I would like to formally apologize about yesterday. With the release of version 5.0 and the business of Realms Deep, I kind of panicked when a major bug was reported. My big mistake was trying to hastily patch it and not really seeing all the long term consequences of that patch.
So I ended up making the problem worse.
But I had a good rest, and a fresh perspective early this morning. I believe I have successfully mitigated the problem in three ways.
- I prevented the game from hanging when trying to land on a planet. Now, even if the same conditions exist, it should not fall into an endless loop.
- I found the root cause of the crash, an invisible arm that is used in orbiting planets. The reference to this arm gets removed from the game when leaving orbit. The problem occurred when leaving orbit, then quickly going back into orbit, which is why the issue showed up more in the interactive guide (because the guide directs the player to do just this) but could also occur outside of the guide when the same conditions were met.
- I was able to load a crashed game by adding a redundancy in the code. Now, if the reference to the orbit arm is not found when reloading, the game will create a new arm and assign it the right parameters automatically. This should no longer be needed with the prior fix, but I wanted players to be able to reload their crashed games if possible.
Sorry to get so technical, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew what was going on. The new system can be stress tested (if you want to try that) by rapidly leaving orbit, entering orbit then landing on a planet.
Hopefully this particular bug will not cause any more issues. But please feel free to reach out if you encounter any related, or unrelated issues with Star Explorers. Thanks for your patience.