A Week of Heavy Debugging

Hello everyone,

It was a very intense week, I spent a lot of time debugging City Game Studio. That means studying dump files, which contain all the game's traces and let me understand why the game isn't working properly. And you might not realize it, but this kind of thing takes time. Time I couldn't spend on other things. As you'll have understood, I had to revise my plans. So let me tell you about it right away!

This week's recap

This week, two people ran into major crashes at game launch. So I looked into these crashes and reworked the game's startup to make it less abrupt.

Previously, City Game Studio loaded everything it could into memory all at once while starting up. That works fine in the vast majority of cases, but not in every single case. That's why I reworked the game's startup to delay the loading of less important modules. From now on, the game will display much faster, while spreading out over time the loading of elements that aren't essential.

As a result, you'll feel like the game launches almost instantly, or at least much faster than before, and that's a good thing. But these changes didn't fix the crashes, in fact they highlighted a problem inherent to the engine I use, namely Godot Engine.

Indeed, there's a bug that only affects Windows and involves USB peripherals connected to your computer. Certain devices plugged into your computer can cause the game to fail to launch properly, or cause it to become unresponsive ("Not Responding"). It could be a Blue Yeti microphone, or a USB-C device, and to fix the issue there's a somewhat old-school but highly effective method.

Unplug all your USB peripherals except your mouse, and launch the game. If everything works, plug your peripherals back in one at a time, until City Game Studio crashes again. And there you'll have your culprit.

For those who want to know more, it's all here: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/99106

What's coming next

Well, since I wasn't able to work at all on what was planned, I'm going to do more or less the same thing I had planned for last week. Adding features to the game engine, but also making fixes. Because this week I kept gathering your feedback, so there are extra things to do that will still improve your gaming experience!

That's it, this rather unusual blog post is now done, thank you for reading. See you next week, with fewer bugs this time, In the meantime, take care of yourselves Xavier aka Binogure