ABD: A Beautiful Day
Patch #82: I think I have the server issue whipped.
Obviously, I did not find the issue, only made it work longer until the issue arises :(
Back to the programming trench.
#endedit
I can't say for sure, being that I have only tested it for 2 hours, but I think I finally got this nasty server crash issue whipped. Also, the code changes resulted in cutting the CPU usage on the server in half. How is that for optimization? The patch is now available.
Many lines of code were harmed making this update...
Dev Blog - 8/19/15 - Launch Week, +2-3 more Programmers, and Fan Swag!
We've had a pretty rocky launch, our server has been having issues and we are pretty stressed out! We had anticipated issues during launch week as early as four months ago, and we have a development timeline in the main description of the game. Long story short, the first two weeks are our stabilization period, which we will use to maximize coverage on low-mid-high range gaming rigs and ensure both the server and game services are kept operational on a 24/7/365 basis.
Although it has been rough, we are very close to the solution and we will be bringing on 2-3 additional programmers as new hires to help us ensure that nothing will go wrong! Also, these new programmers are in the West-EU, East-EU, and Asian Peninsula so we will have round the clock improvements being made to the code. What does that mean? We are taking a highly aggressive approach to solving our launch woes, and once those woes are gone, we'll be swimming in the most bug-free gaming environment possible. Instead of having 25-30 hours programming per week being done, we will have 80-120 hours per week of improvements being made at every major timezone on Earth. Thats right, we're moving into a global job provider.
Fan Swag:
Alright, everyone here has been absolutely amazing. So understanding, so helpful, and we've even gotten some epic user created content! In lieu of everyone's patience, we will be offering our current players (AND future players, up to the 30th of August) the ABD: Legacy Edition when we can get that pushed out on the 29th of August 2015.
What is the ABD: Legacy Edition?
-Free Expansions for life.
-Free DLC for life.
-Free Clothing Accessories & Aesthetic/Cosmetic DLC for life.
-Access to exclusive content / features.
-Special ingame items.
-Special Legacy Edition Holiday Content.
-Your name *Ingame, real name, or otherwise specified* on the upcoming monument, "Wall of Heroes".
Q.) How much will it cost to people past the 29th?
A.) $60
Q.) That's a lot for an Early Access title!
A.) You will be backing (without gaining advantage in a Pay-To-Win format) the development team and the game in our early stages, getting access to additional content, and having the ability to gloat to your friends when you see what we've really got in store.
Q.) Why?
A.) The Legacy Edition of ABD: A Beautiful Day supports the dev team, and will give you access to our upcoming expansions. Each expansion is geared past Tier 12, or roughly 245 B.C.E. when the Ancient Roman Empire was in its initial stages of forming into the incredible European powerhouse in later years.
Here are the following expansions planned for the ABD: Legacy Edition:
Future expansions include, are not limited to, and may change or increase:
ABD: The Mesopotamian Expansion
ABD: The African Expansion
ABD: The Asian Expansion
ABD: The European Expansion
ABD: The Dark Age
ABD: The Iron Age
ABD: The Middle Age
ABD: The Renaissance
ABD: The Age of Enlightenment
ABD: Western Civilization
ABD: The Industrial Revolution
ABD: The Wild West
ABD: The Great Wars
ABD: The Death of a Star
Future DLC includes:
(Most will be free.)
(Will be updated and added upon over time.)
-Aesthetic/Cosmetic clothing.
-Backpacks, Bags, and Custom Gear.
-Artists Commitment (top secret).
-Names, Places, and Things: All Things Noun.
-Many more, (you decide where we go!)
----
We are aware of the Pay-2-Win model, but I can assure you as a Bachelor level Game Designer and Veteran, this is not going to happen. I take great pride in my work, both on the design side and on the business ethics end of things. I spend a lot of time looking through and analyzing game mechanics, specializing in logic based fixes and improvements to ensure the most rock steady solution possible. A great number of items are planned for the game, most of which will be inclusive with the base version of the game. I would like to open up as many possibilities as I can for ABD, and stretch our sales as far as possible without considering things like MMO Subscriptions, the Dark Side to Game Design (Pay-2-Win, Addiction Based Gameplay "ABG Algorithms") and other cheap tactics.
