Portal flash does not mean success
The battery is just barely enough for the portal jump, as far as I see. A lot of time all the white segments get completed and the portal flash occurs, but then you stay in the source system. Console says that there was insufficient energy, and lists an error from portal's L2L about trying to execute a local which is nil.
I am not sure whether it is a related problem, but even if the jump succeeds, there is a good chance to be on an orbit quite far from the target portal (and incompatible with appearing close to a portal with wrong speed).
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The battery is just barely enough for the portal jump, as far as I see
Hm; when I make the jump with a full battery there is roughly 1/3 left. Are you seeing it consistently drop to zero?
In any case it's true that the battery power can run out before the sequence completes; maybe we should check before activating to make sure there's enough and prevent anything from draining it while the sequence is active.
I am not sure whether it is a related problem, but even if the jump succeeds, there is a good chance to be on an orbit quite far from the target portal
Yeah, I have seen this too. It's unrelated, but I haven't been able to figure out how to reproduce it. I'll open another issue for it.
mentioned in issue #170 (closed)
Hm, that happenned reliably at some point, but now a wipe has fixed that. Strange. It was some middle state — full battery was barely enough for the jump (and apparently this depended on the angle towards the star, because solar power charge to the battery in the process was relevant).
Actually… The portal code seems to draw proportionally to time, if sleeps get into a lag situation it could overdraw the power. So the battery problem could depend on real-life state of the notebook…
Anyway, white portal flash should probably only happen on success — other behaviour seems unfriendly.
It seems to be load-related: try running
openssl speed -multi 33(or a multithreaded litecoin miner, if you so prefer…) and play Bussard at the same time. I wonder if you will manage to complete any portal jumps. (I assume that 33 is strictly larger than the number of threads/virtual CPUs as reported bylscpu).I tried, and this does seem to increase portal battery drain (probably because of the effect I described in the previous comment).
