THE AMAZING STORY OF THE FANTASTIC PLANET BUG AND ITS MARVELLOUS, WONDERFUL FIX
by Hazed
I recently received an email from a player who had accepted a job to one of the planets in the Amazing system, but when he jumped there, found he couldn’t land on either of the planets, Wonderful and Marvellous. He asked if I could do anything to fix the problem, since the PO, Founder Fantastic, hadn’t been seen in Fed DataSpace for several months.
So I pulled the maps for the system down from the server and loaded them into the Workbench to find out what the problem was.
It turned out that the space map did not have a title, and that was why the game hadn’t been able to figure out how to move the player from the orbit location to the landing pad. Easy enough to fix, although I did wonder just how the map had ended up in the game like this, and why the owner hadn’t realised the planets were unreachable.
Stupid owner, I thought.
And then it dawned on me. Fantastic was one of my alts. I was the stupid owner.
This PO was one of the bunch of alts I set up when we were testing the ‘COLONIZE’ command which added a new planet to a system. In fact, he was the first one I used, and there had been plenty of problems during the testing because of bugs in the new code, before he could finally get his new planet linked in correctly.
Obviously in that process something had messed up the space map, but I never did spot that you couldn’t land on the planets.
Stupid owner!
I have now killed off Fantastic, and all his tester friends and removed their systems: Aazack, Amazing, Ballet, Distraction, Feeble, Fire Light, Malt Vinegar and Pigstuff.
