StarMade v0.199.459 - Major Performance Upgrade

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    I'm agreed with SilverSound, Brokengauge and other, keep in mind it's an Alpha.

    Yes it's very frustating if you lose your blueprint/design, but it happens when you take the risk to play on an alpha part.

    If the dev team take too long time to make an update, many people growl and if this team make many fast update (but unstable), other (or the same) people growl to. We are all the alpha tester!

    Now if schine need specific demands, tell us, and regulary. All that can help to add/improve the community and the relation betwen you and us is good to say/make.
     

    Criss

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    Yes but if the testing was put through, we wouldn't be having these issues to begin with.
    It was tested and we saw that nothing was wrong in that particular instance. However we cannot foresee every issue. I have little knowledge on what went wrong, so I'll leave that to the others to explain. However this has been eye-widening for us and we will be rethinking how to we approach releases.
     
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    DukeofRealms

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    I wasn't going to respond to this thread, little time, much work. However, I do think something needs to be said.

    I'm going to be honest; I haven't read most of the responses here, I've read a few snippets. That being said, it doesn't change my message.

    Basically, we've made a massive mistake. There's no doubt in our minds that this wasn't acceptable. Yes, it's alpha, but at the same time, this is why we implemented the backup feature. Unfortunately, that feature doesn't work on Steam, the launcher backs up before updating. As Steam auto-updates, this feature is practically useless (at least for Steam users). While we will never be able to prevent issues from escaping development, even large issues, we should always have something to fall back on (backups). For a large portion of our users, that didn't work. We've known it hasn't worked (as intended) for months now; we knew we were dancing around a fire. We should've fixed it immediately, that was our fault.

    This incident has put no doubt in my mind and the rest of Schine, that not only do we need to ensure our backup features are working as intended, but also, our development is working in a way that minimises these sorts of issues. The conclusion is that we don't think we can push development to conform to our 2 week release schedule. It's not enough time for development; it's not enough time for testing, and in the end, we spend at least a few days of the next development cycle hotfixing for the last. Development ends up either postponing release dates or rushing to meet them. In both cases, there's never enough time for us to test. We're working on changing this procedure at the moment, and in all likelihood, 2 week release schedules will cease to continue.

    We're a small studio, understaffed and under-funded. Our current release methods are not realistic; the evidence is right in this thread.

    In a separate point, we have issues with getting people to test the game. Our testing team is already community-based, our bug report site is already open to the public. Anyone is free to test development builds and make reports. What we can look into, and what we are looking into, is making sure the process is as easy as possible.

    However, testing is an incredibly difficult and tedious task. It's hard to find a professional game tester that's been in it for more than 1 year. Those guys get paid to do it; it's no wonder our volunteers burn out within weeks. At the same time, we're not a AAA studio; we can't afford to have a dedicated testing team. So we do primarily rely on community reports and volunteer testers. Unfortunately, in the last few months, Lancake (who is doing this all in his free time) has been bearing the brunt of that work. One person is not enough. We've always had issues with convincing people to test development builds, we've had issues with recruiting new volunteer testers, we've always had issues with retaining them. We don't have a large enough community pool to draw from, those willing to test the game (actually do the hard, boring and unsatisfying work) are few and far between. Out of those who do give it a go, an even smaller fraction stick around.

    We've run calls for more people to get involved in testing, we've made changes to our reporting site to make it easier. It's never enough, and it's something we think about often. We're looking into ways we can gain more activity in testing, some server owners have offered to do tests for us (most of whom are already involved in our testing/support projects).

    We might run another recruitment drive. The way to get involved today is to test the game and report bugs now. Whether that be on release or dev branch, the guide for reporting is located here: ⚡ Create Bug Task . We may also write a document about what it takes to be an effective and useful tester. It takes quite a bit of skill and patience to be able to locate issues. What might seem glaringly obvious to the end user, might be incredibly hard to reproduce. It's frustrating work, best of luck to all those want to give it a go, and thanks to our current and former testers for all the work they've put in.
     
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    DukeofRealms Why not make the testing server open for everyone to play on, like MMOs do? When implementing new features, put out a call to players to test specific areas. Like I said in a previous post, I'd be happy to play on the test server and report any issues I may find. I'm not a trained tester though, and I don't play StarMade exclusively. But this also means I have no issues with starting from scratch.

