The article I read the other day said they have approximately 250,000 debuggers. It sounds to me like you signed up to be one of them, but find yourself not enjoying the job. Since you are making suggestions, I have one for you. Uninstall the game and reinstall it once it is released. You don’t seem to have the stomach for early access projects.
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I like the game to much, when I’m able to play.
I already have experience with most Anno games, certainly Anno Online was a bug machine in the past. And Crate is doing a much better job, than the Anno team (as well as speed as fulfilling requests.)
The bugs aren’t the problems that makes us mad, but the trouble with communication. It would help with a subtopic in ‘Announcements and Information.’ Just post a small post with: We’re currently working on the ‘repair’ bug, please have patience. Then we know we just need to wait, but most the time they are late with communication and leave us in the emptiness.
Their is one small other thing I’m not happy with is, that they only fix the original files, but nothing is provided to solve the damages done by the bugs. The response is that we need to start a new game.
Someones save file is basically their live in the game, and no one wants to lose it.
As an example: I had trouble with the patches of herbs. The collector can’t acces them, but I did get the message that I needed to restart with a new map. And it’s not the first time I’ve gotten such a message.
The worst of all, it wasn’t an issue with the map, but the flattening tool that makes the shore currently inaccessibel.
We do have ‘debuggers’, they’re called programmers. Reviewing each other’s code happens all the time, though there are situations where someone has expertise in an area of the game that the others do not, and such a review has minimal results.
There is no such thing as a debugger. Someone can’t just come in and look at your code without knowing what it does, what its dependencies are, and how it all comes together to make the game work. If the entire engineering department suddenly vanished today and we had to get fresh programmers on the project to replace them, they wouldn’t pick up where the old team left off. They would be learning the ins and outs of the codebase over months if not years even as they start to work on fixes and features.
We do, throughout the day every day, in the bug reports.
That is largely dependent on the issue. In the case of the vanishing rocks/fish issues that happened in a brief time window for v0.7.5, there is nothing that can be done to recover that save state, so there is no recourse but to load an older save or start a new town.
Obviously nobody wants to lose their progress, but at the end of the day this is early access and bugs do happen. Sometimes saves may break.
We worked through 4am that night to push out a fix for those issues as soon as possible to minimize how many people were affected.
That is often a case of world generation changes. When the way the game generates a map is changed, ex. to get rid of resources spawning out of reach in the water, that is not something that can be done retroactively.
As a simplified example, imagine that you have a town built on a map, but the world generator has changed and your world seed now interprets completely differently. Where your town exists there is now supposed to be a mountain. How do you reconcile that? The answer is you do not. You need to start a new game to take advantage of changes to world generation.
You lowered the terrain below the water line, burying that resource in water. There is no raise terrain tool, so that’s pretty final as far as the path grid is concerned.
I hope that clears things up a bit.
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I wonder if this enables use to create streams and ponds for irrigation and a moat around our town…
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Thanks for clearing out things, and my apologies for being a bit rude. It’s just painful to see everything collapse where you put so many hours in.
I’m only confused by the last point: Is it possible to flatten the area around the lake, this is how it looks like:
I even tried to lower it, but I can’t use the flatten tool near the lake. It stays like a cliff. I was still hoping to save those patches of herb.
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A lot of people have gotten upset about this but I thought this was the point with an early access sandbox game. Starting over with new updates is fun!
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Ok, I’m going to try it, but first a bit of crying and saying goodbye to my old save file number three.
Rest in peace on the graveyard, no worries you won’t disappear.
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It’s early access dude, stuff breaks. that’s what you signed up for
and speaking as a software engineer… Zantai is being far more civil than you deserve with the attitude you came in with
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Indeed that is the reason why I apologies. After cooling down, I noticed I was far to rude. Sometimes I regret the things I’ve done, way to late.
Please delete the whole topic.
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Hijacking Op’s post, I believe the best approach would be devs add a button somewhere on main window (since is yet on early access), with “Report Bug” function, that would at least take a screenshot and upload with some error log to dev site.
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@Zantai
I work for a software company with more than 400 people. The level of care and detail that you provide is amazing. You are providing more information to the public than I get from my own internal QA team sometimes. Thanks again for the 4 AM sprint. Those are very hard and ask a lot of people. It is much appreciated!
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I’m sure you aren’t the only angry or frustrated one among us. The thread responses are still useful to others. If I had no experience with codering, I wouldn’t be aware that raw code out of context is almost incomprehensible. So long as it runs, it would pass most spot checks.
You’re human. We’re all learning the game together. If you hadn’t posted the thread, I wouldn’t have been able to consider the level tool could potentially create motes and rivers lol.
Have a blessed day, friend
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When you write code, your mind is in it and you know your way around the whole project. Even hiring more developers requires training about the project that takes time away from actually working on it. Developers are always rewriting and optimizing their own code to make it easier to read, debug, and remove duplicate code. We call this refactoring. Debugging is something that happens as you develop, or in response to bug reports by the developers who already know the code they worked on. Some tools used may help pin point bottlenecks and resource problems, but you have to find these problems before they can be addressed, and that is also what the community does for free is find the problems. This type of cloud source work has changed the way software is developed dramatically. Especially for games that have been in open development from nearly the beginning. CIG has crowd funded over $410 million since its development, and that is because the community gets to be a part of its development in more ways than just reporting bugs. They contribute ideas, create content by way of illustrations and movies, and sometimes these talents get them hired. They’re making a whole new building just for this project, but not to move everything in to. Just to expand it. So for smaller projects like this, hiring developers just for the purpose of searching through your code to find mistakes is pointless, because mistakes in code don’t always just appear like grammatical errors in a book. They can be like cracks in a wall or foundation, misaligned picture frames, windows that leak. In other words, they can require some parts to be completely redesigned and rebuilt.
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He’s clearly referring to QA testers here, which is definitely a thing.
And he’s right, generally other people are better at finding the last few errors in your work than you are yourself. This is a known fact in software development, it’s why peer reviews and QA testers exist.
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With this gsme being so varying and frankly quite slow, QA testers can do only limited amount of testing. They cannot start a new game and play to 100 years in one working day. They can test only so many different scenarios.
That’s why early access (open beta) exists. To let thousands of people play and find more issues, and more obscure issues. And so far, Crate does everything it could to make our playtesting enjoyable, despite hundreds of uncovered issues.
Yes, critical bugs happen, but they are fixed very quickly… Quicker than many studios with 100s of employees.
Indeed. And it’s not like there hasn’t been testing going on long before the 9th August. A select group have been testing and giving our feedback in just the same way as people playing the early access version are now.
Sure we can’t catch everything though we give it a good try. Like it or not there will always be bugs somewhere in a game. We just have to try and find them as best we can.
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you clearly have absolutely no clue how software development actually works
Still, we all benefit from people sharing their impressions and thoughts - even if these are just misconceptions - so that those being in the know see where they are coming from, and the others get questions answered they have not asked / thought of 
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lol thanks for giving a laugh
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