Welcome back everyone! Sorry the post is one day late (the bottom of this entry will give some sense about why). This fortnight we have another massive set of bugs whose fixing I would like to report (and another new release!), and this is indeed one of the largest bug-fix entries I’ve posted in quite a long time. One of the reasons for that will be clear when you read the end of the post, but for now the important thing is that I can – personally, at least – no longer find any crash or freeze bugs in the game! That’s pretty damned exciting, and while my pessimism tells me there’s probably another one or two hiding out there in some obscure corner of the game or some extremely unlikely edge-case of one of the generators, I’m really really pleased with how smooth the game’s feeling now, and how rare it is for the player to run into some major issue. All of this needs doing before the 0.11 release, of course, and all the bugs on the remaining bug list (still a good hundred or so) are not critical issues or anything close to it, but are more about detail and precision and making sure everything is working perfectly correctly, rather than fixing things that are working wildly incorrectly. As ever, a small number of these are more like improvements or polishes than bugs strictly speaking, but they’re in that same category of very small thing that needs adjusting and certainly wouldn’t deserve a larger engagement, so I tend to add those to these lists for ease and clarity. I also, as ever, must express my strongest appreciation for the bug report emails and messages I get – many submitters will recognise their bugs solved in the list below! But yes, here’s a huge list of bugs and minor polishes now implemented – and as ever, where it’s a realistic option, I’ve tried to make the list as amusing / entertaining to read as I possibly can – and I hope you all enjoy the read, and the new release that all this will shortly herald :). So, let’s get to it:
0.10.4d Bug-Fixes:
- Alcohol bottles now have a purchase price and a sale price that takes account of how much alcohol is actually in there, with empty bottles being worth almost nothing (to sell; you’d never find these for buying). As an aside, at some point I’ll need to adjust these into a generic “bottle” item category, and do away with canteens and just have everything in bottles whose content can be changed (as that’ll really increase functionality and add more interesting decision-making) – but that’s not a 0.11 issue.
- Ensured consistency in the selling prices of items regardless of their origin and home civilization, since it is now always 50% of the purchase price.
- You can now access the options menu while travelling on the world map, as well as while you are wandering around on foot.
- Shop stall terrain is now called “countertop” instead of “shop stall”, since that is far more accurate of the function it is serves across a range of places (including those which are not shops).
- The same mansion name can no longer generate twice in the same world, and therefore certainly not twice within the same civilization, as I once rather upsettingly noticed.
- You can now press ‘@’ to look at yourself while you’re on the travel screen, not just when you’re on foot in a map grid.
- Fixed a significant generator bug when an oasis spawned on the same tile as a road going through a desert – this now cannot happen, and roads overwrite oases and get rid of them in order to prevent some bizarre weirdness being created when you enter that map tile.
- Ensured that sedentary civilizations can only select shapes for their coinage that actually make sense and are at least decently and reasonably related to their overall shape aesthetic preference.
- Consuming any kind of one-off consumable item does now correctly delete the thing from your inventory (although this will be far more useful later on in development than now).
- Digging a hole beneath an item or pile of items lying on the ground now yields a logical message along the lines of “An item slides into the hole and rests at the bottom” or “A large number of items slide into the hole and rest at the bottom”, or whatever it might be.
- Made a major change to how conversations work, with the conversations no longer all being stored in the player object (this is insane, please don’t draw attention to this) and instead being stored in the NPCs, and each conversation you have with an NPC is now stored, and timestamped for future reference!
- Discovering a new location (nation, bioregion, etc) on foot, rather than only via the travel function, now correctly updates your journal with the relevant information.
- Purchasing or selling items no longer shows their weight or their size, since neither of those is a mechanic at the moment, nor is likely to become one (again) in the future.
- Fixed a crash bug where the game’s attempt to print a general message while walking around savannah wilderness would very rarely lead to disaster.
