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Star Shaped Bagel

A turn based shoot-em-up with a ship made of blocks stealing blocks. · By st33d

Bugs Sticky

A topic by st33d created May 19, 2018 Views: 821 Replies: 31
Viewing posts 1 to 17
Developer

Bugs come in two categories:

  1. Hard Bug. Doing X causes Y, every time. This is a reproducible bug. It could be a flaw in the code, or it could be a flaw in the design. But it can be addressed.
  2. Wild Bug. Something weird happened or the game crashed.  The best thing to do in this situation is not to come up with theories, the cause of the bug could have happened long ago, and we are only now catching up with the effect. What we need is data. A watch will be placed for future occurrences. Then we can look for patterns in that data and solve the problem.

I can't promise fast resolution, but rest assured I do want S.S.Bagel to be an exploding chess game where logic prevails. The data shall light the way.

Developer

Wild: Station reported missing on return, macguffin blocks were apparently still at large.

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Hard: Having 3 repair blocks repetitively repair a block that's taking 2 damage per round until it gets destroyed causes a variety of glitches.
The easiest way to replicate this is to have 3 repair blocks all adjacent to a gun that can backfire. The gun must be facing an open space. Then spawn an enemy fighter directly in front  of it and spam space until the gun is destroyed. You can do a multitude of things from here:

- Press space, crashing the game along with some graphical bugs

- Destroy the fighter, then spawn and dock any block in the spot where you had the gun; causing the new block to move around by a factor of 2.

Developer (1 edit)

Cheers. I assume the heal is performing necromancy. Will get on it.

* this is fixed

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Was playing around with the holo blocks in the pallette, placed a bunch of them and ran out of memory when I attached to them

once I get all 4 blocks attached nothing happens. I went to the station thingy at the start, with all 4 blocks attached directly to my core even, and nothing at all happened. The radio continued to point to more indestructible blocks, too.

Developer

Couldn't reproduce this but will keep an eye out. PS: you've triple-posted the same response.

Sorry, PTCL acting up.

Instant memory crash upon attaching a single holo block. Had not attached any other holo blocks before in the same run.

Developer

Can't reproduce in the browser version or in the dev environment. Marking as wild.

hard bugs with the tractor beam:

1: having an enemy use Gauss on any block attached to a tractor beam causes glitched connections.

2: When you have a power cell attached to a tractor beam and a Gauss cloud removes it, the detached power cell is glitched. 

Developer

Cheers. Looks like I’m missing a check to ignore gaussed tractor beam children. Will try to get a fix done and uploaded soon.

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Hard Bug

Magic

tractor beam is so broken

Developer

Cheers.

It's only a visual bug. There's no crash and the block still docks on the right side. The logic for the tractor beam needs a look at but I have to do a load of work on Six Match for GDPR. I'll try to fix this for the next update.

2 hard bugs:

Visual bug:  Having 2 diagonally adjacent rock/ bomb facs facing into the same empty space create a displaced "ghost" asteroid upon activating.

Lazer bug: having 2 Lazer guns (tractor beam or beam gun) with equal HP shoot each other,  the northern/eastern one will always survive. 

Developer

Cheers. The bomb fac is probably multiple push effects on one rock. The laser is odd - blocks execute in the order they were placed on the ship, will investigate. Should be able to fix for next update.

Developer

Tested the laser thing. I got it slightly wrong: It's the most recently added block that acts first. This was done to help the code remove blocks that killed themselves, but that was before I realised that some blocks tear the ship in two - it's safer to count the dead afterwards.

Looks like the laser is obeying attachment order so I'll have to call that one wild for now. Though this does make me wonder about which way the blocks should iterate. New blocks or old blocks first?

Astro-fac is behaving normally after I've added some more rules for pushing. Also putting an end to pushing a core block hit by gauss. It's amusing but it's gonna break stuff.

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Some Wild bugs I've come across:

- I started getting shot by an offscreen enemy with a beam gun. The beam was invisible for the first 2-3 moves, then was visible again.

- While fighting an enemy, I lost one of my indestructible blocks because power cell was destroyed (the block may have been gaussed, I wasn't paying attention). The block acted like a ghost block from one of my previous Bugs (had offset graphics) and the enemy could not push it. When I docked it back the bug was fixed.

- I degaussed an enemy's core and while it was running, it disappeared without any animation or sound. This may or may not have been me just not playing attention

Developer

Cheers. Added to my list for investigation.

Hard bugs and some suggestions:

1: Blue fighters will damage anything in their path if they have no target (including you)

2: You can see through Holo by mousing over it's blocks (I think Holo should just be re purposed; all it does is offer confusion to new players and waste time for experienced ones)

3: Enemy Nanites cannot stack, while yours can

(off topic: Nanites should have a lifespan similar to mines. They can be very annoying while looting an enemy who spammed them after battle and they make it super hard to get around. I also recommend adding the enemy core to the palette for bug testing)

Developer

1. Fighters fixed for next update.

2. I don't mind that you can use mouse to look through a holo, you still have to guess it's a holo - even though ship designs are currently too basic to hide it. I still find it interesting to fight against and can make use of the AI effect. I don't intend to have every block available in the full game, and this block is unlikely to make it into the opening selection. But I see no need to cut it.

3. The enemy nanites can stack, it just happens rarely. I've added a condition preventing clouds from moving into an area with a trigger already in it (bullets / clouds / fuel). This should make things clearer. Adding a time limit means natural clouds can't exist. Adding even more variants of clouds is confusing. If a way to shoo clouds around becomes available I will add it, but currently the code doesn't support this.

If there is a block that is not on the editor palette then it's because it's not a simple as clicking it into existence. If adding enemy ships at random become simple and definitely not the cause of a bug, I will add it.

Hard bug: if you have two blocks adjacent to two blocks of an enemy, it will put X's over your blocks and not allow you to move. This has happened twice with my core and gun blocks, forcing you to reload the page.

Developer

Cheers. Sounds like a crash, I'll get to work on a patch.

Developer

Okay, I've just tried to reproduce this and it's not crashing. Not in the browser or on my machine. And I can still move afterwards.

I'm probably misreading your directions. If you remember any more details or can reproduce it by opening the editor (press P) that would help a lot. I'll keep an eye out for anything like it for now.

yeah, now that i played more it stopped happening, maybe it was more of a wild bug than hard bug. but if it helps to replicate, i had two blocks (core and gun) and they were adjacent to the enemy (had core, block, and gun). i can't remember any more specifics.

Developer

No worries, have put a watch on it.

I cant find the worm gun?

Developer

Whoops. Forgot to add it to the upgrade list. I've uploaded a new build with it in.

I was playing around with the worm gun, then i had a rock eating worm kill me and the slow- motion death animation took an entire minute or even longer.

Developer

Cheers. No solid theories as to what could cause that but I'll investigate and see if I can put some safeguards around the slo-mo.

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Hard bug: Exploding rows of astro- bombs creates bullets that travel at higher speeds

Edit: Actually a wild bug. After exiting and reloading the game i cant get it to happen anymore