Unable to see or interact with a Probe

[Jaofos]

Not knowing what I was doing having just started, I sent a couple of probes out in a fleet to explore. I went back and decided to break these guys up, one kept on exploring and will respond, but now I have one probe that show up as being in a sector, but is not visible when I go to that sector. I have tried accessing it from the ships menu, the game recognizes that the probe is out there, but I cannot interact with it in any way.

Any tips?

[Tsagoth]

What is the grid reference where the probe is located ? Server name and the G x,y S x,y and I can look it up.

[Jaofos]

G 10,6 S 8,1 on Nergal

[Tsagoth]

hmm. Interesting. I see the invisible ship alright. Ok, let me check into this.

[Jaofos]

Thank you for the quick reply's. You guys are on the ball, keep up the good work!

[Royce]

This happened to me constantly on Nergal. I reported it from in game, case 602. The problem seems to be that probes don't always properly explore every sector they pass through, and if your probe happens to stop in a sector that is still considered unexplored, you cannot access it. The only solution I found was to send another probe to uncover the sector, after which both can be moved.

[Tsagoth]

Ok, I will have to pull some logs and that is really time consuming for Nergal, but what has happened is that the ship thinks it has arrived at its destination, but it's physically somewhere else. What I don't know is if this was caused by Nergal crashing right when your ship was jumping, or an exception occurred during the jump. I think for now it will be stuck until the next time Nergal restarts, which unfortunately probably won't be all that long the way it has been behaving lately.

[Tsagoth]

This happened to me constantly on Nergal. I reported it from in game, case 602. The problem seems to be that probes don't always properly explore every sector they pass through, and if your probe happens to stop in a sector that is still considered unexplored, you cannot access it. The only solution I found was to send another probe to uncover the sector, after which both can be moved.

That would be a different bug, probably client side. In this case, he is seeing the ghost of where the ship was and the ghost is not commandable.

[KyleMac]

This used to happen to me a lot on Nergal (I had 3 or 4 invisible probes at one point) but the invisible harvesters patch brought my probes back under control. It still seems to happen sometimes but the probes quickly come back under control so I think it's actually a separate bug I've seen...

Ships can appear twice (or more?) in the idle ships menu but only one of them will actually link to the correct ship and the extra ships will be invisible if you try to go to them. Once you've given an order to the idle ship then it's duplicates will also disappear from the list. This bug seems most prominent when there are multiple ships in a sector but it does happen to lone probes as well. For example earlier I built a colony ship and two outpost ships and in my idle list it listed something like:



Location
Colony Ship x 1

Location
Colony Ship x 1
Outpost Ship x 2

Location
Outpost Ship x 1


Once I'd given orders to the three real ships, all five "idle" ships disappeared.

[Tsagoth]

Interesting. The ghost ships are a result of a failure in the synchronizing of the three display systems. Generally, if you can get the ship to move it will resolve the issue when the three controllers agree on where the ship is located. I'll have to talk to Z about your experience because I was under the impression that the ships list he displays there came from the physical ship management layer which permits no eccentricity. What you're describing is what I expect to see when the orbital mechanics layer suffers a fault, which is what was causing all the invisible harvesters.

[Skeith27]

I had the same problem on Nergal, and the above mentioned solution (sending another probe to the location the original one disappeared in) worked for me. It does seem like the sector just fails to acknowledge that it has been explored, and thus it won't let us see our own probe floating there.