Official Fulqrum Publishing forum - Thursday, May 10, 2012. Patch Alpha

Patch Alpha – Report 1

Hi everyone,

First of all, we’d like to thank everyone who’s sent their crash logs and suggestions to the team. Your help is extremely valuable, and we really do appreciate it. We know how dedicated and thorough our fans can be, and it always raises our spirits to see all the effort and time you put into helping us make our sim better.

As most of you know – and we should have mentioned it when releasing the patch – all of Russia was on official holiday for four days. Most of the programmers took some much needed rest and are just now starting to sort through the bugs. Over 500 emails with reports and suggestions were sent to Luthier’s email over the holidays. He sorted through every single one of them and relayed everything to the appropriate team members, but if your email contained a question or a suggestion that requires someone else to investigate, it may take a little while to get a response. Ilya wants to apologize to everyone now if you do not receive an immediate reply. Your email does get read, and gets looked at very carefully, especially if it contains crash logs or dumps.

With that, we do have to respond to a few of the more common responses to the alpha patch.

1. “Why are my graphics busted?”
We did not reduce any graphics in the game! We did not resize any textures, redo any models, or anything like that! Also, in its current state, the graphics engine does not produce different FPS depending on texture resolution. You can very easily check the fact by watching the FPS counter as a plane’s external texture loads while the game is paused.
We’re simply ironing out some quirks with the texture manager in the current pre-release version of the patch. It’s been rewritten in order to reduce stutter. It no longer freezes the game when a large number of new objects have to get loaded with their textures, but it’s still imperfect. Lower res graphics are a temporary non-intended side effect.
We never ever tried to improve performance by decreasing the visual quality of the game.

2. “Fix your damn game! “
This is, after all, an alpha patch that was released with many known issues clearly listed, and the main purpose of the release was stated as locating and fixing crash bugs. We’re sorry it’s been frustrating. The remaining crash bugs are hard to catch, which is why we’re actually glad it’s been crashing for you. Yes, I said glad.
It’s been crashing for us too, and in a way that makes it impossible to catch the exact culprit. The crash needs to happen in a very specific rare way to point out the root cause. We need to get that specific crash report to fix it. We’ve got a few hundred crash dumps to look through now, so chances are, one of them should contain the smoking gun.
And, returning to the common thread in some of the responses – we are fixing it! That’s exactly what we’re doing right now! And you are helping!

Again, we do apologize if you are one of the people for whom the game crashes a lot. Remember – this is a pre-release test version of the patch, and you are not required to use it at all! Please roll back to the previous more stable version if you want to continue flying while we continue working.

Now we’re going back to work. We’ll release a status update by Saturday.