This week all our programmers gathered together to take apart Crest's code piece by piece to find what's causing the random crashes. We finally did! But the journey there was rather adventurous as you'll find out below.
Full notes
Full Crest - an indirect god sim update
Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.
What changed
1 fix1 addition1 change0 removals
Performance
changedThis week all our programmers gathered together to take apart Crest's code piece by piece to find what's causing the random crashes. We finally did! But the journey there was rather adventurous as you'll find out below.
addedCommunityWe dropped the price of Crest to $9.99 this week and started what is definitely not a cult. Find out more about The Inner Circle . We will have a new patch next week but want to make sure first that everything is running flawlessly before we publish it. A good thing about all the debugging is, that we've been able to polish a lot of the code while hunting for the cause of the crashes.
fixedCodeJohannes This week all programmers including myself have been trying to fix the crash that keeps happening after playing the game for a while. After working on it for a few days, we managed to fix a few major bugs having to do with object pooling, but the crash was still happening. We finally realized that the crash started happening when we upgraded to Unity 2017.3. We tried going back 5.6 which is the last version we used before upgrading, and the crash was gone. I tried a few versions and figured out that 2017.1 is the last version where the crash isn't happening, so that's what we've downgraded to now. A very frustrating realization, but this weeks efforts have all been worth it anyway. We've fixed a lot of memory issues, and built some tools to help us catch problems faster in the future. Jens The name of the game this week has been debugging, debugging, and more debugging, and its been a journey I can tell you. The crashes have been our top priority and I have looked at more crash logs this week than I think I've done in my lifetime. At first we could only narrow it down to being a memory issue, the crashes would occur at any place in the code where new objects where created. This lead us to believe that somewhere a loop might be creating a lot of objects during the same frame, but after some testing that didn't seem to be an issue. Looking at the memory usage over time showed a slow increase, building over time. This suggests a memory leak was occuring somewhere. So we started to look for references in static instances that was possibly keeping objects from being garbage collected. When we actually found some cases of this in our pooling of objects, we were feeling hopeful that fixing them would solve the crashes. But nope... Still crashes after a few minutes. In a last effort we went back to the engine version where the game wasn't crashing, and lo and behold, no crashes! Apparently, there is a problem in our current engine version of Unity. In the end, we did fix a lot of issues in our own code so the time spent was definitely worth it, and now I can finally go back to working on completing the features in the game. Johannes W I completed fixing the bug where followers are overperforming and I made a change in the game mechanics. Each follower's action, like farming, picking berries,
Crest - an indirect god sim changes
changedThis week all our programmers gathered together to take apart Crest's code piece by piece to find what's causing the random crashes. We finally did! But the journey there was rather adventurous as you'll find out below.
addedWe dropped the price of Crest to $9.99 this week and started what is definitely not a cult. Find out more about The Inner Circle . We will have a new patch next week but want to make sure first that everything is running flawlessly before we publish it. A good thing about all the debugging is, that we've been able to polish a lot of the code while hunting for the cause of the crashes.
fixedJohannes This week all programmers including myself have been trying to fix the crash that keeps happening after playing the game for a while. After working on it for a few days, we managed to fix a few major bugs having to do with object pooling, but the crash was still happening. We finally realized that the crash started happening when we upgraded to Unity 2017.3. We tried going back 5.6 which is the last version we used before upgrading, and the crash was gone. I tried a few versions and figured out that 2017.1 is the last version where the crash isn't happening, so that's what we've downgraded to now. A very frustrating realization, but this weeks efforts have all been worth it anyway. We've fixed a lot of memory issues, and built some tools to help us catch problems faster in the future. Jens The name of the game this week has been debugging, debugging, and more debugging, and its been a journey I can tell you. The crashes have been our top priority and I have looked at more crash logs this week than I think I've done in my lifetime. At first we could only narrow it down to being a memory issue, the crashes would occur at any place in the code where new objects where created. This lead us to believe that somewhere a loop might be creating a lot of objects during the same frame, but after some testing that didn't seem to be an issue. Looking at the memory usage over time showed a slow increase, building over time. This suggests a memory leak was occuring somewhere. So we started to look for references in static instances that was possibly keeping objects from being garbage collected. When we actually found some cases of this in our pooling of objects, we were feeling hopeful that fixing them would solve the crashes. But nope... Still crashes after a few minutes. In a last effort we went back to the engine version where the game wasn't crashing, and lo and behold, no crashes! Apparently, there is a problem in our current engine version of Unity. In the end, we did fix a lot of issues in our own code so the time spent was definitely worth it, and now I can finally go back to working on completing the features in the game. Johannes W I completed fixing the bug where followers are overperforming and I made a change in the game mechanics. Each follower's action, like farming, picking berries,
This week all our programmers gathered together to take apart Crest's code piece by piece to find what's causing the random crashes. We finally did! But the journey there was rather adventurous as you'll find out below.
Community
We dropped the price of Crest to $9.99 this week and started what is definitely not a cult. Find out more about The Inner Circle . We will have a new patch next week but want to make sure first that everything is running flawlessly before we publish it. A good thing about all the debugging is, that we've been able to polish a lot of the code while hunting for the cause of the crashes.
Art
Martin Look, I'm sorry that my blog posts have been so cryptic for a while but that changes soon. Here's a last tease of what I'm doing.
Code
Johannes This week all programmers including myself have been trying to fix the crash that keeps happening after playing the game for a while. After working on it for a few days, we managed to fix a few major bugs having to do with object pooling, but the crash was still happening. We finally realized that the crash started happening when we upgraded to Unity 2017.3. We tried going back 5.6 which is the last version we used before upgrading, and the crash was gone. I tried a few versions and figured out that 2017.1 is the last version where the crash isn't happening, so that's what we've downgraded to now. A very frustrating realization, but this weeks efforts have all been worth it anyway. We've fixed a lot of memory issues, and built some tools to help us catch problems faster in the future. Jens The name of the game this week has been debugging, debugging, and more debugging, and its been a journey I can tell you. The crashes have been our top priority and I have looked at more crash logs this week than I think I've done in my lifetime. At first we could only narrow it down to being a memory issue, the crashes would occur at any place in the code where new objects where created. This lead us to believe that somewhere a loop might be creating a lot of objects during the same frame, but after some testing that didn't seem to be an issue. Looking at the memory usage over time showed a slow increase, building over time. This suggests a memory leak was occuring somewhere. So we started to look for references in static instances that was possibly keeping objects from being garbage collected. When we actually found some cases of this in our pooling of objects, we were feeling hopeful that fixing them would solve the crashes. But nope... Still crashes after a few minutes. In a last effort we went back to the engine version where the game wasn't crashing, and lo and behold, no crashes! Apparently, there is a problem in our current engine version of Unity. In the end, we did fix a lot of issues in our own code so the time spent was definitely worth it, and now I can finally go back to working on completing the features in the game. Johannes W I completed fixing the bug where followers are overperforming and I made a change in the game mechanics. Each follower's action, like farming, picking berries,
