Now Serving: Your Bug Reports and Spiritual Woes

[Fritz]

Hi Everybody!

Firstly... Thankyou so much to everybody who has played the game! I hope you found a little joy in it.

Secondly... To those of you have experienced bugs - I am so sorry! It's a big process, launching. I'll be updating frequently to address all of your issues.

If you find a bug, have any feedback, want to talk about life, or anything like that - please feel free to email me at [e-mail].

I'm super-available and friendly as people go.

I'll be working on the game for the forseeable future - so do feel free to fill my queue.

Thanks for playing!

Update Log:

We test as much as we can while keeping updates timely - so please: If something I've added breaks the game, or makes you fundamentally unhappy, or you experience crashes or such - do holler out!

02/17/2014: 10.40PM.

Fixes:
-Temporarily rolling 64-bit builds back to 32-bit so you can all get your achievement goodness until this achievement plugin business is sorted out.

02/16/2014: 9.04PM.

Fixes:
-Huge, sweeping, spiritually-frightening changes to the way memory management and painting work. Keeping that overhead low and that happiness high!
-64 bit and 32 bit builds for all platforms. This scares me. But I think it will fix a lot of issues.
-Escape-ing from a menu no longer leaves you in a midnight world of fear and loneliness.
-Maybe I fixed the bugs with being eaten by critters / critters eating each other. It's hard. Lots of systems trying to cannibalize each other.
-Decryption hub now retains your letter choices between attempts (kudos to Russ!)
-Decryption hub now hides cleanly if you exit menus while it is visible
-A pretty heavy-handed fix on UI scrolling issues until I get the clarity of mind to properly fix it. You'll be able to see the bottom now! Oh yes. And a lot more than that.

02/16/2014: 12.56AM.

Fixes:
-Added new memory handling logic to attempt to kill the garbage collection crash impacting some Windows machines (so much data! so tricky to juggle).
-Shuffled save game correction logic in order to fix save games that lack player coordinates (this should fix a lot of the bugs above. I hope)
-Fixed (I _think_) UI scrolling issues on Achievement / Journal / History screens. You should be able to get to the bottom, now.
-Fixed data caching for the world that was causing world tiles that are onscreen to be disposed of / forgotten. That was an insidious one. It just cropped up if you stay still for a while. Bizarre.

-Joshua

[Fritz]

Current Bug / Task Queue (in rough priority order):

-Currently implementing new Achievement plugin for support on 64-bit systems
-Some weird bug with closing the achievement window during a color storm and the game not correctly unpausing
-Very rarely - entities won't reserve / respect the reservations of other entities when pathing, so they'll just... eat each other. It's a tricky one - lots of things going on.
-Linux: More distros, more testing.

I'll keep you all posted - [Right here. I'll try to keep a log]


-Joshua

[Fritz]

Update:

I think I've cracked bugs 1, 2 and 3.

Here's the story (for those of you interested in the grimy underside of the colorful world):

So - the game saves little bits to memory everytime something happens (say, you pickup something, you color something).

And then every so often (30 seconds or on quit or minimize) it commits all of that to a file. (A file that you can copy and share around, if you like! We do it for testing).

However... sometimes that commit is interrupted or doesn't trigger (say - the game crashes, or _maybe_ an Alt-F4 exit. I'll have to test that).

Since the player's position is the most frequently-updated piece of data - it's the one that gets lost.

So you end up with a world in which you have no _place_. (Just like real life!)

So when the game boots, it's frantically trying to find a place in which to put you.

Sometimes, that goes wild (like the slanted world) and sometimes - it just goes "No dice" (like the crash on startup).

So we'll see! I've just intentionally imported a bad save file and I'm running off that to see if the game just... takes it and accepts it and gets on with life.

Looking good thus far!

Sidebar: Are people interested in this sort of commentary? I assume there's a minority of you who are. I'll keep it up until it irritates people.

-Joshua

[Mr Windblade]

I'm always interested in this sort of commentary! ALT+F4 calls the normal quit function of a program by default, so unless you've changed that, your game should be saving even if you exit in this way.

What I would do is look through my functions and find a place to "correct" an invalid player position.

[Fritz]

Bang on the money!

I had a "bandaid bad save" function in there - but I guess somewhere down the line I added something player-dependent in front of it (it was a call to the weather system to evaluate the color upon which the player was standing).

Long development cycles are crazy, man. It's like... working in tandem with some dark past version of yourself - and you can only communicate through faulty memory.

-Joshua

[Fritz]

Bam - fixed that issue of being able to collect a pillar (Fire, Passion, Logic, Joy) twice.

It was a stupid oversight on my part:

1) Load the world
2) Paint the world
3) Load in whether you have those powers

_But_ that "paint the world" function does a little checking to assure that if a tile _should_ have a pillar, but doesn't for some reason, and you _dont_ have the power... it'll pop it back there.

(For those of you into trivia - the function is called "BandaidWorldNode")

So... minor victory? Achieved.

[Turbanator]

Not sure if it's a bug, but when I got the power to build homes, I was spamming the C button for fun, and it kept creating new land and buildings now and then, but it continued on its own until I left the area, trying to convert the land.

I get the feelingit's due to the stalkers or the other creatures that create colour since the function has to continuous fight against the Stalker's colour changes to put the land colour to the once it was supposed to be on.

Here's a screenshot showing the behaviour, not taking a video yet though: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=228732871

[Fritz]

Colorstorm!

That's what we've been calling them here.
You can create nice little self-sustaining patches of color and fire and such with the right timing.

It's less a bug and more a... little emergent feature.

(They'll stop once they're offscreen)

But - they do look fascinating if you switch to "map view" while they're going and zoom down on them.

-Joshua

[Armok: God of Blood]

I tried to crush some tiny things and I turned into a group of frozen tiny things.

[Fritz]

Oh man!

I've been trying to recreate that one for _ages_. I heard some other funny ones - like... turning into a hermit crab, turning into a strider.

I've got it on my list! I just need to find the split second at which it's happening.

Thanks!

-Joshua

[Fritz]

Update: Strange issue on Macbook Air where the game doesn't pass the initial loading screen. Top of my list for today.

[Russ]

Quick note, I am still (intermittently) not able to get all the way to the bottom of the achievements page. It stops at #31 for me, at 1920x1200. The other two pages seem to work, though. Keep up the good work.

[Russ]

I also just noticed that leaving any of the menus by pressing the escape button leaves me at a mostly black screen until I manually click one of the menu buttons and then leave the menu that way manually. Make sense?

[Fritz]

Ohhh. Interesting. I completely forgot about the escape key.

I added it way way back at the start of development - I bet it's calling like... a primitive version of "Hide" (it's not hiding that backdrop).

Edit: I wish all bugs were bugs like that. Not bizarre engine bugs or platform bugs. That would be a beautiful world in which to be a developer!

Oh damnit re: screen scrolling. I thought for sure I'd killed that. I'm going in with a vengeance, now.

Thanks!

-Joshua

[Fritz]

Oh my god....

I swear I have just made a thoroughly _awesome_ optimization to the way Cube & Star paints the ground (the heaviest part of the app - alongside pathfinding I guess. Texture operations are big).

If it stands up to testing... I swear it is going to solve... well, only one problem (garbage collection crashes on 32-bit builds) - but that's one less problem, right?

-Joshua

[lectic]

Hi sorry to bother you but I'm wondering whether anyone's noticed these problems a well... It appears that the steam achievements are not updating (for me those relating to the number of stars, diary entries, coins and relics etc I've discovered), but also the in-game stats for the number of stars I have met are different on the 'achievements' menu screen and the 'drop-down' statistics menu.