Issues surrounding hotfix 2 for Enraged Koala

The most upsetting part is that it didn't just affect personal belongings, but also all explorable planets, containers, missing, -everywhere-.

Might as well reset it all and it will give the same result, crazy stuff.

I think the other most upsetting part is that those items we found that are finite, disappeared if they hapened to be in one of those containers.

I'm just analyzing the disaster of the situation and it just ends up as "Might as well restart fresh" in my head, such a mess. Wish they could just roll back our datas from before this hapenned.

I think i'll stop touching that game for a while, that's so disheartening.

 

FWIW, I just updated, loaded my game, nothing missing. Saved, quit, restart & reload, all still fine. Something to do with the fact that my only chests are in my ship, perhaps? (I'm early in the game).

As to missing something like this, as a former LUA gameplay programmer, LUA has some weird things that catch you out occasionally. Bugs happen, especially in game dev land and they tend to catch you in the weirdest ways.

The fact that my game worked and many others didn't tells me that it's possible that the devs did indeed play it, found no problem and released the update. Like Kahlzarg said, it's about taking responsibility and doing something about it, and that's what Chucklefish are doing. It *sounds* like it was a glaring, stupid error that should have been picked up but sometimes even those slip through and you kick yourself later and can't understand how you missed. I'd bet that that's what the guys will be doing once they've finished stressing and fixed it. I don't care how good a programmer you are, anyone could have done this.

Skip this if you want but as an example, the last company I worked for released a game on multiple platforms, the DS being one and we ran multiple round-robin mulitplayer tournaments, all on different gen DSs, using all different characters and player configs to test gameplay and balance and never came across any show stoppers. Some minor tweaks here and there but nothing critical. Just before worldwide launch we did a soft launch at a local media event and took two of our dev DS Lites for people to try out the multiplayer. Within 5 minutes they were handed back with a fatal crash.

Stuff happens and the devs will feel bad enough about this without being hounded as well. Let's try not to make them wish they were working somewhere else, okay? As has been said before, it is a beta

 

Infact each time i stop play (each day so) i copy the fully "Starbound" folder somewhere , so basicly i need only delette the current folder and copy the "old" in the "true" folder it's that ?


anyways thx for reply

 

Alpha means adding content and fixing bugs, perhaps even adding new things to the engine.
Beta means fixing bugs before the release.

These are two different things and if you have a hard time telling them apart it's time to get improved staff to help you out.
Now, this does get complicated with games that plan on continuously updating the game after it is fully complete. I'm not even sure if they plan on doing this.
They might just leave it as is when it's released like Risk of Rain.

Being in Beta is no excuse for things like these to happen, they didn't test this patch enough. They were rushed by an eager community of people who want to play the game, not test the game.
Which is completely fine since they actually paid for beta access which is a pretty new thing, beta access usually meant you play the upcoming thing for free and help find bugs.
If you're paying for the product, you're expecting a game. Not a job to do.

This has all just become a confusing mess.
I love the game, I love what it's becoming (slowly) and I'm very excited for it. I don't mind finding bugs but I still think they should put more effort into testing and removing errors than implementing things that they've not fully tested.
Ignoring a problem won't make it go away. Adding more things that have problems onto the problem is sure as hell not going to make it go away.

They have a community of people that are not beta testers. It's players.
It was their choice to take money for beta access, so that's really their own fault.
Take responsibility and adjust, I say. You can't leave things as broken as you would for a beta tester that enjoys finding errors and bugs to report. A casual player getting their character corrupt or losing half their progress isn't going to react the same way which should be expected.

If you're going to respond with "It's just a beta, all sloppiness is a-okay!" keep in mind that this isn't a beta and that it's still no excuse to bad planning.
Mistakes happen, even if they did plan it flawlessly things can be forgotten and that's a-okay.
But this is happening a little too often to just be bad luck.

 

Maintaining a backup copy of the entire installation is apparently the only secure option. Almost unprecedented for NOT being massive engine updates, but...

 

Alright so I have a couple general questions. I think it would help clear some things up as to what people should do.