There is a point where we, unless we just make mad sales and can fully operate on everything above, have to consider the distant future of the game. By going with expansions and cosmetic DLC, we will be keeping in mind that they will be non-intrusive, non-required-to-continue, and ethical to the standard practices of a responsible game developer. So no, you won't see DOTA2 looking marketplaces spammed all over the game in a few months time, or even ten years. Will you be able to buy furry pink backpacks and items requested by our users? Very possible, we have to see where you guys and gals take us with ABD: A Beautiful Day.
Thank you for your time, your energy, your understanding, and I am absolutely beside myself with excitement from all the chatter going on! I will be in the Group Chat Room for the game if you have any questions, as I usually am, and Boris is also there during waking hours, so see you soon!
-Robert Bonner
Creative Producer - ABD
G.A.M. Entertainment, LLC.
www.GagAMaggotEnt.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtewSF1jqHRmdrP-uEDQ76Q/about?view_as=public
IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/a-beautiful-day
Facebook: www.facebook.com/gagamaggotentertainment
Twitter: www.twitter.com/gam_ent
PS: Don't forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook!
PPS: Check out the community hub for our fan artwork and videos! We've got some of our first fan art coming in, and it is very impressive!
Server Downtime Issue
Server is down, a notice will be sent when it is back up
#endedit
60 hours. That is how long the server lasted without a crash or error in the stress test that I put it through before launching on Early Access.
15 minutes. That is the average of how long the server stays up now, before hanging with no bug report or error.
Tomorrow the server may not be up all day, because I am going to do some serious work on it to fix this issue.
It is an old tried and true method of finding the impossible bug. Saw the code in half, see if the error still happens. Saw it in half again. Continue this until you have a small chunk of code that, when in use causes the problem. Fix that code!
Wish me luck.
Multiplication Bug Patch
Patch is live, server is up a little early at UTC 15:45
#endedit
Imagine yourself on TeamSpeak last night.
"Hey guys another unit just spawned" "And another" "And another" "what the.." "this is weird" "7 units now" "8"
In private testing, which was just ended, I had a key set up to spawn another unit, so that we could test things like combat faster. I missed turning that off. Can anyone guess which key that was? (Rhymes with "Inert")
Also, movement bug has been found. It is due to an old problem that Unity plans on addressing in their March 2016 update. Luckily I found a workaround, so we don't have to wait until next year to have both dynamic loading and async loading.
The build is being baked as we speak, I am aiming for UTC 16:00 for this patch.
Movement Bug
It is a quick untested stab.
Also I have added the functionality that hitting the 'f' key will move your camera to one of your units, in case you loose him. I will expand this later to allow you to pick which unit to move to.
This patch will be live in about 15 minutes.
Thank you for your patience as we iron out all these initial bugs.
GC/Threading bug
We have noticed that you may need to restart Steam to see the update available for ABD. If you get the GC error, please restart Steam to make sure you have the latest patch.
This patch will also improve server stability, but not implement the new "automatically reload saved data from database on crash" feature I coded today. WHAT?!? How could I not activate such an awesome system??
The reason is simple. 7 billion Steve's. This save/load code is brand spankin' new. What if I made a mistake in the saving code today, and it replicates instead of updates? Imagine after a few save cycles, there are 7 billion Steve's running around. *Shudders*
I will turn it on tomorrow, after letting it collect data tonight.
Bug fixes today
The server is now back up.
#endedit
You will notice several patches coming through today in quick succession. We are working very hard on both the server issue, and one causing the "too many threads" issue.
I will make an announcement when these issues are fixed.
What I am saying is that until you see that announcement later today, don't get too excited when you see a patch coming through Steam.
Thank you for your understanding, I will now go back to my coding hole and get this fixed for everyone.
*Full disclosure, I may need to eat something at some point, but other than that I am coding my heart out.
GAMEntertainment Job Openings
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/paid-steam-game-abd-a-beautiful-day-programmer-others.348110/
Dev Blog 8/15/2015 - Post Launch Announcement
Hello ABD: A Beautiful Day Community,
First of all, I wanted to thank everyone who stayed up with us for our Steam launch! The chat party was a little small, but we had some good times talking about everything from game components to weird Scottish dishes “Thanks ForsakenSco, I’ll never get that image of Haggis out of my head” galore.
