BUGFEST SOLVES THE PROBLEM
by Hazed
Last Sunday we held BugFest, a day where we didn’t save anything that happened, and we encouraged players to make the game crash.
The purpose was to track down the cause of the crashes that have been plaguing us of late. Although we were sure they were connected to new players setting up accounts, Alan had been unable to reproduce the problem on his development kit. So we enlisted the players to help.
And it worked! It turned out that the crashes happen when two people try to set up new accounts at the same time. No wonder he hadn’t been able to make it crash when he tried on his own.
Of course, identifying the problem is only half the battle, and now he has to fix it. Unfortunately that is going to involve a major rewrite of the new account routines. He has made a start on this, but it will take time, so in the meantime we’ve put back the block on creating new accounts.
I’ll keep you posted on his progress in future issues of the Star.
Meanwhile, many thanks to those of you who helped out during BugFest, and made the game crash. I hope you enjoyed the chance to deliberately break things.
The people who actively helped us were Allei, Gizmo, Redd and Sjw. They’ve been given a special bug-hunters charm to reward them for their efforts.
Everyone else who was in the game while we were constantly crashing it, and who suffered the inconvenience, will be given a BugFest charm. To claim your BugFest charm come and see Hazed, Bella or Freya in Chez Diesel.
