Catan Universe News

Hi Catanians,

In this week's developer update, we want to focus on how you can reach out to us to get assistance. And shed some light on the issues we are currently facing which are hindering this week's release of a client update.

Last Week Jan 23rd - Jan 29th

Our dev team is closing in on the underlying issue of the host switching system, which causes many of the issues in multiplayer you experience once one player leaves a match. In short, the host of a game is making sure the game is progressing in order. If there is an issue with the host switch, you can see games getting stalled or the A.I. not responding. This also can affect the display of trades or the ability to trade in the game.

To resolve these issues, the host switch is getting rewritten to work properly with the new backend in several edge-case scenarios. This also affects the clients' behavior when it comes to reconnecting to games in general, an issue that we’ve been working on optimizing in the last weeks. Both topics are interconnected and depend heavily on each other.

This Week Jan 30th - Feb 5th

Right now it is our plan to create a combination of improvements we mentioned above to have a more substantial impact on your experience with online games. Unfortunately, this means that we will need more time before we can release since as described above there are a lot of dependencies and even more test cases to go through. As we tested, we still found issues, e.g. when the turn timer runs out while a player is reconnecting to a game, and we will address these first before the release.

We increased our efforts to get in touch with our Catanians directly on Discord to help out with individual issues. We want to encourage everyone to reach out to us there and we will do our best to resolve issues and collect feedback via this channel. We want to thank any Catanian who already made use of our Discord Server to get in touch with us since your feedback already is helping us immensely.

https://discord.gg/catanuniverse

Hi Catanians,

In this is weekly development update VIII we will update you on the state of the next update and what we are further working on.

Last week, Jan 16th. - Jan. 22nd
We released a backend update to tackle some custom match and account migration issues on January 17th. After checking the extended logs, we can see that this resolved some of the related issues. Nevertheless, we will need to address others in another backend update as well as in the client update shortly.
The client update has made good progress, as we could mark several key issues with reconnection as resolved internally. However, we will need at least one additional internal test-build to fix remaining edge-cases before we can publish.

This week, Jan 23rd - Jan. 29th
We continue QA focus on the next internal version of the client update for internal testing.
While QA and the development team are working on this, we have identified several key issues that we will address next. As we cannot reproduce some of these issues here, we kindly ask those affected for additional info via our Discord channel:

- Game closing/freezing for some players after placing the first settlement of a game:
We cannot reproduce this here, but some players reported that clearing their cache (on PC) resolved the issue for them. If this is related to corrupt cached data, re-installing the app on mobile should resolve this as well. We would appreciate if affected users could let us know if this is the case.

- Custom Match Issue “Could not create lobby due to an error”
The backend updated resolved a custom match issue that caused players not being displayed in the custom match lobby properly. However, some accounts get the error message above immediately when selecting custom match mode. We are actively investigating this issue. As of now, we believe it is tied to account migration. You can tell us on discord, if your account is also affected by this problem.

- Some accounts still could not migrate to the new backend
We will add further logging in the next backend update to get to the root of this complex issue. We have several leads on this and will continue refining the migration process until this is resolved for all. In the meantime if you are affected, please contact our support team and we will try to find an alternative solution for you!

Hi Catanains,

In this is weekly development update VII we have some news to share on a backend update we just deployed on January 17th and how the next client update is progressing.

Last week, Jan 9th. - Jan. 15th
As we outlined, our QA team tested the changes made to the clients and backend in an internal test. Our focus of this update is reconnect-handling when one or more of the clients disconnect, as issues here can cause consequential errors. We saw significant improvements in this regard, but identified a related mobile caching issue that we need to tackle at the same time. Therefore, we need to build a new client update for internal testing first.

We also revisited account migration and tested a fix, which should help most of the remaining accounts to finally migrate to our new database properly. We furthermore added additional logging to this system to catch remaining issues.

On top of this, our team investigated and identified certain account status settings that affected matchmaking issues for Auto- and Custom-Matches. A backend fix for this was tested and released.

This week, Jan 16th- Jan. 22nd
We continued testing the backend update for account migration optimization and additional logging as well as matchmaking fixes on Monday. Feedback from our users confirmed our suspicion that the matchmaking issue in custom matches WAS related to player avatar customization. Thank you for your detailed feedback!

This backend updated was rolled out this Tuesday afternoon (CET), January 17th.
Focus for the rest of his week is to finalize the next internal version of the client update for internal testing. As soon as we can confirm it is all working as intended, we can schedule a release as soon as possible.

Hi Catanains,

In this is weekly development update VII we have some news to share on a backend update we just deployed on January 17th and how the next client update is progressing.

Last week, Jan 9th. - Jan. 15th
As we outlined, our QA team tested the changes made to the clients and backend in an internal test. Our focus of this update is reconnect-handling when one or more of the clients disconnect, as issues here can cause consequential errors. We saw significant improvements in this regard, but identified a related mobile caching issue that we need to tackle at the same time. Therefore, we need to build a new client update for internal testing first.

We also revisited account migration and tested a fix, which should help most of the remaining accounts to finally migrate to our new database properly. We furthermore added additional logging to this system to catch remaining issues.

On top of this, our team investigated and identified certain account status settings that affected matchmaking issues for Auto- and Custom-Matches. A backend fix for this was tested and released.

This week, Jan 16th- Jan. 22nd
We continued testing the backend update for account migration optimization and additional logging as well as matchmaking fixes on Monday. Feedback from our users confirmed our suspicion that the matchmaking issue in custom matches WAS related to player avatar customization. Thank you for your detailed feedback!

This backend updated was rolled out this Tuesday afternoon (CET), January 17th.
Focus for the rest of his week is to finalize the next internal version of the client update for internal testing. As soon as we can confirm it is all working as intended, we can schedule a release as soon as possible.

Hi Catanains,

in our Dev update VI we want to talk about how we are currently addressing the most reported issues.

Week Jan. 2nd - Jan. 8th

Our team did resolve a remaining issue with the database that involved game sessions to create a huge workload on the servers even after all clients closed that game session. We are seeing a steady and good performance of the servers since then.

Our team also started to work on client updates that will focus on reconnecting to games as well as how the game detects if a player is offline or online.

Week Jan 9th. - Jan. 15th

Our QA team is currently testing the changes made to the clients in an internal test. Our focus is to resolve issues with games not proceeding properly after one or more of the clients did disconnect. We are also focussing on improving how gracefully a client can reconnect to a game after a short disconnect.

We also took another look at our account migration and are currently testing a fix there which should help the remaining accounts to finally migrate to our new database. We will let you know once this fix has been added to the servers.

On top of this, our team is currently looking into a possible connection between certain accounts and matchmaking issues for Auto- and Custommatches. These investigations only started yesterday. That is why we can´t present any conclusions yet but we will be able to give more info on that in next week's Developer Update.

As you can see our team is currently tackling the biggest issues and we are looking forward to releasing a new client after we tested the changes successfully. Please keep in mind that testing changes on those important functions takes some time. Once testing is finished we will let you know when to expect the rollout of the update.