I love seeing how the game is shaping up, and am extremely positive about the direction. The game is however currently unplayable for me. If I manage 30 minutes without a crash I'm lucky, and the vast majority of savegames I create malfunction and merely close the client when I attempt to load them. I get that there are people that have fun creating new colonies over and over again, but I can feel that I will personally burn myself out on the game being forced to play that way. So I'd really like to put the game aside until stability has been a major focus for a while, and the game can actually be played continuously. So I'm here asking if any of you guys know if this is something that has been mentioned? Will there be a point where they take a pause adding new content (and thus more bugs and performance issues) and focus on getting the staple game working before pushing on? I love the small bits of the game it has been willing to let me play, and I'd hate to just archive it mentally in the "Was a great idea but might not ever actually become playable" category.
We just released the December Update, revision 34, within the last hour. Have a look over the changelog, lots of stability fixes there. I think they may improve things. Let us know how your experience goes with this latest version - and please do let us know if you run into any problems (and how they happen) so we can get on with fixing them!
After having played the newest release a bit, I can say that it has done nothing at all the remove, or even diminish, the constant crashes and malfunctioning save/load system. I'll urge you to take seriously how damaging the lack of basic playability can be to building a large customer base, and again mention the concept of pausing development of new features until you've gotten then ones in place to work reliably. In a game that didn't interest me as much as this one does I'd be happy to go bug-hunting and submit crash logs for a month or so. But this game I actually want to play, so I do not intend to burn myself out on it by forcing a truly unplayable experience upon myself. Will check back in some months. Best of luck.
That has certainly not been my experience - I've been able to play for long stretches, crashing my client only occasionally - I'd estimate maybe 1/4 times, on sessions longer than an hour. Crashing within the first half hour is very rare for me. Saving and loading before version 34, on the other hand, was a bit hit or miss, and failed more often than it succeeded, but that's improved with this version. What are your system specs like? Could your issues be related to your hardware, perhaps, or outdated video drivers? My computer is no supercomputer gaming machine.
I don't tend to crash that much, but if I do it's usually related to the population of the colony. Getting above 20 colonists begins to slowly impact stability, with 40 starting to chug a bit. Mostly if I keep the population lowish and manageable the game runs fine.
Tbh I'm not planning to play until the nice load/save crash thread doesn't die for at least a bit. Lack of stable save/load feature is the "Don't touch" sign for me.
Believe me, it's very frustrating for us as well. Obviously there is stuff going on - but we don't know what it is, and we can't figure out what it is without seeing it. Typically what happens with games (in particular, Dredmor) was that we narrowed down this stuff and resolved it as part of the normal development process. The first six post-release patches for Dredmor were very crashy, and it was only about Dredmor 1.07 where we finally were able to sort out what people were seeing and fix it.
Am I understanding correctly that there is some heisenbug around save/load so it works for you without problems?
One thing that might help would be increasing the maximum file upload size for GG's site. A lot of people seem to be posting bug reports without console.txt because zipping it doesn't reduce the file size enough (and they don't know to use something else like 7Z).
Orzelek: Got it in one, yes. We don't actually *send* builds out of the door if they crash during save or load for us. I played an hour long game of CE today, with saving and loading, and it was fine (although I did solve the mystery of the disappearing hair bug, so that was good.) At this point I'm thinking that the save/load issues are caused by something that happens after only a couple of hours of active gameplay, but that doesn't help us narrow it down.