- Library names and great hall names correctly display on exterior signs as “The [name]” instead of just “[name]”, which reads much better in pretty much every circumstance.
- Adjusted some of the ancient languages in the 8×8, 10×10 and 12×12 tile sets to reflect some of the difficulties in generating those in-game in larger forms, and ensuring that all characters are genuinely distinct and identifiable.
- Improved and unified the keybindings for interacting with books and tablets (and by extension, later, scrolls, as well).
- The territory map on the sidebar no longer incorrectly displays elements of a city’s walls / outline in a way that the other map views do not (i.e. they all did it correctly already).
- The 12×12 font option is now correctly selected in the preferences list in the options menu if you open up the game with a monitor size large enough to handle it.
- Preferences in the options menu now definitely stay present when you close the game and then open it again (which is rather the point!).
- Fixed a crash bug which could very rarely trigger when spending time within an armoury in a military district within a city.
- The staves of fire held by some god statues (only one religion per world gen) now show one of a random selection of fire images instead of always the same one each tile you look at them, and the fires can be in different colours, too (not that that might ever find its way into a riddle generator, of course…).
- Fire staves also no longer interact in a slightly strange visual way with the statue’s plinth.
- Fixed yet another issue with city gates and the roads that lead out of them sometimes being weird – this is a classic case of ancient code I’m building on top of, thinking each time I’ll fix it, when it would (in hindsight) have been faster to wipe and reset – but I think this is now all resolved.
- The inventory list now instantly updates with the code / symbol you’ve added to a particular item whenever you have, indeed, added a code / symbol to your categorization of a particular item.
- Fixed a bug in the inventory where adding categorisations to some items would sometimes fail to properly expand the size of the inventory window to fit it in, dependent on what ranking (i.e. first, last, middle) in that inventory that problematic item in question happened to have.
- Fixed other issues in the inventory where wearing/unwearing something didn’t properly update the inventory, and other issues as well involving very inefficient – i.e. coded 10+ years ago – ways of handling the data more generally.
- Fixed a crash bug that triggered when entering – i.e. when generating – a particular mansion layout in an upper-class housing district.
- Ensured that a number of staircases with different coding to the others (these locate a staircase on the appropriate floor and change the players x and y coordinates to that staircase, rather than just moving the player directly up or down without changing the player’s x or y coordinates) always correctly deliver the player to where they should be.
- Ensured there is absolutely no way for two religions to have the same name, or indeed, anything close.
- Actual arrow characters are now used everywhere in the game instead of “v” or “^” in order to prevent any ambiguity about inputs and control scheme.
- Universities can no longer spawn in colonies until at least one university has spawned in a nation’s homeland, but others can indeed spawn in colonies if that’s where they show up – but the generator still leans towards the homeland.
- For reasons of formatting and visual presentation you can now categorize a given item (or later, memory) into eight total categories, after which the message “This surely can’t be relevant to any more riddles than that!” is displayed. I will later increase this to sixteen (the most possible for the user interface), but for 0.11, this will be already far beyond what is required.
- Wells in towns and cities now count as a blocking tile, since it was rather weird that you could just walk straight through them at present.
- Benches in towns can no longer spawn in places where it doesn’t really make sense for a casual, everyday, community thing like a bench to appear, e.g. inside the inner grounds of a lord’s mansion, or inside a military base, and so on.
- Opening your journal for the first time now adds a far more logical message into your journal about the opening of said journal.
- Updated the “converse” (“v”) function – the renamed “speak” (“s”) function, because I need to free up qwe, asd, and zxc, to be an alternative keypad – to correctly note that it is now “v”, not “s”, that will take you out of it.
- After ten years or so, the game does not quite literally freeze up for a moment when you look at an open portcullis / gate in a castle or an upper-class housing district. This has been on the list for… a while. I also noted in the process that this is another old graphic that needs updating, but I’ll deal with that later.
