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Dissatisfied with the huge ammount of CTDs


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Hi.

I just bought this game yesterday, and was super stoked for a remake of the old X-Com game. I read that the game is soon to enter beta, but from my experience it seems like it's quite some way to go.

I tried playing for about 4 hours, and at most i got one battle through before crashing to desktop.

First, i got the error where if you save while battling, there are invisible aliens which crash the game if they die.

Then i got crashes at the start of a battle.

Then suddenly a battle started without me even having dispatched a heli, and immediately crashed.

As of now this game is not even playable to me. Are these crashes known bugs? Are they being worked on currently? I know that the game is not complete, but i was expecting to be able to PLAY at least.

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Hi.

I just bought this game yesterday, and was super stoked for a remake of the old X-Com game. I read that the game is soon to enter beta, but from my experience it seems like it's quite some way to go.

I tried playing for about 4 hours, and at most i got one battle through before crashing to desktop.

First, i got the error where if you save while battling, there are invisible aliens which crash the game if they die.

Then i got crashes at the start of a battle.

Then suddenly a battle started without me even having dispatched a heli, and immediately crashed.

As of now this game is not even playable to me. Are these crashes known bugs? Are they being worked on currently? I know that the game is not complete, but i was expecting to be able to PLAY at least.

Hello and welcome here.

There are couple of known CTDs issues and also some workaround for them. Just see Bugs secction on this forum.

Do not forget this is still Alpha! So everyone who runs this must count with this kind of issues.

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Oh and i searched for this error but couldn't find a workaround:

When trying to adjust the mouse sensitivity, the click rectangles for "new game" "options" and "load game" are too big, so i can't click the mouse sense slider. Super annoying since even though i run native resolution, the sensitivity is not 1:1 what my windows sense is.

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I'm not having a pop at anyone directly here, but after a recent spate of threads like this I'm starting to wonder if Introversion's way of offering up alpha access is actually the correct way to go.

You made me google Introversion, and found out they're the guys behind the selling $1000 slots for Alpha access to some upcoming indie Prison sim. Good on them. I'm all for you guys squeezing maximum money out of people for access to stuff you're actively working on. As long as you don't promise X by date Y and keep plugging away, I see no problem.

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I'm not having a pop at anyone directly here, but after a recent spate of threads like this I'm starting to wonder if Introversion's way of offering up alpha access is actually the correct way to go.

There certainly are disadvantages to it which is why AAA publishers avoid this sort of thing but for indies it's pretty much a necessary part of the business model.

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You made me google Introversion, and found out they're the guys behind the selling $1000 slots for Alpha access to some upcoming indie Prison sim. Good on them. I'm all for you guys squeezing maximum money out of people for access to stuff you're actively working on. As long as you don't promise X by date Y and keep plugging away, I see no problem.

Well, it's a bit less nefarious than that. They're planning to sell their game at ~£15, but they're charging £30 if you want to be in on the alpha and beta.

The idea behind it is that the majority of people will think it's too expensive for an alpha when they know the release price will be around half that, so that the people who do actually invest are the ones with a strong interest. All in the hope that the subset will offer "better" and more quantitive feedback the devs can use.

Introversion noticed in previous titles that when the alpha price point was low, that while it brings it a good bit of money from people who are curious and wanting to try, they got lots of early adopters who went "Eugh, it's buggy! I'm not playing this ever again or recommending it!" because they didn't understand what an alpha version is (ie, massively unfinished!), and that they also had to spend a fair chunk of time dealing with complaints and feedback because of that.

Obviously, I think it's only a method that can be used by established indies, as you're potentially reducing capital by doing so (smaller user pool initally) so need to have some back up funding.

Edited by Buzzles
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I think the devs said at one time that they will be concentrating on fixing CTD only AFTER all the features have been implemented(a.e. after alpha). Because no use wasting time on them when the new mechanics/A.I. will probably cause a dozen of new ones.
That would not be a good approach. Bugs are much harder to find as the code becomes larger and they tend to trigger as chain. It's a lot easier to stamp out bugs early. Hopefully that is what they are doing. Obviously, new bugs will be found in beta, but getting rid of known bugs as you develop is the best way to go in general. The only time this isn't a good idea is when you are waiting on something from someone else (like tiles and sprites). Obviously, if a bug is caused by missing content there isn't much you can do until it's delivered. However, even under those circumstances your error handling should be able to at least let the user know what went wrong and potentially give them a way to continue if the bug isn't a complete show stopper or damages the game flow. Edited by StellarRat
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That would not be a good approach. Bugs are much harder to find as the code becomes larger and they tend to trigger as chain. It's a lot easier to stamp out bugs early. Hopefully that is what they are doing. Obviously, new bugs will be found in beta, but getting rid of known bugs as you develop is the best way to go in general. The only time this isn't a good idea is when you are waiting on something from someone else (like tiles and sprites). Obviously, if a bug is caused by missing content there isn't much you can do until it's delivered. However, even under those circumstances your error handling should be able to at least let the user know what went wrong and potentially give them a way to continue if the bug isn't a complete show stopper or damages the game flow.

This guy right here.

You can't just say "we won't fix bugs until stage x" and expect to be able to remove them all then. Bug finding is a continuous process that should always have some degree of focus, because the longer you go with bugs, the greater the chances that you have to rewrite or refactor big pieces of code which adds large ammounts of overhead to a task that could have been trivial. At least in an alpha, add informative log messages that can help users work around the error such as adding temporary sprites when some are missing.

If you don't do this as you go you only make debugging harder when you finally start doing it.

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This guy right here.

You can't just say "we won't fix bugs until stage x" and expect to be able to remove them all then. Bug finding is a continuous process that should always have some degree of focus, because the longer you go with bugs, the greater the chances that you have to rewrite or refactor big pieces of code which adds large ammounts of overhead to a task that could have been trivial. At least in an alpha, add informative log messages that can help users work around the error such as adding temporary sprites when some are missing.

If you don't do this as you go you only make debugging harder when you finally start doing it.

I don't know from where you get the impression that we won't fix any bug until stage x, you shouldn't talk like that if you are playing the game just from this version (which yes, it's a really buggy, crash-friendly one).

We are fixing bugs as soon as we or the community find them, it's a continuous process.. As continuous is the adding of them, at least until we won't finish to add new features, as is the case of the alpha versions.

We do care a lot about bug fixing, and most of them are solved from a version to another, but having new ones spawning as well is unavoidable at this point.

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Giovanni, I didn't think you were ignoring bugs. I was just pointing out that it would be bad practice to do it that way. Some people think that just because there will be a concentration on bug fixing and balancing during the beta that you are ignoring them now. By then all the content and features should be in, so what else would you do? Anyway, I think you're doing a fine job. I hope you are enjoying your first "real job" as a programmer.

Oh, by the way, dealing with annoyed and uninformed users is a BIG part of the job. I've found that talking to them in non-technical way and listening/watching the process they want to automate is the key to success. Sometimes making suggestions about better ways to do things and features that would make things easier for them, even if they don't think of it, will win you big points.

Edited by StellarRat
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Introversion was interesting. Very friendly, up front and fun video as well. Their approach to Alpha funding is interesting too. For something like Xenonauts, putting down say $30 for an alpha would be influenced by the fact that it has X-Com roots. Would I have paid for it, from the cool art, screenies and the site? maybe.

But unless there's a rich gaming tradition of naked prison shower eating, I'd be a little less likely to go into a game at a higher alpha funding level.

I had no idea that folks assume a game is good to go despite it being fairly clear it's in Alpha. Perhaps not. Maybe that's why introversion spent a chunk of the video focusing on it.

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