    Having access to a creative mode test sector would help a lot, outside of normal play.
     
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    The testserver is open for everyone. Just update to the dev build and you can see it in the server browser.
     
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    The testserver is open for everyone. Just update to the dev build and you can see it in the server browser.
    Thanks! I don't know why this info isn't more readily available. :-/ Logging in and checking it out. :-D
     
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    Perhaps your change in development can include a "Release Candidate" version. When a version is feature complete and stable but untested, release it as a "release candidate" for a set time, and allow sufficient time for people to test this version. A similar concept for Star Citizen (another alpha game where things go wrong often) to their PTU, they can test things ahead of time to discover problems bad enough to warrant not bring it to "live".

    Its clear we need more testing, and a Release Candidate system is the best I can come up with. The best kind of testing would involve server owners taking a copy of a server, updating it, and running it as a separate server to test on for a period of time.

    Lets face it. Programming is hard, harder still if the team is small. Things like this happen. I for one still believe that the effort is worth it in the end. As long as Schine is willing to work on Starmade, I'm willing to play it and support it.
     
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    The best kind of testing would involve server owners taking a copy of a server, updating it, and running it as a separate server to test on for a period of time.
    They might as well run a perpetual RC server in that case. Usually the player base will stay on the stable server, unless something cutting edge interests them. I ran a snapshot minecraft server for a bit, stuff went wrong, there were bugs, but there was a subsection of players who loved that kind of experience.
     

    Atheu

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    Speaking of these serious new issues, i'd really like to have the "block reverting" bug in entites really looked into.. i just lost like 2 hours of work on a ship.
     

    AndyP

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    I'm mostly a solo player and wouldn't mind using the testing server to play and build on when I play. I usually play a few weeks at a time, leave the game for a bit, then come back. This also means I don't mind restarting often, and use blueprints/templates for the designs I find important.

    Would this be of help to you? Is there a thread somewhere with more info about the testing server & what amounts to its code of conduct?

    Edit: been trying to find information about the test server on the forum & wiki, but can't find tangible information. This confuses me. Is there a sign-on process involved, or does the server not run permanently?
    As stated somewhere later already:
    Just update to the dev-builds and they usually stay available on the server list for you (make sure to check "compatible only").
    It usually is up 24/7 unless it crashes, but this is used to examine the lockup and investigate details on it.

    There is kind of a code of conduct in the welcome message.

    "General good behaviour, and do not destroy the fun of others on purpose."
    (Sure if you find a way to crash it, contact us, show us and we can fix it, just crashing it for fun wont be tolerated for too long.)

    Speaking of these serious new issues, i'd really like to have the "block reverting" bug in entites really looked into.. i just lost like 2 hours of work on a ship.
    We run various conversations with affected people, investigating the details and comparing systems.
    Most losses or reverts that cover more than 5 minute involve/require steam usage. There were also a few reports about "insufficient file permissions" while steam updated starmade out of nowhere. So it may even be some steam induced issue that we now have to cleanup somehow. We got quite close to the cause, but still need some more samples to back the theory and also fix. (We got only like 3 sample blueprints/worlds that had those reset issues, being sent to us after asking the users directly.)
    So you can be sure we focus everything we have to find the root cause of this problem.
     
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    Lone_Puppy

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    Are we likely to see the issue with docked entities falling off ships that travel across sectors any time soon?
     

    AndyP

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    Please signup at phabricator and subscribe to:
    ⚓ T2094 Fleets loosing docked entities

    Its not that easy to fix, as it seems to involve a complex timing problem, so when we attempt a fix on this in dev builds, it would be good to have players around that can easily reproduce it.

    (Subscribe to it, and if the status reads: "Resolved, needs quality check / confirm fix"
    wait for the next dev-build to show up, and test it again.)

    - Andy
     
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    Just to throw my two cents in. I agree wholeheartedly that we need some major hardcore bug fixing before any new features come out. It takes an immense amount of time to explain to new players why it's not a good idea to do or build things a certain way due to either game breaking or player frustrating bugs (Shipyards being a particularly enduring example due to a variety of issues). Many players quickly get exhausted from the numerous small and large things that really chip away at the experience and impede server admins in their efforts to foster an engaging play environment for their constituents. It all comes down to the first impressions of new players, if they try it during a particularly problematic update like the most recent, they are not likely to try again or be willing to dedicate their time to learning the game. More new players who are willing to try this game need to be retained so that they can potentially become future buyers.
     