- Fixed another very long-running bug where trees meant to appear in a market district in a city would sometimes just appear as a single tile of road instead – the origin of this bug was incredibly obscure, but super satisfying to find and resolve.
- Fixed a bug where a particular and very fast sequence of key inputs would enable you to start reading a book you hadn’t yet even opened.
- Priests no longer say there are no relics in the religious building you’re in when there clearly are – although what they say instead is just a placeholder solution until I rework speech generation and conversation mechanics from the absolute foundations.
- Shopkeepers now always spawn right next to the stall inside their shop.
- Shopkeepers also stay next to their shop stall – though they will move “along” it, as it were, while just wandering or pacing inside their shop – instead of sometimes just wandering away. Another I’ve wanted to fix for ages.
- Weather is now more logically generated as a result of adding certain restrictions when you enter the proximity of certain terrain types (e.g. so if there is somehow a polar region not a million miles from a desert region, any snow will definitely fizzle out before you reach the sandy area).
- Fixed a crash bug where sometimes one element of an item couldn’t be properly read or understood by the game because, in my wisdom, I had inserted a ” ” where I shouldn’t have.
- Fixed a rare crash bug where random NPCs spawning and trying to hang out with another random NPC – who all spawn as part of making towns and cities and so on feel “alive” – would in incredibly rare circumstances match with an NPC in the middle of deleting themselves from existing, and thus, collapse into quantum uncertainty over what to do.
- Fixed a related rare crash bug involving the leader of a group of NPCs walking through a district (e.g. a priest being followed by a bunch of devotees) deleting themselves because they’re so far away from the player they can be safely despawned, and then their devotees freak out in uncertainty instead of also following their leader into the afterlife.
- Fixed a third and again related rare crash bug, again with handling NPCs who are in the process of deleting themselves from existence, and this time involving “important” NPCs (i.e. always tracked by the game) trying to find another important NPC to interact with, e.g. a guard finding the guard they’re meant to swap with when one goes off shift.
- Students on university campuses containing galleries will, indeed, sometimes go into that gallery.
- The floor beneath plinths containing relics in religious buildings and cathedrals is now consistent with the rest of the floor in that building, rather than just going off and doing its own zany thing.
- Improved how the game keeps track of what item you’re actually handling in your inventory at any given moment, which should now avoid a few niche but rather strange potential behaviours.
- Wooden trade goods – plates, boxes, etc – now actually look different across the three quality levels, which I somehow forgot to implement at the time of actually developing that generator.
- Fixed an issue with how a handful of items are described when picked up or dropped.
- When reading a book, the game now correctly removes the rest of the user interface instructions which are no longer relevant, and adds clear explanation of how to use the book, and how to return.
- Towns now have far more everyday shops in them, i.e. brewers, potters, carpenters, weavers, and mining equipment.
- Fixed a very rare crash bug when generating the colours of high-quality firearms.
- Upgraded the new options menu to use far more efficient code, and avoid getting into infinite recursions if you were to keep going into and out of the menu.
- Students at universities will now indeed sometimes go into halls of worship, rather than these being the only buildings on the campus that NPCs don’t actually go and out of.
- Addressed a really strange graphical bug with some of the boots that can generate – though this is just a fix for now, since I will be coming back to clothing generation later to update the weaker parts of it to the game’s modern visual quality.
- Fixed a freeze bug involving generating galleries on university campuses (in the “aesthetics”-focused civilizations that have them) sometimes having door information – needed to generate the interior – that wasn’t correct, and thus led to disaster.
- Using both doors to a gallery no longer leads to two quantum-overlapping copies of that same gallery existing.
- Fixed a crash bug with students at university very rarely losing their marbles and deciding they’re actually in a city, and trying to find a city gate. This is one of those bugs where I couldn’t find the cause, but addressing the effect was a trivial fix, so I sorted that instead.
- Universities in octagonal-shape-preference civilizations no longer spawn rather strange libraries with the doors and the signs in the opposite locations.
