1.0C ON EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH: A NEW... NUMBERING SYSTEM

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Nicholas, Nov 4, 2016.

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  1. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Clockwork Empires experimental patch 1.0C is now on the Experimental Branch on Steam. For those of you who are new and unfamiliar with how we do things, we typically like to roll out a number of "experimental" patches before we push a stable one to the main branch. We make no guarantees that the experimental branches are particularly stable, tested or safe. That's why they're the experimental branch. Nevertheless, it gives you an opportunity to test the game and to give us feedback on what we've been up to.

    Here, then, is your consolidated experimental changelog for Clockwork Empires 1.0C (the next stable patch will then be Clockwork Empires 1.1):

    clarified wording of bed descriptions
    Ravenous Herd event now pops an FYI instead of a Stub
    added Empire Times Special Report event arc
    added Palmerstokian Science Assistance event arc
    re-enabled Stahlmark Smithing Contract in foreign office
    updated science loadout description to be more accurate
    minimap now renders at 45 degrees rotation
    FIXED: many uses of word "citizen" changed to "colonist" for consistency
    FIXED: strange display names for many combat jobs
    FIXED: no memories were created by "blame enemy" action
    FIXED: stew pots are no longer left floating in the air after a kitchen job is interrupted
    FIXED: overseers could have their job roles removed from offices in seemingly random cases related (probably) to skill gain (this caused various issues in related systems)
    FIXED: REDACTED spores would not be considered player-owned in certain cases
    FIXED: military training speed techs
    FIXED: rug models should no longer occasionally sink through the floor
    FIXED: properly locked Revolver crafting recipe behind Science
    FIXED: tobacco crop wasn't outputting its harvest
    FIXED: people dropping goods in the wilderness after butchering events/various other major disasters
    FIXED: modules can occasionally not have their order moved in the workshops
    FIXED: window placement occasionally crashes the game
    FIXED: arguing rivals beatings could tag various colonists with Frontier Justice unintentionally
    FIXED: memory leak in particle system
    FIXED: various commodities not making their way into the stockpile correctly
    optimization: did way too much work in the skeletal animation system, slowing the game down considerably when multiple characters were present. (This one is really embarrassing, please don't ask about it)
     
  2. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    I've noticed a significant performance improvement with the update.

    Mmm, coffee crops are still broken, any chance this could be changed before release, since you fixed tobacco? It's just a one-line change in crops.edb
     
    Last edited: Nov 4, 2016
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  3. DrusoMR

    DrusoMR Member

    Now the Barmans donĀ“t refill the booze of the bar. They pick up and drop the booze forever :p
     
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  4. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Can you send me a save where that happens, please? Thanks!
     
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  5. Thanandorn

    Thanandorn Member

    That's a good news to me, the next one (that im still waiting for) is 'add a frontier road (or gravelpath/dirtwalkway/etc.) to the game'

    Keep forward, comrade!!
     
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  6. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    Endgame hasn't improved , colony still crashes without noticeable reasons, also with a count of of 137 colonists the game feels still a little sluggish (noticeable pause between walking animations) and
     

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  7. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    Is the old rule about experimental not guaranteeing sane behaviour when loading saves from a previous version still applicable?
     
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  8. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    Yes, the behaviour of a lot of things won't be fixed by a new release. But the sluggish behaviour shouldn't be affected by it, because the colonists are picking up new jobs and getting the current fixes by it. The game crashes seemed to be related to fire animations when fighting selenians so they should get new fixes either.

    But to be honest, when a game reaches 1.x state i personally expect that save game compatibility AND application of fixes of newer versions should be a matter of course
     
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  9. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    That basically is the same as not having any experimental at all.

    There's an optional experimental branch for a reason.
     
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  10. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    No, experimental is for testing out things..it may break things, it may crash more times, it may occasionally no longer load your save (in which case i would file a bug report so it may be fixed). But yet in some time it will become a productive version and my personal expectation for a fully released game is that the next productive version provides downward compatibility to the older one....
    But if you think that bugs in the end game will be found at all if you need to start a new game everytime, well, that's your decision ;)
     
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  11. mistrornge

    mistrornge Member

    You are welcome to try your old save. Just no guarantees it will work. And it is pointless to send in error reports as it could be a compatibility problem.
     
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  12. Cheshire

    Cheshire Member

    My naturalist refuses to restock paper on this build D:
     
  13. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    Here we see Tillie Cogburn, in her eternal struggle to pick up Pulque without immediately dropping it again, and store it in a booze vat. Sisyphus eat your heart out:

    (PS: It appears to still work for spirits)
     

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    Last edited: Nov 5, 2016
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  14. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Yep, that's because the hitch is now on the game side, not the renderer side. The skeletal animation fixes and the other performance stuff I'm doing right now affects the render side, so the acutal frame rate and not the speed at which the game can fix the simulation tick.

    I'm looking into whatever the hell happened with restocking now. *sigh*
     
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  15. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    Seems like REDACTED spores spawned by REDACTED impacts, rather than killing a REDACTED, still have to be explicitly forbidden and reclaimed, and spawn in the weird not-forbidden-but-actually-forbidden state when the REDACTED falls.
     
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  16. Jacq

    Jacq Member

    Awwww, c'mon...
     
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  17. Zaralzer

    Zaralzer Member

    It happened me with Foreign Office, just unasign the overseer and asign it again to the job and it solved that for me.
     
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  18. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    We called the skeletal animation update function between two and three times more often, per frame, than was necessary. Slowness ensued.
     
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  19. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    Nicholas, is this assumption valid? (The save files appear to contain script/XML that's presumably generated by the version that started the game originally, does this risk mismatching anything or yielding inconsistent behaviour compared to a fresh game?)
     
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  20. Naffarin

    Naffarin Bureaucrat-Inspector Exemplar of The Empire

    I think you have been misreading what i meant to say.
    The save game contains states of the game objects but not scripts. It neither contains game object definitions. If you load a previous save there may be game objects that have a copy of the game object definition in their own state. These game objects (e.g. farms) won't get fixes, because they don't lookup the current game object definition in the current game installation.
    You can test this with the coffee farm (see bugs forum) in a pre 1.0c game. The solution to replace outputCommodity = "crate_of_coffee_fruit" with the correct bushel_of_coffee_fruit won't work on an existing farm because farms store the crop commodity definition in the state of the farm that is saved in the save game. But if you would build an additional farm next to the existing coffee farm the new one would start to yield coffee (even though the game was loaded from 1.0 or 1.0b). The old farm remains broken.

    So the answer about inconsistent behaviour depends very much on what you are asking about. If a colonists takes an entire new job the chances are pretty good that it will work as expected. But if it relies on fixes made in other game objects this may no longer be true, because these game objects might have been loaded from the old definition.

    For me it is an display of a very bad programming style (sorry gaslamp) because there is no need to store a static definition inside the state of a game object...it is an unnecessary impact on the memory footprint and leads to problems as such as the farms show. This could easily be solved by looking up the current definition in EntityDB the moment it is used in the code instead of accessing a local gameobject state, because the information stored in there is the same as in every other game object of the same type.

    So the answer to yield inconsistent behaviour, yes that may happen, but it depends on the circumstances and could (and should) be prevented in the code by reinitializing or working with the actual definitions from the game base.

    PS: Maybe it's time for a scripts and modding forum :)
     
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