Good news!

Lots more bug-fixes this week, and I now cannot find a crash bug anywhere! I’ve spent many, many hours this week doing everything I can think of doing within the game world, and it has been a long time now since I’ve run into a bug from talking to people, moving around, looking at things, saving/loading areas, generating the world, etc. This means a bunch more bugs have been fixed. Specifically:

  • Fixed a crash bug where taverns in far-off lands were unable to correctly list appropriate the drinks they have for sale.
  • Fixed a bug in some churches where a single tile of wall would not generate where it should, and thus you were able to wander outside of the church’s map and into the unknowable void beyond the map itself…
  • Fixed a major new bug I discovered where moving out of an area that contains NPCs (e.g. a town or a city) into an area of the wilderness would almost immediately produce a crash, because the game was still trying to handle the NPCs in the previous map grid. This has now been resolved, and you should be able to wander around the wilderness to your heart’s content (although given that nothing new in this version is in the wilderness, I probably wouldn’t recommend it).
  • Fixed a freeze bug involving the game being unable to place a city for a particular feudal civilization during world generation.
  • Fixed – again, and I think for good this time – the problem with monasteries spawning in strange places, such as in the middle of cities, and then being completely inaccessible because no city gates lead to them and the monks are thus forever trapped and cut-off from the outside world, impossible to observe. (If a monk reads a book but nobody sees it happen, was anything learned?).
  • Something weird is going on with picking up and dropping objects not working correctly and not registering the movement of the items, but since the only things right now to pick up and drop are clothes – and I don’t anticipate the player doing this – I’ve just disabled pickup/drop commands for the time being.
  • Fixed another sort-of freeze bug where things would go a bit peculiar when you were trying to examine an item of clothing in particular circumstances.
  • Fixed a crash bug involving discussing religious artefacts with certain priests who weren’t able to figure out whether or not they kept any in their religious buildings.
  • Fixed a crash bug with moving in and out of a dock in a town in a way the game wasn’t sure how to handle.
  • Fixed a sort-of freeze bug with the player being unable to leave a building if NPCs in and outside that building had a particular spatial distribution that blocked all possible routes.

However: bad news :(.

It turns out the Windows 10 fix I thought I’d found… is only working on my Win 10 system. I’ve sent it to a few people with Win 10 computers (some of whom even have Python installed) and none of them can get it working. This must have something to do with some stuff that needs to be packaged with the download not being packaged with the download; this is a real pain as there’s no obvious error log which tells me what’s missing.

So it seems this is what it comes down to – the final hurdle. Let me stress at this point how far we’ve come in this last month or so: as of today’s update, I am calling 0.8 done! Everything works and nothing crashes. I just need to figure out what the problem is preventing the executable – which works completely fine on my Win 10 laptop – from consistently booting up on Windows 10 machines. I’m going to try a bunch of other bundling options with some other files included in the package which I wasn’t previously putting in there, and then if that doesn’t work, I’ll shift from py2exe to PyInstaller and try that instead (since apparently PyInstaller is better with 2.7?), but I do find these technical / hardware elements of programming very challenging compared to the actual game development stuff.

I’ll get onto this in the next week, and hopefully this’ll fix the issue – but I don’t know how challenging a problem this is going to be. This next week is also likely to be a very busy one for me in evenings as well as in the day, as a major grant deadline is coming up I have to prioritise – but I promised weekly updates until release, and you’ll see another update next weekend no matter what. So: more soon!

21 Comments

  • Great news! I just wanted to say that I am using Windows 10 and have never encountered a single bug in 0.7. I’ve been playing it from time to time since this spring and the game crashed only once.

    • Hi! Can I ask you which version of Windows 10 are you using? Both the release number and if it is 32 or 64 bits. I tried several 64 bits version and URR 0.7 never starts for me, it simply hangs before opening any window. I only got it to work on Linux using Wine emulating a 32 bit Windows version.