- Towns can no longer, in rare circumstances, spawn with an exact duplicate of the tavern in a second location, with the same people inside it.
- Added new minor variations within an eye colour, so “green” might be lighter or darker green for example, and also added new minor variations to the colour of the rest of a character’s eyes (ranging from white to pale grey), and to hair (darker and lighter variations within a single colour), and also some more minor variation in skin tone, all just to boost the overall variety higher – since it’s otherwise quite easy to talk to someone who looks eerily similar to your character.
- The journal no longer always uses a placeholder name for relics seen, and instead uses the actual name of the relic (whoops!) and correctly states what kind unique item the thing is (e.g. “religious relic” or “gemstone” or whatever).
- Fixed an issue with jails where the jailer’s desk and administrative area would sometimes spawn in a wall (or a wall would spawn on top, I’m not quite sure), leading to some very strange outcomes.
- Reliquaries no longer very rarely spawn in some very specific circumstances, even though we’ve transitioned to all relics being “out in the open” and simply immediately visible (because that’s more visually interesting, has more gameplay potential, and the reliquary visual generator is pretty meh).
- Payments for entering/leaving city districts in “planned economy” civilizations now definitely always work correctly, and definitely never charge you when you’re in your home nation.
- The journal can no longer tell you twice in quick succession that you left a place, without noting that you returned to or entered it previously (whoops!).
- Fixed – I think? – a crash bug when very rarely a generic NPC in a city would struggle to figure out what to do when they were considering perhaps one in a thousand road tiles that they might want to path towards.
- Pearl coins now look slightly more like actual pearl.
- Pearl coins also now have a rather attractive little luminescent shimmer, comparable to how pearls themselves (as objects) do/will look once they’re implemented as one possible ancient / tribal currency (the image generator is done, but they aren’t yet in-game objects).
- Fixed a significant crash bug where diplomats and ambassadors in city centres sometimes couldn’t find their embassy. This is another one of those where I really couldn’t find the cause and I’m really not sure why this only sometimes trigger (it’s something about the NPC’s civilization id somehow having become “False” instead of a number before handling this information), but the effect was a trivial fix and nothing else seems to be involved in this bug, so, the effect is now sorted by just adding in a new one-line piece of code that ensures their civilization id is correct.
- Using the options menu to change the font size no longer makes everything go completely nuts – this used to be the case, and then some minor changes I made broke it, and now it is back in place, and far more efficiently coded than the previous version.
- Jails can no longer very rarely generate with names that don’t make sense, e.g. “Ice Bulwark Prison” for a jail in the middle of a desert.
- Hopefully fixed a super-rare crash bug whose origin I cannot discern, but is something about NPCs who are meant to be walking on roads within city districts very very very rarely stepping off a road, but thinking they’re still on a road, and then checking for the road’s properties, and not finding anything – regardless of its origin, I’m pretty sure that this no longer causes a collapse.
- Fixed a very rare pathfinding bug where the road generation outside of a city could sometimes just “omit” a tile that should contain road, and leave a rather strange gap there instead. Another one where the cause is a mystery, but the solution is nicely trivial.
- Fixed a visual bug where bookmarks in books that have them had the wrong background colour for the pages underneath the bookmark.
- Fixed a visual bug that sometimes left some instructions text on the screen when the player exited the inventory menu in a particular way.
- It is now (very very very nearly completely) impossible for any policy to never appear even once in the game world, so we are > 99% guaranteed to always see prisons in at least one civilization, at least one imperial civilization, at least very one artistic civilization, and so forth (previously it was something like 90%).
- Fixed a visual bug with incorrect colouring on some of the religious vestment / robe styles (these are amongst the weaker remaining visuals in the game – they’re fine for now, but this needed resolving for 0.11 even if I do end up redoing them all at some point in the future).
- Fixed an issue with a momentary flickering visual of a black screen when going from one particular menu / screen into another one, rather than a completely smooth transition.
