May 14, 2006

[Personal] T-3

We're shooting for the Wednesday patch window for "SiN Episodes." The preliminary patch I tested today had most of the major fixes in place. A couple of minor fixes weren't working right, but we can iron out the kinks in those tomorrow.

Three of the bugs were actually pretty interesting, and I'm thinking about doing some "anatomy of a bug" posts after the patch goes live.

The first interesting bug (although a nightmare for those who were living it) was in certain unique circumstances, the Personal Challenge System would amp the difficulty up to previously unseen heights.

The second bug is very interesting to me, and that's the crash bug that about 1% of our users are experiencing going into U4 Lab 02. Given that the bug was introduced back in January, and we had done three full config passes since then, the lessons learned tracking this one down are ones that I'm definitely going to be applying going forward.

The third bug also takes place in U4 Lab 02, and it's Radek not triggering Elexis. This one is the strangest of the bunch, because the symptoms and solution have been different for almost every person who has reported it, but the end solution was pretty much the same. This bug is also going to have a profound effect on how we test levels in future episodes.

While several other bugs have come up, these are the three that fascinate me both from a clinical as well as a professional sense. So until the patch goes live...

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