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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.

3 Comments

  1. Micky1992
    Micky1992 July 10, 2009

    Well, in my opinion world 1 works much better than i hoped before the release =D

    I didn’t recognized much bugs, but there were a few i did and these few bugs were very critical. Thanks anyway that you are fixing the bugs in a very high speed. Keep on doing so, i like it 🙂
    And you’re style of writing is just like everytime awesome. It’s funny but also informative 🙂

    Micky1992

  2. Shulik
    Shulik July 10, 2009

    Another nice article, thank you. I love this blog, you have awesome style of writing as Micky1992 said.

    Just a little question: you wrote “We have the aim to up­date other worlds some­time next week”: Did you mean German worlds or all worlds?

    Good luck with fixing bugs.
    I’m looking forward next articles.

    Shulík

  3. zet
    zet July 10, 2009

    We will start updating the German worlds then. I really can’t tell when we will update the other worlds, but once the German worlds are rolled out, it shouldn’t take us too long to start rolling it out in other countries as well. But I really have no straight answer on that.

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