IRT “Just release it”

One of our most recent bug fixes was a solution to an older bug whereby characters would lose their conversation bindings if you walked away from an overheard conversation. This was because all generic characters share a couple of different sets of “nothing to see here, move along”-type lines, and in order to make characters with overheard convos use these shared lines, we have to change their conversation bindnames when their overheard ends. If you walk away from an overheard, it never reaches the bindname change trigger, and before a fix was implemented, the characters involved in the overheard would stop talking to the player when this happened.

Our ever awesome programmers solved this bug by making all conversations trigger anything with their own names suffixed with _Stopped upon terminating. This happens regardless of whether you wait until the conversation ends or you walk away from it.

Last week, Lawrence built Release Candidate 1 and started a quick playthrough of the WorldCorp storyline. I downloaded it, burned it to a disc, installed it on my laptop, and started a test run of the PlanetDeusEx storyline. Together, we would make sure no critical bugs had snuck into the game during our last month of hectic bug fixing. In one map, Lawrence found himself spontaneously teleported to a different level upon triggering an alarm.

We classified that as a critical bug.

Our ever excellent programmers tracked the problem down to a little bug in the recent conversation fix: Certain conversations would throw up an “accessed none” upon terminating, potentially triggering any object in the map without a tag. Fixing the accessed none fixed Larry’s spontaneous teleportation problem.

And that’s why you don’t want us to “just release it”. You want us to play through the final release candidate to make absolutely sure you won’t find yourself teleported to another level for no discernible reason. Have patience. It’ll just be a few more days.