Having picked up Volkov, Jenna, and Rama, I went back to clean up Tau Ceti. When engaging a cluster of anarchist habitats, I gave the squadron 'Break & attack' order. All three flew off screen in pursuit of an Earthzone which was doing its 'retreat and recharge' thing... and never came back. By the time I finished blowing everything else up, they were nowehere to be found. There were no wrecks (I'm not even sure anything in the system would be capable of destroying them in any case) but they were no longer listed on my comms menu either... I had been abandoned. My terrible feelings of rejection were made worse by Jenna's failure to return her expensive new ship.
On a more practical level, debug.log contained the following which appears to be related:
06/14/2018 22:49:42 ERROR: shpOrder attack target already destroyed.
06/14/2018 22:49:42 ERROR: shpOrder attack target already destroyed.
06/14/2018 22:49:42 ERROR: shpOrder attack target already destroyed.
Oh, that's unfortunate. This is probably related to auton and wingman behavior code I worked on, though I don't see how a destroyed object could end up being the target. In case it's relevant, did you have any autons, and if so did they disappear or come back?
We could check in the OnBehavior event if a wingman has no orders or has a gate order (and gPlayerShip exists and their behavior isn't 'goingHome), and if so order them to return to formation and print something to the log. I just want to make sure this doesn't mess things up when the player gates.
Good question but not sure if I can remember the answer now. I certainly had a TX3 waiting but that of course didn't engage (or disappear). Fairly sure I didn't have any combat autons though.
This should fix, and maybe help debug the issue.
Unfortunately it won't get your wingmen back. But if you're playing in debug mode or with an unofficial mod, it should be possible to insert some code to get them back. If so, let me know what ships they had (and equipment if they were modified). If it's a registered game, I think only George can fix it.
Many thanks and absolutely no need to retrieve the missing wingmen, I usually get them all killed one way or the other further along the line. I've played a lot of Transcendence (mostly vanilla) over the last few years and, since there is such a dedicated development community, I raise issues on the assumption that it's more helpful to devs and other players to report bugs/annoyances than to ignore them.
Merged PR into 1.8 Beta 3 (https://github.com/kronosaur/Transcendence/pull/93)
Thanks!