Second, I wanted to apologize to everyone who was upset by our rocky launch. We’ve narrowed down the issue, and we will have it squashed by Monday or Tuesday at the very latest. Currently our server is having issues with the trees being called on by the server, causing the entire string to run out of memory. The “GC: Too Many Threads” error was coming from this item, and it should be taken care of as soon as Monday if not sooner. We are keeping our eye on the Community Hub, as well as the General & Bug Forum so that we can obtain a bug list while our In-Game Bug Tracker is down. Even when the ingame tracker gets back up, we will still be heavily monitoring the avenues you ladies and gentlemen are using to send us the errors you’re getting!
Third, some of you are confused at what to do in the game! On our website (www.GagAMaggotEnt.com) we have game manuals in five languages at the top of the page on the right; English, German, Russian, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese.
To aid your adventure, here is a rough breakdown of gameplay:
1.Click the, “Search” button to scavenge the ground for Wood.
2.When you have found 18 Wood, craft the hatchet.
3.With the hatchet, you can cut trees down to collect more wood for fires and structures.
4.Craft a Club (25 Wood) or Spear (55 Wood) to hunt animals, or to defend yourself.
5.Collect more wood, build Shelter (150 Wood) to spawn more units after two(2) minutes.
6.Collect more wood, and build Resource Storages.
7.“Tasking” your character to a Resource Storage will make them seek out that specific resource in their environment, then return when they can’t carry anymore and they will continue the task until otherwise instructed.
8.Once you have a supply chain of Hunters (Meat, Hide, Bone, Fur) and Gatherers (Water) your village is semi self sufficient.
9.Either searching or hunting, and various looting, you will find BP (Blueprint) and SCH (Schematics) which will look like colored inventory items of Blue or Orange. These items allow you to create more structures and equipment then you had previously.
Current features that are having trouble post-launch:
-Chat Button
-Top Resource Bar
-Toggle Box UI (Sneak, Walk, Jog, Run, etc) but it is still functional.
We’ve had a very hectic week, and the entire team is absolutely exhausted! As we have stated many times, we are doing the following:
Weeks 1-2: Stabilizing the Client.
Weeks 3-5: Increasing capability and functionality.
Weeks 6-7: Adding more features, content, game items, database items etc.
Weeks 8-9: Adding language support.
We look forward to your videos, concepts, fan art, ideas, and critiques in the coming days! Although we’ve had some pretty harsh reviews so far, games like this age like wine. The longer we get, the more people we have, and the more dedication we can achieve the better the end result will be. Thank you everyone for your understanding, and we hope to show you that ABD: A Beautiful Day will live up to your expectations! Negative reviews are just features we will take attention to foremost, fix, and improve upon. We won’t stop until you’re all happy, and as usual, we will be right here to answer your questions in the coming weeks.
Thank you!
-Robert Bonner
Creative Producer - ABD
G.A.M. Entertainment, LLC.
www.GagAMaggotEnt.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtewSF1jqHRmdrP-uEDQ76Q/about?view_as=public
IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/a-beautiful-day
Facebook: www.facebook.com/gagamaggotentertainment
Twitter: www.twitter.com/gam_ent
Steam Store: http://store.steampowered.com/app/384920/
Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=462500400
Bugs and early issues - Volume 1
Our game manual is located both on our Store Page, as well as on our website at www.GagAMaggotEnt.com in multiple languages. If you run into errors, or somehow something is going wrong, just know that fixes are on the way and to please have patience. We have been at this for about 18 hours today getting ready for launch, so we will be back at it as soon as we can!
Thank you for your understanding!
-Robert Bonner
Creative Producer - ABD
G.A.M. Entertainment, LLC.
www.GagAMaggotEnt.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtewSF1jqHRmdrP-uEDQ76Q/about?view_as=public
IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/a-beautiful-day
Facebook: www.facebook.com/gagamaggotentertainment
Twitter: www.twitter.com/gam_ent
Steam Store: http://store.steampowered.com/app/384920/
Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=462500400