- Also adjusted the shading and contrast schemes for some of the generation of religious vestments, again just to make them look a little bit sharper for the 0.11 release (and beyond?).
- Dropping items in a stack now correctly and logically puts the last-dropped item on the top of the pile, rather than the first-dropped item.
- Made sure that priests in religious districts in nations with a lot of local religions do not sometimes vanish when you leave their area and then come back a long time later.
- Fixed a strange and rare crash bug where the opening message arriving in a location, telling you what you can see/hear and what directions you can see/hear those things from, would very occasionally not generate correctly.
- Fixed (I think?) a very strange elusive crash bug to do with pathfinding that happened in stables the military district of a city. I can’t reproduce it, anyway, and I’ve really tried hard to do so, so I think this one is sorted, until / unless I, or someone else, encounter it again.
- Fixed (I think?) a similarly elusive crash bug in religious districts – again, I cannot make it recreate itself, and I’ve resolved a ton of pathfinding and related bugs recently, so it looks like this one was covered in those other ones.
- Fixed yet another issue with roads and how they generate and appear in slums and graveyards.
- The game no longer wastes time redrawing faces at unnecessary times while you’re having a conversation.
- The game also no longer wastes time redrawing faces when you’re looking over the items of clothing and the like that someone has on them.
- Pressing “Enter” when you’re in your inventory, but without any item selected, no longer brings up the item coding / categorising menu, and thus avoids a few crashes that way.
- Fixed a crash bug in item generation when trying to make a certain set of items the correct colour, and I had brilliantly managed to mistype a very important word.
- Fixed a visual bug with the edges of some doors, i.e. where the door meets the frame, generating slightly incorrectly.
- Resolved a minor issue in how the description of deity statues got written into your journal after the first time you’ve seen the statue.
- Fixed a rare issue with one hairstyle in one exact scenario causing the game to crash.
- Towns can no longer spawn with two versions of the same shop type in rare circumstances.
- Browsing language pages in-game adds a user interface explanation of the required controls.
What Next?
And with all that done I will – of course – release a new version! 0.10.4d will soon be live on the downloads page, probably when I upload next fortnight’s post. I really wanted to get it there this week, but it has been such a flat-out sprint to reach a full one hundred bugs fixed, and it’s last thing at night now and I don’t want to delay posting this entry, there’s still plenty of debug stuff activated in the game, and I want to ensure it’s actually a polished and sensible release when it goes out, so I’ll be continuing work, and then releasing 0.10.4d in a fortnight, just before the holiday break. I’ve been focusing on bug-fixes for the last few months partly because they’re just incredibly important and have to be fixed for the 0.11 release whether I like it or not, but also because I’m sad to say that I’ve been dealing with some very hard health stuff in real life recently – although, touch wood, it seems to be looking up – and so my brain was really in the mood for doing lots of really small things in URR, rather than working on really big, demanding, new-feature things (like implementing keys, padlocks, riddles, etc, and all the other stuff whose generators are finished but not yet integrated into the game world). That latter type of big thing is very hard to find the sustained focus to deal with when there’s very big life stuff really preying on one’s mind, and so I’m just glad I’ve managed to find another productive and equally important way to spend the past month’s game dev hours instead. With that said though, in next fortnight’s update I will be heading back into new features, probably involving the proper implementation of keys, padlocks, and locked and open doors and chests. These are all major developments, and I’m excited to plunge into them now that my mind is slightly clearer of obfuscating rubbish. 0.11 isn’t quite going to be coming out in 2025 as I hoped, but 2026 is looking damned good at the moment, and 0.10.4d is already going to be by far the most stable release I’ve had out in a decade, and should make a fantastic foundation for finally bringing this all together. Thanks as ever for reading everyone, please do let me know your favourite bug in the comments, and I’ll see you all in a fortnight for an update back to core development features for 0.11, and the 0.10.4d release!