Hi!
What a roller coaster. The very first update after it released and everything broke! Sorry about that. After spending most of the day tracking down the issue, I think I have it solved now but I don't dare publish the update on the main branch yet. So update 0.1.2 is now available on the BETA branch. You can access it right now if you want by right-clicking on Atlas Architect in your games library, going to "Properties..." and then "Betas". There you can opt in to one of the following branches if you want:
- Blank - This is the default version which you have if you haven't made any changes. You will get all regular updates after they have been tested out for a few days on the Beta branch.
- Beta - You will always get the latest changes right away, there may be some weird bugs but you can test out stuff as soon as I publish it
- Stable - This branch is lagging one version behind the default one. So in case you hit a bug or something isn't working, you can always jump back to the previous version by switching to stable.
I hope that makes sense!
What the problem was that made it go black in the last update
Since it might be interesting to some I will explain what caused the bug that made the game unable to launch:
The problem was that I made a build of the game that worked well locally, all of my regular tests worked well when I tried out different features. When I uploaded the build to steam, I got the same issue as many of you did where the game didn't start at all. I first assumed there was something wrong with the patching and that I have somehow made a mistake during the steam upload process. I spent quite a lot of time hunting time information regarding this to see if anyone else had similar issues. I made a lot of different versions of my game with different settings but it still kept failing. Then, after testing a new version, it suddenly worked! I even went back to the original update and it worked there as well. I thought that perhaps my latest upload to steam had correct settings and everything was now working. That was incorrect, many users wrote that their game was black on launch and now I didn't have a way of getting the issue myself so I couldn't test if it worked.
After spending some more time debugging, I finally found that it was the reading of the save files at the start of the loading the game process that was causing an issue. During a test, I had saved over some problematic saves and that is why the bug disappeared for me. It turns out that saving references to actors in Unreal is a very slow process when you are reading them back in the game. And when you boot up the game, I check all save files to see what the level names are. Previously it wasn't that big of an issue but since the map is now much larger and I have many more actors, it took much longer. So it was just sitting there in and trying to read thousands and thousands of references that didn't exist anymore because I had updated the map size. After reworking the saving system a bit and removing all those references, everything seems to be working again. You are welcome to try it out on the Beta branch to see if it's working for you. I will also continue to test and if I don't hit any more issues, I will make the update available to everyone by default.
That's it! Thank you all for your patience with this. As this is the first project I'm releasing by myself, there are a lot of things I'm still learning and I unfortunately don't have a QA department to report issues that they find before going live. But I will try to set up a more structured test approach while also keeping updates coming at short intervals. For those of you that read this far, thanks for taking the time and I will try to keep the process as transparent as possible.
Thanks again and happy world building!
/Danial