Hi everyone,
While I did manage to finish updating chapter 5 of the tutorial last week (to be uploaded to the experimental branch next week), the majority of my time last week was actually spent chasing an elusive game crashing bug.
The bug in question has been reported a couple of weeks ago, and I have also experienced it during some more elaborate testing, but so far, no-one had been able to narrow down what exactly caused it, or what context it occurred in. Together with the complete lack of any error messages and how infrequently it occurred, fixing it had been on a lower priority. However, in the process of creating chapter starts for the tutorial, I ended up creating a save point that would very consistently lead to the crash after approximately 10 minutes.
The time it took to crash was not perfectly consistent, though always in the same ballpark. Changing subtle parts of the game did not do much, nor did adding additional debug statements help me figure it out. Overall, I ended up changing various aspects about the game and then speedrunning to the crash a good 150-200 times to see if it would help me find the bug before I finally found it (leading to me simply referring to it as "the" crash after). To give you the short version, it was a bug in the healing hut, which needed very specific contexts to occur, and if the trigger conditions were met, would crash the game once it filled up its healing charges.
Assuming that the conditions were met, the number of villagers that were healed while it was building up its charges would then affect how long it would take to crash, making the timing less consistent and the bug more difficult to find. In good news, the issue has now been fixed, which means that the last game breaking bug I am aware of has been eliminated.
In the process of searching for the bug, I also got around to updating all major plug-ins the game is using, which fixed a number of lesser issues the game had and that I hadn’t fixed yet (e.g. the ground cover not being deleted when buildings were placed in the tutorial). I will finalise the tutorial chapter selection and upload all of the changes to the experimental branch during the week.
Until next week!