Odd SpyPlane behaviour

[WTBClan]

After some months of testing Ares, I found just two bugs:

The first one, I've described in a seperate thread. The second one is propably not even a bug, but simply a weird twist of coding, perhaps vestigal from some other game mechanic.

Occasionally, if an aircraft is spawned by a SpyPlane SW it gains the ability to actively pick targets on its own and it will seek out the nearest object with a non-zero Storage value (only tested positive values) and attack this object.

Now, a SpyPlane spawned object picking its own target might sound like an absurd situation, but it is possible to achieve in two ways I have found so far:

1) If such an aircraft is not immune to mind control and is MC'd by another player, that aircraft will follow this behaviour of seeking out the closest object with Storage>0 and attack it.

2) If an aircraft with a weapon with negative damage (a repair weapon) is spawned by an SW, it will ignore the target it is given by the SW, and instead seek out the closest object with a non-zero Storage value owned by its player and use its repair weapon on that target.

There might be other situations in which this unlikely situation is reproducable, but obviously case 2 is the more severe one, as it disables the possibility of having "repair support"-type SpyPlane SWs.

[Mevitar]

1) This most likely happened because it switched the owner and the AI ordered it into attack mission. I don't know if the AI is able to make AircraftTypes do other stuff after they get MCed, but it seems a pretty standard behavior for the AI to send the MCed units to attack. Don't think it can be "fixed" in any way without dwelling too much into the AI, nor do i think that this behavior needs fixing.

I have a UnitDelivery SW in my mod that delivers 3 AircraftTypes, and if the AI uses it, they obviously don't attack, just sit where they were spawned. However, sometimes i could get them somehow to retaliate when they were attacked by my units, and in some cases even started to attack my miner units. It appears to be more related to AircraftTypes or the AI itself than Spy Plane SW.

2) Aircrafts spawned by SpyPlane SW don't attack objects, but cells. Even if you order it to attack an object, it will still attack the cell under it. Since you can't repair the cell, I think this is the reason you get this behavior. If you want to have a repair SpyPlane clone, then you have to do it different way than giving negative damage on the aircraft's weapon.

[WTBClan]

1) This most likely happened because it switched the owner and the AI ordered it into attack mission. I don't know if the AI is able to make AircraftTypes do other stuff after they get MCed, but it seems a pretty standard behavior for the AI to send the MCed units to attack. Don't think it can be "fixed" in any way without dwelling too much into the AI, nor do i think that this behavior needs fixing.

The curiosity here is not that it assigns an attack mission, but that it specifically seeks out the nearest enemy object with positive Storage, rather than the nearest enemy object in general.