      • Hello there! Sure thing – I am using Lenovo V110 with Windows 10, 64 bits, version 1803. I have successfully installed and played all of the URR versions I could find – 0.1.2.c, 0.1.3.b, 0.3.1.c, 0.6.0, 0.7.0.b. I have encounter only a single crash a few months back with 0.7.0.b. Otherwise it works perfectly fine. Hope that helps 😉

        • Interesting, I haven’t had any issues either with Windows 10, come to think of it. I’ve emailed Mark about this.

        • Hmmm… so it probably stopped working with the more recent versions, somewhere between 1803 and an update last year… ?
          I suspect it might be something that was bundled with the older versions then that isn’t working anymore. Luckily the new build does work (but it’s not including some mystery piece, from what Mark said)

          • Yeah, this was about the time I started getting bug reports about this! 0.7 worked fine on Win 10 for years, but about a year ago I started getting comments about it not working on Win 10. Gah!!

      • Hey Roberto. For what it’s worth, I’m trying to compile on 10.0.17763, apparently, on Windows 10 Enterprise, and x64. Anything there stand out? Thank you for that data, also – perhaps it is a 64-bit issue somehow… (the original machine I made URR on was a 32-bit, but I have 64-bit Python 2.7 and 64-bit libtcod installed on this machine.)

  • Hey Mark, I’ve had luck using cx_freeze to generate an exe & installer for a Python3 project at work.
    You might run into similar issues trying to make sure you have all your packages included if you don’t spell them out in the setup file, but I think it should complain if you’re missing anything.
    I’d be willing to see if I can get it to work.

    • Thanks for this Josh! cx_freeze is one I have my eye on for trying out. I also appreciate the offer and will let you know!

  • That’s so exciting to hear! Can’t wait to play the new version 🙂
    Congratulations on the amazing job, Mark! I’m sure you will figure out that last bug in no time.

  • Hi Mark – there’s a Windows utility called Depends which will automatically detect missing dll dependencies, which might help you out? Not sure if that’s what’s blocking the Win10 progress or not though.
    Let me know if you’d like some help debugging, I’ve been making games for a long time and I even worked on the Windows OS back in the Win 2000 days.
    I am really looking forward to the 0.8.0 release! So happy to hear your incredible results recently!

    • Mike, thank you so much for this message and the kind words. That sounds amazingly helpful, I’ll be sure to give that a shot!

  • Hiya Mark – I’m replying to my own comment that’s still pending. I took the liberty of running the dependency walker on 0.7.0, and I noticed that the URR .exe file is x86, while the linked dll dependencies are x64. That is a very likely cause of the failures to launch. Just thought I’d let you know!

    • Hello (again) Mike – woah! Okay, that’s interesting! And very promising. Errrrr… you are going to have to forgive my shocking lack of technical knowledge about these things, but how do I fix that? Can I force the .exe to be x64? I see there’s a 32-bit version of Python 2.7 and py2exe; I’m going to try installing those and compiling with that, and we’ll see what happens. (This is where it really shows that I’m not a computer scientist!)

  • Yes!! I am so glad that it is practically finished! Thank you so much for all your hard work Mark! I look forward to seeing what projects you (may) do next! Once again, thank you for creating such an extensive and in-depth game.

    • Thanks Sam! I seriously appreciate the comment. There are other ideas, but we’ll get 0.8 out first and then go from there. Thanks so much again for the kind words :).

  • Windows updates, speaking as an IT manager, have broken a LOT of stuff in the last six months. I spend half my week fixing endpoints that Microsoft broke compatibility with things. They have released a lot of bad updates lately, far more so than normal. You may be running into this.

    You might be able to trouble shoot some by looking in the windows Event Viewer and looking for errors in the system or application logs. It’ll give you an Event ID that might narrow down what service/library or feature might be connected with the crash… assuming said crash is actually flagging as an event, or course. Worth a shot.

    • Hi Jonathon – this is interesting! Event Viewer is something I hadn’t considered, I’ll be sure to give that a shot. This week has been a mega-work-week and sadly I’m only now (at the weekend) getting to do some research on this, but I’ll have an update tomorrow regardless.

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