Issues surrounding hotfix 2 for Enraged Koala

mollygos submitted a new blog post:

Issues surrounding hotfix 2 for Enraged Koala

Continue reading the Original Blog Post

 

With the updated patching system established will it be easier in the future to avoid such issues?


Still behind you guys 100%! People tend to forget it's still β.

 

Sucks, but It's OK, that's why it's a beta.

For those of you still feeling a bit sour...



(For those without a sense of humor, the above pic is a light-hearted joke, not intended to disrespect Chucklefish or anyone else)

 

We love and forgive ya Omni. Beta is beta hehe Theres a good little mod to fix the shiplockers for one pixel but it jsut makes a new one like FCS mod if anyones interested. However why cant i see the Alpha marker on my starmap? lol

 

What wound up happening is actually pretty damn stupid.

Technical explanation time:

In order to update files more effectively and agilely we implemented the update routines in lua, so if something is flagged out of date the lua script to update from that version to current or a chain of such scripts are run.

We recently made a rather major object update to make all objects interactive and scriptable, which caused the "interactive" object type to be deprecated. A side effect that we didn't realize is that objects you sit on, such as beds and chairs, suddenly became non-interactive because there was not proper information regarding interactivity in these older objects. So we created a lua script to update all loungeable objects to set interactive to true.

However, in lua, lists and tables are not allowed to contain nil values. We have created a workaround for tables, but not yet for lists, because it just hadn't come up yet. So if you have a list in C++ that looks like {1, 2, nil, 3, 4, nil, nil, nil} and you pass it to lua it becomes {1, 2, nil, 3, 4} and if you iterate through it you only get 1, 2

So when we passed the contents of a container object through lua and back without touching it explicitly, it truncated the size of the object if the last position wasn't filled.

Because the object had a list that was too small it failed to initialize in the world. Because this isn't a fatal error, it just logged to the console and went on its merry way. And then saved the world on exit without the container in the world, thus erasing the container.

Fuck.

We've fixed and pushed in hotfix form the "can't initialize in the world if the list is too small" problem. And we're working on the lua list passing back and forth problem.

 

Thanks for the quick explanation Omni we appreciate it ^^

 

So I'm assuming since I hadn't recently backed up, that my containers are permanently lost? If that's the case I'll happily start over again. No big deal.

Is it a good idea to just delete my characters and move on? Or should I wait? Because I have a late night starbound itch I want to scratch and I don't care if I have to start over or not....

 

There's not going to be a way to recover containers lost in this fashion unfortunately. If you don't have backups, you can still player your character by allowing the game to regenerate your shipworld. But anything that was in your ship previously is lost.

 

I started over to see if the shiplocker would come back and indeed it did. However I cannot see the Alpha icon on my starmap which kinda worried me if I wanted to leave the sector and come back. Havent found an answer yet and still looking.

 

Made me lol irl thanks for that

 

Everything was fine for me after the first patch. Now ship locker is gone and some chests. Even using back up files from before this or before Enraged Koala does NOT fix this. I thought back up could?

 

Not sure Dio Omni has a new post about a fix but I would reccomend we start over. It's a pain yes but now we get faster updates and more content quickly which is a huge plus imo. Sorry to hear you lost chests as well.

 

And I put the most valuable items in the ship locker of course thinking that would be the safest place...

 

Thank you for the reply.

I'm sure it's frustrating more for the devs than anyone, but you guys have made a great game. It's relaxing and a lot of fun. So much so starting over is a " meh " feeling. No big deal. That's impressive.

One day all of this will come together. Onwards and upwards. In the meantime, I'll have a lot of fun playing your game. Off I go.

 

On a tiny, related note: is the launcher supposed to still show "Beta v. Furious Koala"? In other words, did I not update entirely correctly, or is the string just not updated everywhere?

 

Hey, it wouldn't be programming if this wasn't how you felt after fixing the big ones... traditional bugfixing sequence:

I need to look into Lua more; as a python programmer I'm cringing at the lack of Nones/nils/whatever to use as placeholders/no-ops.

 

doh
wondered where my shiplocker and fuel hatch went xD
c'est la guerre

 

I can deal with updates. I have to re-work everything after each update, after days fixing mods without a detailed document to help.

But I really miss a better support to multiplayer in the updates. Server-Side character and a better work to prevent cheaters can be really nice. Something like admin tools can be good too.

 

Take some deep breaths and relax, we that appreciate you are not going anywhere.

 

So, for clarification: Should i backup my shipworld before the next patch / hotfix, or was i supposed to do it before this one?