Race Conditions Resolved and Stability Improved
Hello everyone!
This week I worked hard, pretty much like every time, but I didn't do exactly what I had planned. Well actually I did, but I ended up doing a bit more than what was planned.
[h3]This Week's Recap[/h3]
Last week I told you about the constructive feedback I received to improve City Game Studio, so I got to work on it. First I fixed the few English mistakes in the translations. There must have been about thirty errors across more than 1700 entries. After this pass I think we should be good!
Since I was working on the English translations, I took the opportunity to make an adjustment regarding currencies. Or rather, how money is displayed in the game. You see, in French or in the vast majority of languages, the $ is displayed after the numbers. But in English it's the opposite. So I had to do a pass through the entire game codebase to make this change, and I took the opportunity to make it dynamic. Basically, I normalized the way the game displays money, which means that instead of having two formatting steps, one for the numbers and another to display the currency, there is now just one formatting step that does both in a single pass. And naturally this has a positive impact on performance. It's not much, but on weaker machines it should make a small difference.
Given that we're approaching March 9th, the date on which v1.26 will be released, I did a pass on your bug reports. And there were a few, notably one concerning the banker. Actually, when you sold your game engine while you were in the middle of updating it, your employees would end up stuck working on an engine that no longer existed. Well, that's fixed.
Another problem concerns emails. The new notification that lets you open the game engine panel had a bug. Actually, if you only had that notification in your email inbox, the inbox was supposed to close and be replaced by the game engine panel. Except since the game is already displaying the game engine panel, there's a security mechanism that prevents closing the inbox. Which means the inbox would get stuck and could only be closed by pressing the Escape key. Well, this bug has been fixed, but on top of that it also fixed other bugs of the same kind, involving race conditions. Which means you should no longer have panels that stay frozen and can't be closed. It was fairly complex to resolve, but in the end it makes the game much more stable.
Oh, and I reworked the background of small studios a bit. I felt like it, I wanted you to have scenery that makes you want to dive into City Game Studio. So I hope this little change will please you. It's very visual especially compared to the other changes.
[h3]What's Coming[/h3]
As I was saying, we're approaching the v1.26 release, so I won't be adding new features, but mainly fixing bugs. Either bugs that prevent you from playing, or user experience bugs, like adding filters on certain components.
In any case, I still have plenty of tests to run. Given the changes this version contains, I'll have to test on lots of different machines, and that's what's going to keep me busy during the coming week.
Well, that's already it, thank you for reading me,
See you next week
In the meantime take care of yourselves
Xavier aka Binogure
This week I worked hard, pretty much like every time, but I didn't do exactly what I had planned. Well actually I did, but I ended up doing a bit more than what was planned.
[h3]This Week's Recap[/h3]
Last week I told you about the constructive feedback I received to improve City Game Studio, so I got to work on it. First I fixed the few English mistakes in the translations. There must have been about thirty errors across more than 1700 entries. After this pass I think we should be good!
Since I was working on the English translations, I took the opportunity to make an adjustment regarding currencies. Or rather, how money is displayed in the game. You see, in French or in the vast majority of languages, the $ is displayed after the numbers. But in English it's the opposite. So I had to do a pass through the entire game codebase to make this change, and I took the opportunity to make it dynamic. Basically, I normalized the way the game displays money, which means that instead of having two formatting steps, one for the numbers and another to display the currency, there is now just one formatting step that does both in a single pass. And naturally this has a positive impact on performance. It's not much, but on weaker machines it should make a small difference.
Given that we're approaching March 9th, the date on which v1.26 will be released, I did a pass on your bug reports. And there were a few, notably one concerning the banker. Actually, when you sold your game engine while you were in the middle of updating it, your employees would end up stuck working on an engine that no longer existed. Well, that's fixed.
Another problem concerns emails. The new notification that lets you open the game engine panel had a bug. Actually, if you only had that notification in your email inbox, the inbox was supposed to close and be replaced by the game engine panel. Except since the game is already displaying the game engine panel, there's a security mechanism that prevents closing the inbox. Which means the inbox would get stuck and could only be closed by pressing the Escape key. Well, this bug has been fixed, but on top of that it also fixed other bugs of the same kind, involving race conditions. Which means you should no longer have panels that stay frozen and can't be closed. It was fairly complex to resolve, but in the end it makes the game much more stable.
Oh, and I reworked the background of small studios a bit. I felt like it, I wanted you to have scenery that makes you want to dive into City Game Studio. So I hope this little change will please you. It's very visual especially compared to the other changes.
[h3]What's Coming[/h3]
As I was saying, we're approaching the v1.26 release, so I won't be adding new features, but mainly fixing bugs. Either bugs that prevent you from playing, or user experience bugs, like adding filters on certain components.
In any case, I still have plenty of tests to run. Given the changes this version contains, I'll have to test on lots of different machines, and that's what's going to keep me busy during the coming week.
Well, that's already it, thank you for reading me,
See you next week
In the meantime take care of yourselves
Xavier aka Binogure