June 2022 - Week 145 - Cymera

Summary

• Cymera festival
• Crash dump fix
• Bug-fixing
• Kingdom of Balance stream

Detail

On Saturday I go out to Cymera and see Adrian Tchaikovsky being interviewed for the Page One podcast. I was intrigued to learn that the Shadows of the Apt series was set in his own table-top RPG world. I really enjoyed both Children of Time and Children of Ruin, fascinating to see the world through such alien eyes and to imagine their societies.

In the afternoon I verify that crash-dumps produced from builds made on the Azure build server do not work. On Sunday morning I find the cause of this is an issue with the build tools. I fix it by making the build not self-contained. This reduces the size of the build by 65 MB but users will have to install the .NET Core runtime.

A bug with injuries keeps me occupied on Monday, discrepancies between what the UI indicates about an injury and the simulation. I resolve this on Tuesday by lunchtime and then take another look at job priorities. I believed that any number of Dwergs could work on digging pits without stranding themselves. Testing has proven otherwise. Looking into this in the afternoon and I find some foolish assumptions. Fixing those causes significant slowdown. A new approach is required but it's out of scope for this release and I park it on Wednesday morning.

The rest of Wednesday is bug-fixing and play-testing but on Thursday I review the stream of Dwerg Saga by Kingdom of Balance. This is very useful as the streamer thinks out loud and I make a bunch of notes on improvements, some of which will go into release 0.19. Ethan Robson provided me with videos of his playthrough and I take additional notes from them.

Athena finds me a crash bug on Thursday which I fix on Friday. Athena has checked all the Needs behaviour by the end of Friday. We have a good chat about hunger, blueberries, and farming and I learn more from her about systemic design.

For the next week I will be bug-fixing and making some small changes to farming. If everything goes well we will make a new release next week.