TWO OUT OF THREE AIN’T BAD
by Hazed
This week’s technical news: Alan has fixed another long-standing bug; one of the bugs he thought he had fixed was not quite dead but is now; and he is still searching out the cause of the crashes.
Production Freeze Bug Fixed
For a long time there has been a strange and mysterious bug that caused production to freeze on some commodities. Players would report the bug to us from time to time but nobody could figure out why it happened sometimes, and not others.
Until now.
Thanks to some detective work by Munabilo, and his very thorough bug report, Alan was able to figure out what was going wrong.
What Munabilo identified was the exact circumstances which would make production freeze. Those circumstances were: If a commodity’s efficiency is below 100%, and somebody was standing in the planet’s exchange, then production/consumption would stop. Since the most common cause of low efficiency on commodities was the lack of housing builds on promotion to resource level, that explains why most reports of the bug were concentrated on the promotion being the cause.
Once Alan was able to duplicate the bug, he found it easy to figure out where the problem was and to fix it. The explanation is technical and is to do with the efficiency calculation being rounded down to zero. The fix will go in at Sunday’s reset.
Many thanks to Munabilo for his detective work.
Buying Shares in Businesses
Alan thought he had fixed the bug that was preventing Financiers from buying shares in businesses, but apparently not. We had a report that all was still not well with the ‘BID’ command. He found the continuing problem and it should be working now.
Outstanding Issue
Meanwhile, things are still frustrating in Fed DataSpace as the crashes continue. Alan is working on finding out why they haven’t stopped yet. Meanwhile he’s turned off the new player account creation again so assuming the crashes are caused by continuing issues with new accounts, this should stop the instability while he continues to work on the underlying cause.
If you have any losses because of the crashes then please talk to Hazed in the game and ask for compensation, or send some email to feedback@ibgames.com (don’t forget to put Fed2 in the subject line.)