Is there any point in backing up our ships and worlds after the game has been patched but before we launch it? For example I have ship file that was last modified on the 1st, which is also the last time I played. Is there any reason to back that up after the game has been patched, even if we haven't launched the new patched version?

Is there anyway we can "ride this out" by not launching the game until the next hotfix/patch hits?

 

I'm not going to say weird errors don't occur, but you are one of TWO players I've heard of who didn't have the bulk of what they'd accomplished wiped out with a broken patch. It seems the odds of being able to miss it completely in internal testing are very, very low... and it's an outgrowth of building half a fix earlier on, then working like they had the full fix in place.

I just want them to bring in some more staff to help carry the load with their massive success dollars. They'd admitted they're more on art degrees than CompSci. I love all the good things they've done. Starbound is a BRILLIANT game.

It just needs a bit better oversight in the programming department. Not the first of these. Likely not the last. But they have a whole bunch of capital to mitigate that now, as compared to launch. I'd just like to see it rolled into making the best version of this they can make.

 

Just gonna throw it out there; I wholeheartedly disagree with you on this. Isn't the very efforts put into the "no more wipes" system an attempt at minimizing these things? They didn't need to try and prevent wipes, they shouldn't really even need to warn when wipes would have happened with every player being warned in bold red upon starting the game.

Instead they went forward to create a system that doesn't wipe.. and they goofed early on. Even if it was a preventable oversight, these things happen and they don't deserve to be looked down upon if you were to weigh positive progress against it.

I do understand the points you were trying to make as well, your original post just sounded more like an attack than a suggestion.

 

You all keep talking about backups, but no backup you load is going to work until this problem is fixed.

You have to understand, loading the files is what breaks them. Your backups are probably fine, but you can't even see them without loading them, and then they're as broken as the files you had to begin with.

Just hang on to your files and wait for this to be fixed. As long as it's fixed, they'll (presumably) load just fine, and you'll have your stuff again.

Also, don't load any worlds - that breaks them! Just wait this out and don't touch anything. I pity those who have already played wiithout backups.

 

I take it that there's no way to undo the damage?
Been storing so much materials/items/weapons/loot etc on my ship (been saving it til I found a suitable planet to build my base on - found one last night) and I've got two chests and a box left on there and they're pretty much empty.
Not to mention the bug whereby you're no longer able to go to / set home planets.
Pretty annoyed to say the least. But, ho-hum.

 

If you've already started the game without a backup, I'm afraid there's nothing to be done. It's lost forever. The items simply no longer exist.

 

i beg to differ

(then again, i've been playing an outdated version already)

 

Thought they might've had like copies of player codes (etc) in their main database and could just reset characters back to before the patch.
Pretty shitty, but it's not like it was totally unexpected.
Looks like making a new character is in order!

 

I will be honest with you guys, on my game I only lost my ship bank on 2 characters I had (and some storage on my home planet), at first I was sadface.jpeg but I never really used my ship locker, its really good when you start the game but when you use more than 1 character it can be quite troublesome, kinda happy to have 2 characters without shiplocker now lol! it forces me to go to my homeplanet more often, and it made me make a new character as well for why not and spam N everywhere xDDDD (I love those characters thoughts). Anyway, as ppl said before, this is beta, expect bugs and be happy to be part of that bug, you can go all hipster saying "I PLAYED STARBOUND WHEN IT HAD BUGS AND SHEEP" =P

 

The domain should temporarily be changed to dontplaystarbound.com.

I'll go register it for you.

 

You mean you can play on furious koala atm ?


If yes can you said me how do that ? i've still the full folder of the game before the update , maybe i can get back my item ?

 

Well, i've lost the majority of my storage chests,crates and so on.. it's sad, cause all my ores are gone... and it took damn long time to get em... like the matter stuff to create some of the armour. The Robot parts are gone too... and a damn lot of stuff to make my home, homable

In the end... i 've got to spend a lot of time to get those things back. It's annoying but thats part of the game^^

 

At an estimate, without world files - just backing up ship, player, and meta - if each registered copy of Starbound only has one character archived they'd need to keep 600Gb of character data on-hand.

 

You saved me omni, I was mere moments from launching after the update and I was able to backup the player folder in the nick of time after reading this post.