Hey everyone! If you have been following my Twitter or Facebook page, you will know I have not been feeling the best these past few days. Well, hopefully that is all in the past now and the future will be sickness free!
So, here is what has happened in the game this week:
If case you are not on the snapshot builds, there is now an integrated voice chat system! This is a big improvement to old text chat system that nobody seemed to use and MUCH better than having to run a separate voice chat server.
Also in the snapshot builds, automated error reporting! I have noticed a big decrease in the number of begs that are getting posted to the message boards, and I didn’t feel like it was entirely because of my awesome programming. 🙂
What the automated reporting will do is monitor from within the game, and if it detects a ‘code bug’ it will send off a report to the website where it will get logged and allow me to track the issues and fix them faster. This is entirely anonymous, not even your username is tied to the report. But this helps me fix any critical or rare bugs that pop up. It doesn’t send in ‘game bugs’ so I still need help with that. An example of a game bug would be, “Hey, when I snap these parts together, they always say they are colliding”. That would be a perfect time to take a screenshot (default key is F9) and post it up on the message board as a bug.
Moving along, I am currently working on improving the ‘first player experience’. This is basically, if I give the game to someone that has never played it and say go, what issues do they run into? The biggest offender on this list is login connection feedback (when the connection is slow and the login button is not showing) and trying to deploy into a game without having a valid MAV build. On top of this, I will be tackling the Garage feedback on when you actually are trying to deploy with an invalid build.
That’s it for this week! I hope to have a new stable build out soon, so if you are not on the snapshots, all these features will be available soon!