To everyone discussing the need for a full changelog.. keep in mind what Tiy said just 2 days ago towards the bottom of the 20th February Blog post: "We’ve decided against full changelogs because we’d like players to discover what’s new themselves." Does it undermine beta testing? I think so. But you should at least know that any simplistic not-really-a-changelog we get is all we are going to get from them now and that is on purpose. *At least use this to give the messengers the benefit of the doubt. In many cases it may not be that they don't know what is in the update, rather they choose not to tell us.
and this is unacceptable. so, in order to correct the issue, we must discuss it, else the devs will not understand that this is a huge problem. you'll also note a bunch of us discussing it here, are also discussing it there, and also in a thread specifically about it. also, since the latest version upgrade, that have admitted to not knowing what the patch contained several times. this is a major issue.
Every time I get online and my Starbound updates, I copy the new .pak file into a folder labeled "paks" and unpack it into a subfolder that has the date and time built into the name. I then compare each of the main folders in the unpack by checking their properties. If there's a discrepancy (either in terms of number of files, number of folders, or space used accurate to the byte), I enter the folder and repeat the process with subfolders until I find the difference. I then note the difference in a notepad file and continue. It can take up to two hours to compile a changelog, and it does require an older version of the pak file, hence why my first changelog (furious to enraged) was rather lacking. I know between Enraged hotfixes 2 and 4, the assets pack was completely unmodified.
Your Buddy Bill, I love you. Single? No, wait. Don't tell. Let's keep it mysterious. Also, hi OP. Thanks for posting.
and you wouldent have to do it, if only they took some notes. again, thank you for putting in all that effort.
He's right. There's a line between keeping things secret for the sake of the users to have a little bit of fun finding things, and just outright not detailing changes that could run the possibility of crashing the game, cause bugs, or worse. Without that kind of proper documentation, people can't figure out the underlying causes of a problem, and essentially cripple the community's ability of giving feedback to a problem that they have no idea what could be causing it in the first place. I'm cool with keeping any small cosmetic changes secret, since that's always fun to do, so long as there's an indication that the thing that's being obfuscated is cosmetic in the first place. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the implication here, especially when it comes off as something very vague (referring to the last line of the hotfix log). This is less of a problem with communication and more of a problem with documentation, though. It's very clear that they're listening to us (just recently people were badgering about lack of updates and forum content and whoops here we are), we just need to remind them that they need to organize themselves a little, and not hide details that could potentially bring about bigger problems in the long run. I spoke to some folks on IRC that had recently updated their clients and hosted a server before and after the update, and claimed everything remained untouched. Don't take my word for it, though.
you are correct, they have taken steps to address our concerns about updating the front page, which is what has exposed this flaw for us in the first place. that is to be commended. if this current issue is corrected, than our concerns about the frontpage were extremely valid and have directly resulted in a much more positive experience, and a efficient manner of communicating to the devs critical flaws. i'm dead serious, good job guys.
I'll be posting changelogs in patch notes threads within 24 hours of something new coming up, but I should really find a thread I can keep them all in.
What the shit? I haven't even played since the last update because I was worried you broke all my chests. Now because I was cautious I've lost my planets? Is this for real?
After your changelog post I figured you were using this already, but now it sounds like you might not be. If that is the case I highly encourage you to get WinMerge for stuff like this. (Free and Open Source) It helps immensely.
I've never heard of WinMerge, but it looks like it will be useful. Thanks for the tip! Maybe I can finally catch single-character tweaks (typo fixes, integer corrections, and suchlike), which don't change the filesize (same number of characters) and thus are not caught using my method.
I'm not sure quite how it handles, but make a backup of your Player and Universe folders, and then boot up and see if you get to keep the planet. I think it will keep the planet you were currently in orbit of... i think. Not sure, haven't tested, I only stay on one planet nowadays.
Holy shit, man, you just handed me a gold mine! I caught something in defaultconfiguration.config that I missed on the first pass " "playerBackupFileCount" : 3, " Hmmmmmm... official backups on the way, perhaps?
Ok, so WinMerge has one problem that limits its usefulness: It doesn't identify and search subfolders and display whether or not there are differences within folders. As such, it's not too good for checking the object files and other such things where everything is stuffed in its own folder, but it's still useful for checking the main configs, items, and the like. I caught another change I missed last time: A new grass overlay was added, heckgrass, for use in heck (obviously). My post has been edited to add this.
Actually, you can use git for this, just like the development team does. They DO have a changelog and use git branching and merging themselves -- many of us have seen from watching the developer's twitch.tv stream, chucklefish does work in branches and merges them before a release is made. What I'd recommend is picking up a copy of TortoiseGit and maybe watching this video on how git works. The basic method you'd use is close to the same as you currently do, however this is the difference: Pick a folder to initialize a git repository in. With tortoisegit, that's as easy as a right click in explorer. After you've extracted your dated directory, copy the contents over the git repository folder and 'commit' it. All of the changes made will then be displayed to you in the 'git log'. Each time you copy something into the repository, commit it, and optionally 'tag' it with information you have, like '639 Enraged Koala Hotfix 3'. If you go through the trouble of tagging them, git actually lets you pick two tags and compare the entire sets of differences between them, so you could say, select Enraged Koala original release, and hotfix five, and get ALL the changes across all five hotfixes. Version control is a wonderful thing, and it's just a shame that chucklefish has decided not to share. (However, after seeing some of the terse commit messages, like 'stupid plant' and no other information, it's no wonder that kyren may not have the time or the wakefulness to walk the gitlog's long form to know exactly what branches had been merged when he triggered the build.) Chucklefish guys and gals, take a look at Gerrit. There was a decent talk on it at linux.conf.au last month. http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linu..._-_Code_Review_System_-_Kristina_Hoeppner.mp4
