Hello, technically this post is the π Friday Facts, but unfortunately we can't think of anything special to do... maybe someone can make a Combinator cake... that can calculate π?
You might have noticed that a lot of rail related stuff was broken during these past releases, and now it is working more or less fine again. The story behind it is not so trivial.
More remnants Dom, albert As for the conclusion of the topic opened in the FFF-288 we finally decided to go for a balanced solution in which the player can recognize what entity was destroyed and also walk through them. The solution of going up in the Z-axis is really attractive for designing the destroyed models, but it gives a lot of headaches to the game designers due its need of a bounding box. We are planning also a generic set of remnants for the modders who don’t feel like making the destroyed version of their own machines. Here an example of how a factory can look after a biter attack: These remnants are still a work in progress, many of them are not yet finished and we are planning more iterations with this subject. By now you'll find a sneak peek in today's release (0.17.36).
Rail building changes kovarex The problem with rail building is that it has too many states. It depends whether you start building the rail with shift, to use the ghost mode or not, and then it also matters whether you still hold shift, to ignore trees or not. Moving from manual building to ghost rail building means cancelling the whole rail building and starting it again with the correct modifier. The problems were reaching the surface from time to time, and Twinsen even drew a nice little state diagram of the rail building system. It kind of peaked with this bug report. After some time, it became clear that we should simplify it. This is a nice example, where we can talk about change we just released (0.17.29) in a FFF. From now on, instead of 3 modes (building manually, ghost building, ghost building + tree/rock removal), we have only 2 modes, where the ghost building without obstacle deconstruction is not available anymore. So it doesn't matter anymore how you start the building, it just matters whether you are holding shift or not at the moment, which makes it consistent with the normal entity building and the ghost icon. Once the topic is opened, it is hard to leave it so easily, so we agreed that the rail building could be streamlined even more. The current model is, that you have to build one straight piece of rail first, and then you can use the rail builder on the edge of that rail. It is annoying generally, and especially for the new players, because he might miss the way how it is being used, as the straight rails are built exactly the same way as other entities. The reason we did it this way was mainly, because when we first introduced the (new at that time) rail builder, we weren't confident enough that it could replace even the basic straight rail building. But since the rail building is stable enough, we might go one more step forward. The plan is that the rail won't be used to build straight rails normally the way you can now. The rail item would be always used to build by the rail planner only. Instead of having to snap to an existing rail, you could just start building anywhere on the ground. Instead of showing the rail preview when holding the item, you would see the arrow as when starting the rail building, and you could rotate it with the R key. It would make sense, to make the arrow color/size different for starting a rail planner on the ground versus snapping to an existing rail, but other than that, it would be the same.
Hello, we are still focusing most of our resources towards fixing as many bugs as possible so we have stable release in reasonable time. In the meantime, the preparation for the continuation of the work on the GUI rewrite is still happening:
Hello, This week has been non-eventful. We are fixing bugs. There is not much to say, and I have updated the graph to reflect the status of the ongoing Dev vs. Bug war: The massive spike is the specific crash we talked about in the last FFF.
The release (kovarex) So we finally released the 0.17 experimental this week. (patch notes) Hooray :) Fun fact: The release script failed to post the release announcement on Steam and Reddit and we were wondering why. The reason is that the patch notes were so big, that it exceeded the maximum post size (40k characters). If this isn't the indication that we should split our releases into smaller chunks, than nothing is :). Code wise, it is clearly the biggest release, and the amount of bugs we have to go through correlates with it. In other words, there are tons of bugs of all variety. We want to fix everything eventually, but it will take time, so we had to prioritize this week to aim for the most generally playable version before the first weekend after release. That means mainly unloadable saves, unavoidable crashes, game failing on startup, and the most frequently occurring problems. Our automatic bug reporting system is helping us a lot with the last one. It is uncommon, but sometimes the automatically uploaded crash report doesn't have enough information for us to be able to fix the bug right away, but the number of times we see a crash happening is still extremely useful for prioritizing. When we see a crash on the forum, we can cross reference it to our automatic reports, and if is one of our 'top-hits', we know to investigate it right away. The most prominent crash related to loading specific kind of save happened with pipe ghosts happened more than 200 times. It was fixed (obviously), but lets wait and see what our top hit of 0.17.4 will be after the weekend. Overall this means, that bugs that are not critical, require design discussions or are not that simple to fix are not being dealt with right now. Also, we got quite a surprising cake gift today. It is extremely delicious and we are extremely thankful for it :).
Playtesting kovarex We have been playtesting a few days this week. There were some things we had to fix on the fly, but we still were able to play quite a lot, so I would say that it went surprisingly well. We have been able to get 3 multiplayer bases into a late game stage.
The release plan (kovarex) This week was the time to close and finish all the things that will go to 0.17.0. Not all of the things that we originally planned to be done were done (surprise), but we just left any non-essential stuff for later so we won't postpone the release any further. The plan is, that next week will be dedicated to the office playtesting and bugfixing. Many would argue, that we could just release instantly and let the players find the bugs for us, but we want to fix the most obvious problems in-house to avoid too many duplicate bug reports and chaos after the release. Also, some potential bugs, like save corruptions, are much more easily worked on in-house. If the playtesting goes well, we will let you know next Friday, and if it is the case, we will aim to release the week starting 25th February.
Hello, as we learned countless time before: Visual feedback is the king! Especially when the GUI is as complex as the Train GUI.
