Dear Stormworkers,
This week development has pressed forward, with big progress being made on the 2 next minor updates, the next major update, and the new crash reporting system.
The next 2 minor updates have long lists of bug fixes and we are making good progress on fixes and improvements. We use the issue tracker to get info from players on where the quality issues are, and this gives us clear metrics on how many identified issues there are. This data shows we are steadily reducing the total number of bugs, and our new quality control processes are introducing relatively few new issues.
Next weeks minor update will also include a new cosmetic feature, and we will announce more next week as we release it!
Recently we have seen a surge in reports of crash to desktop, which is of major concern to us, particularly with our recent push to resolve issues and implement bug fixes. We have been unable to reproduce this new crash, with the game playing very stable in the office. Steam crash reporting only works with 32bit software, and most players play the 64bit version of Stormworks. We had tried using Bugsplat (a 3rd party crash reporter) but that also didn't work well for us. So, we have implemented our own and put it live yesterday. The new crash reporter is very similar to the built in Steam one, except it also capture data when 64bit applications crash.
Immediately we can see that the crashes are probably just a single issue related to physics objects being despawned, and we are already investigating how to fix. Moving forward, the new crash reporting system will help us monitor the stability of Stormworks, and quickly recognise any quality issues, as well as clearly see exactly which update introduced new crash issues.
We will return next week with the next minor update!
Much love <3,
The Stormworks Developers
v1.4.16
Feature - implemented new crash reporting system