Hi everyone,
As I was finalising the tutorial last week, I realised that there were a whole range of things that didn’t work even though they should have - let’s call them the usual unpredictable bugs. As a result, the majority of the week was spent trying to figure them out (and I am down to only one now).
So: what are these “usual unpredictable bugs” I am talking about? How can something be both “usual”, and “unpredictable” at the same time? Let me give you an example: When I created the pathfinding graph for the new island (so the villagers would know where they could go and where they couldn’t), pathfinding on Pirate’s Peak simply stopped working. There was no clear reason for this. Both graphs were stored in different, well labelled files that shouldn’t have interacted with each other - and yet, creating the graph for one island seemed to override the other. After a lot of unsuccessful research online and many tests in the game itself, I tried simply deleting the files and recreating them from scratch. Same names for the files, same locations, and supposedly same content - it suddenly started working.
It is still unclear what happened or why deleting the files fixes it, but the more complex a project becomes, the more of these issues it will run into. So while each of the bugs itself is completely unexpected (and usually not traceable to a “real” problem with setup or coding, but rather a result of compounding issues), these bugs have become very expected whenever I make major changes to the project overall.
In addition to the pathfinding bug, I also ran into an issue with the quest system simply not running one of the tasks (until I added a debug line to the code), and most recently, the GPU Instancer system we are using is working correctly on Pirates Peak, but not running at all on Opal Reef (something I am still trying to figure out).
These are of course frustrating problems. Fixing them is not optional, and yet when I manage to, after many hours of investigating and trial and error, I am right back to where I started. At least I tell myself that I will be able to fix things more easily if something along those lines should come up again - but I fear the bugs will get ever more creative as well.
Until next week!