Diary #44 – Oops, 1.0.09 Release Notes

So I was feeling proud, thanks to my efforts, all of your efforts as players of the demo, as well as Bea’s efforts in bug hunting, the 1.0.01 release went off without any major game-breaking errors. I managed to mess that up with 1.0.06 and those doors nobody asked for 😅. It’s possible that plenty of you never actually noticed the bug, but here’s what happens:

1. A villager is heading towards home. Before 1.0.06, they just knew the game coordinates where they were going, and that they were going to rest. However, in order to get them to open doors just before arriving, I added a variable to store the building they were going to.
2. You upgrade the house that they live in. (Demolishing it might cause the same problem.) This technically destroys their old house and builds a new one in the same location, except your original gold payment gets credited to the new building.
3. They get really close to their destination and try to open the door on a building that no longer exists. (The same things happens if you demolish it while they’re sleeping: they finish sleeping, then try to open that door.)
4. In many cases, Godot’s error handling deals with it decently well, and apart from a missing door sound & animation, the villager moves on with their life.
5. However, the old building and door may have already gone through garbage collection. To oversimplify a technical concept, the garbage truck has already come by to take the trash out of the dumpster. So Iron Village crashes.

Since there’s a possibility of crashes, and the error handling can have side effects in how the simulation runs, I’m pushing out another build, 1.0.09. As an added bonus, you get a new piece of UI and a couple of tweaks I was working on for 1.1. (Some other incomplete features have been disabled.) Here’s the full list:

• Fixed coal and iron hoppers to carry their loads 1 pixel higher.
• Added “Meals” to the Level 4 Permit Document

• Autosale Notifications! I meant to get these into 1.0.06, but didn’t quite find the time. Anyway, now when an autosale gets made, you’ll see a summary of the gold you made, plus the goods that were sold.