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    Here's too much fuss about 3 lost stations. I am really sorry for you guys, but it is just for you to find out, how to get blueprints safely backed up by your own. It is not the first time "starmade happens" (sorry, Schine, we all use that phrase, nothing personal), neither the last one.
    Schema and the rest of the team, you are awesome, forget it and go on coding. We all are standing on the edge of the greatest space sim ever. Thanks for developing starmade.
     

    Gasboy

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    Yes but if the testing was put through, we wouldn't be having these issues to begin with. and it hasn't been just this update. this is the first time i've actually said anything about this. there's been other patches that i was upset with as well, but it wasn't to the point where i felt the game was unplayable.
    1 million people playing for an hour is 114 years of game time. For a more reasonable population, 10k people playing for an hour adds 1.14 years of game time.

    We, the players, are going to find far more bugs and issues than the Schine team will in several months of testing.

    And frankly that's our job.
     
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    Here's too much fuss about 3 lost stations. I am really sorry for you guys, but it is just for you to find out, how to get blueprints safely backed up by your own. It is not the first time "starmade happens" (sorry, Schine, we all use that phrase, nothing personal), neither the last one.
    Schema and the rest of the team, you are awesome, forget it and go on coding. We all are standing on the edge of the greatest space sim ever. Thanks for developing starmade.
    Its not just three stations.
    Ive lost at least 20 hours of actual work on three different ships probably way more hours, One of which, i spent the entire weekend building because i had the weekend off, simply because of this patch. We have ships not saving their progress, blueprints being corrupted on saving them, so even if you save a blueprint it may be corrupted. Ive got three blueprints that im really glad i uploaded to the online community because their blueprints are also corrupted now. And theres more people running into the same problem. Yes they didnt notice this in their testing, and i cant blame them for that, its a few people doing all the testing. And as shine said, theyve been dancing around the issue of making steam back the game up when it updates, so they are partially to blame for this.
     
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    DukeofRealms well said mate, stuff like this needs to be said. The frustrated/annoyed part of the community now have a job to do, start testing in dev build.

    We've been waiting for game features and its been looking like you've been stuck for awhile, and its good to see that others have noticed that the 2 week cycle isnt helping deadlines for you guys.
    2-3 month updates would be alot better

    I look forward to the testing document, will need some guidance to breaking stuff
     

    Gasboy

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    DukeofRealms well said mate, stuff like this needs to be said. The frustrated/annoyed part of the community now have a job to do, start testing in dev build.

    We've been waiting for game features and its been looking like you've been stuck for awhile, and its good to see that others have noticed that the 2 week cycle isnt helping deadlines for you guys.
    2-3 month updates would be alot better

    I look forward to the testing document, will need some guidance to breaking stuff
    It is the testing in dev build that's the most important part. They may want to increase the time in their dev cycle a bit, but it's us, the players who need to step up if we are serious when we say we love this game.
     

    Tunk

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    Yeah im getting reports of blueprints going balls up here as well as seeing some interesting behavior myself that I haven't had time to investigate.
    Folks saving blueprints of a turret and spawning it, only for it to be a different turret as a example.

    Personally I experienced something else weird last night, on a server with full perms on itself.
    I was testing some new weapon configurations on some targets.
    The targets AHP/SHP saved correctly, however the block damage was reverted to the entities undamaged state after a good hour of hits.
    This happened on ALL entities damaged, 6 targets in total.
    The testbed ship also underwent partial reversion (reconfigured between tests).
     
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    Yeah im getting reports of blueprints going balls up here as well as seeing some interesting behavior myself that I haven't had time to investigate.
    Folks saving blueprints of a turret and spawning it, only for it to be a different turret as a example.

    Personally I experienced something else weird last night, on a server with full perms on itself.
    I was testing some new weapon configurations on some targets.
    The targets AHP/SHP saved correctly, however the block damage was reverted to the entities undamaged state after a good hour of hits.
    This happened on ALL entities damaged, 6 targets in total.
    The testbed ship also underwent partial reversion (reconfigured between tests).
    Ive seen this too, except i got attacked by pirates in a frame. I teleported away, exited the game, turned off enemy spawns and came back to all the damage i had taken being reverted as if it never happened. Also my ship had warped back to where i got attacked.