Thursday chaos

I originally intended to write a post on cheating (and partially it’s done), but due to heavy workload and other stuff (I got a brand new computer that I assembled and tested during the last two evenings), I think I should give you a small update. And why not now, after such an ugly buggy Thursday like today was?

So one week after the 1.20 release we ran into serious troubles today on 1.20.

The reason is, that the fort building stuff is still more at a beta level than we expected it to be. The reason was probably our beta testing configuration. As someone pointed out in a comment here, it’s not exactly easy to test building forts on the beta world. That’s really true and we should have thought earlier of that. Well, this hits us now hard, especially those ones playing on world 1.

What happened?

Well, first there was some buggy code for limiting the building levels in the fort – there were only few and wrong limits for the buildings. This caused for example a bug that you couldn’t sleep in the barracks once it was above level 6. That shouldn’t have happened.  Congratulations to the town that managed to achieve that. We should hand out awards for such doings.

Anyway, that required us to fix the data in the database, which included a lot of new codelines and update scripts. Technically the update scripts worked, except for a mistake in the headquarter level and a bug regarding the building process which sometimes made the building becoming level 0. That was really bad. I would love to say that the players simply used materials during the building process that were of such poor quality that the buildings collapsed occasionally – but everyone know that it was just some bad code of our side.

Well, sorry on our behalf. We spent some time on fixing the results by extracting the building levels from a database table backup which repaired at least most of the broken buildings – but some remain to be below previous levels. That’s ugly and shouldn’t happen on the productive worlds. Yet it is hard to avoid, especially after introducing a huge amount of code after a quite long time without a public release. At least it did only hit the new feature – strictly speaking, it could be really much much worse.

Speaking of worse – we will work on denting out the other bugs tomorrow. We have the aim to update other worlds sometime next week, so we only try to fix the most important things. For example, I don’t think that I will fix the animation bugs in the flash client. The animation might be at some points being ugly, but it is still bearable while the fort building process simply needs more attention right now.

I just hope that the Friday will be better than today.