Originally by: ElanMorin6

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RE: Drones wandering off and attacking new targets

This happens not based on distance to the target, but on how long the drones need to travel to get to their target. Because of this, the problem manifests mostly with heavy drones, or medium drones at extreme range - lights almost always get to their target before "forgetting" their command and wandering off in their own direction. I've NEVER had a drone wander off *after* engaging it's intended target, however. This only seems to happen to drones that are "in transit" for too long. Based on my own experiences, I'd guess that the drones redo their own target calculation algorithim ever 30 seconds or so. If they haven't gotten a command, nor engaged an enemy in that time frame, they scatter as if they hadn't gotten any orders at all. Easily reproducable by sending heavy drones at a target 50km away. In fact, this will happen each and every time, unless you constantly re-issue the attack order to your drones to keep them on-task.


Drone auto-target selection:

First and formost, make it so that all drones pick the same target! Second, drones should pick targets based on drone and rat size. Lights should prioritize frigs, mediums cruisers, and heavy drones should target BC/BS first. There's no reason a single light drone should go flying off to attack a BS. If there are a mix of drone sizes, use a weighted average or something. Customizable orders for drones would be nice, but simply making them work together and pick appropriate sized targets would be a HUGE improvement. If, after that, you can get them to pick the closest of the appropriate targets, that would be spectacular. Opinions will vary on what the "best" targetting parameters for drones are, but even simple improvements like these will be a huge step up.


Launch/scoop lag:

This would appear to be a problem with the overview, actually (what, the overview causing lag? The shock! The horror!)
Each and every time I launch or scoop drones, my framerate drops to 0-1 for several seconds. In missions. During PvP. Alone in space in an empty system. Based on everything I've seen, I'd guess the cause is client-side, and probably due to the overview code, which is well known to be one of the crappiest collection of 1's and 0's ever assembled. As a total overhaul of the overview code is necessary anyway, I would imagine that this problem will eventually get fixed, inadvertantly or otherwise.

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