recognized.
Could even reset the merchant's memory to check if he recognizes you again.

What is your Fame level? Maybe you indeed ARE being recognized more easily than you'd like?

About the fleets. They seem to be changing their behavior. At first they would attack. Period. Now it seems they either ignore me or sail away.

Whenever you encounter such behaviour again, please check your compile.log . I'd be interested to know if the ships in that fleet are mentioned in there.

Do you have the minimap showing you hostile/neutral state? Ships that are hostile should, of course, be red.
So ships that believe your false flag will be grey and they turn red when they recognize you (or if they remember you from before).
There should be an accompanying on-screen message as well to indicate when you are recognized.

What definitely should NOT ever happen is for ships to be hostile without a reason.
If that seems to be the case, check compile.log . I deliberately created messages in there to ALWAYS indicate the reason for hostility.
I may have disabled some of those log messages, but we can easily re-enable them to double-check exactly what is happening and why.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Now the merchant at Cayman will not deal with me either so I've got loads of goods but no buyer.

At the time they were attacking me everyone was hostile except for French ships and I did not have a compass that showed colors. All ships were gray and I could only tell their intentions by their actions.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Now the merchant at Cayman will not deal with me either so I've got loads of goods but no buyer.

That does suggest you ARE being recognized. Which is technically intentional.

At the moment no "forgetting mechanic" exists yet, so once you're caught, they'll remember until you actually become friendly to them.
Eventually we do need to allow them to forget again after a while, but it isn't my intention to rush that prior to the Beta 4 release.

At the time they were attacking me everyone was hostile except for French ships and I did not have a compass that showed colors. All ships were gray and I could only tell their intentions by their actions.

Lack of compass indeed wouldn't help to clarify much of anything. Though compile.log should still hold some clues.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

At the time they were attacking me everyone was hostile except for French ships and I did not have a compass that showed colors. All ships were gray and I could only tell their intentions by their actions.

Thanks for the save. Is there anything specific I should be seeing in there? There appear to be no ships around.

What I did do was to keep on sailing until I got a Sail Ho at Cayman. It was a friendly French fleet, so no worries.
Then I enabled the extra debug lines which confirms that those DirectSail ships are indeed handled the same as all other ships are.

After far too long, I finally encountered a Dutch fleet:

FLAGS: The 'Tonijn' is out of range and is not checking our flag
FLAGS: The 'Tonijn' believes our current flag
FLAGS: The 'Akerboom' is out of range and is not checking our flag
FLAGS: The 'Akerboom' believes our current flag
FLAGS: The 'Prinses Royaal' is out of range and is not checking our flag
FLAGS: The 'Prinses Royaal' believes our current flag

For some reason, they DO seem to be chasing me, even if they aren't actually hostile and aren't firing.
That's weird!

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Hylie Pistof: Please extract attached file to your PROGRAM folder.
I noticed there was a call to GetRelation which I have now replaced with SeaAI_GetRelation .

If I read the code correctly, that might have caused ships that did NOT recognize you to chase you all over the place anyway.
They wouldn't fire; they'd just "keep an eye on you". But that wasn't intentional.
I think this change should limit that behaviour to ONLY if they belong to a nation hostile to your flag OR are actually hostile in 3D Sailing Mode (for example after you got recognized).

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Hylie Pistof: I renamed this thread to indicate what seems to have been the problem.
As far as I understand the code, this should be fixed in the Build 14 Beta 4.0 public release.
But I'd definitely appreciate if you can keep an eye out for it!

 

[Hylie Pistof]

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Since nobody reported this anymore, I am assuming my fix for this indeed worked.