kidrdbz said:
Okay, so my brother and I really enjoy your game, but we ran into a problem...
After about an hour my brother had the location of the artifact narrowed down to the bottom left corner. He kept narrowing it down, until it gave him an area that had no stars... He continued to narrow it down, until the entire map was eliminated from possibly having the artifact...
He was playing a local game using the Windows version.
Rats. I thought I had completely eliminated this. I might have to organize some real testers with debug codes who can dump the information and see where the artifact is. It's possible a certain kind of information is getting wiped out.
I know there is a bug with information right now, the pie wedge problem. It's mentioned in the bug section of the manual. Basically expensive industrial artifacts can't be drawn properly as a pie wedge because the angle of the lines is 22.5 degrees, and the graphics primitives can only draw in integer degrees. The red area is drawn in the wrong place. Though I had assumed that the bug shows too much black area, it might not be true on one side of the pie wedge.
It's also possible that the black area was split, and there's some sliver of space somewhere that's impossible to see on the minimap or zoomed out. I've been caught by that a few times, but it's kind of like answering the "My computer won't turn on!" with "Is your computer unplugged?".
I'm going to assume that there is a glitch that allows a possible way to colour in the whole map, and write some debug code. If the entire map is truly coloured in, I'm going to have the program do a data dump, containing the location of the artifact plus all the information used to colour in the map. If anyone gets that debug code, I *critically* need that data so that I can repair whatever information is getting corrupted.
Might take me a while though. I'll try for Release C.
dentrado said:
Wouldn't it be possible to use signed binaries, so that the server checks the binary and only the official signed binaries can log in to the server?
Possible. How to you ensure the client doesn't lie when transmitting that signature back to the server?
(I'm not saying it's not possible, I've just not thought hard enough about how to pull it off).
If I can figure out a way to release the source without ruining the game for legitimate players, I'll be happy to do so.
Maybe I'll go ask in the dev forums.
dentrado said:
Is there no way to continue the game after going to the menu? (pressing exit) I see only start local game, no continue. then i clicked (i don't remember on what) and then the game crashed, I was just about to find the artifact.
(and to others frustrated by escape quitting the game). Yes, Escape *should* behave this way, but the main menu is really a placeholder at the moment to allow for the choice between single and multi player, and escape quits the game for good.
Escape used to quit the application... Early on when I showed the game to a friend of mine he hit escape to get out of the alien menu (instead of home or *), and quit completely. I think it's the right key, but there should be some way to continue and possibly (as some have recommended) save single player games.
If you need to put things on hold for a bit, hit P to pause (in single player only).
fusion_power said:
Oh, strange bug during a little Multiplayer. I found the artifact!!!
...but nothing happend:
the only left sector contained nothing but one Artifact. The white sign indicated it but when drive the ship over the artifact I didn't won the MP.
My buddy also played with me into the game. He found his artifact ner mine location but we had different destinations. He was able to pic up his artifact and won the game. Somehow my map was different displayed or wrong or something.
When you found the artifact, did you get the victory screen?
Did you continue to see your buddy move even after you've won?
When your buddy won, did you see the consolation screen?
The closest thing I can think of is that you lost network connectivity to the server somewhere along the way and your client didn't tell you. I was having a game yesterday that behaved similar to this. Things were going great, I won the game, I got a victory screen, but then nothing happened. I checked and none of the other ships were moving. I checked even closer and the server appeared to had stopped... If I attempted to start a new network game the game would hang (with a tiny bit of the end of "Galactic Aritfact" from the main menu still displayed in the messages box). I restarted the server and all was well.
That being said, the server is still running this morning. If I had to make my best (but likely wrong) guess, there was some kind of hiccup where the server lost your connection somehow.
Now that I think about it, I recall this was the game where the victory screen seemed to flash away too quickly. Maybe that's similar to what you saw. There's a "between_games" boolean variable that checks if a new game is starting.. might be tripping early if there's some kind of network glitch.
If this happens again (to you or anyone here, can you first verify that your opponents are still moving?). When it does happen, can you send me a message and let me know the exact time when you won the game, and what your player name is, and your timezone? (I'm at GMT-8h, west coast north america) I can check the logs to see if/when your ship movement data stopped appearing on the servers.
I need to fix the server first though. I realized yesterday that times are logged to the server as HH:01:SS. Minutes aren't being stored, everything is 01.
I can count forward from the start of each hour, but it's bloody annoying.