I have completed another complete retest, as well as more smaller tests, and everything is working well.
There are still some issues left that I can’t reproduce, but I can solve these when they recur.
The next step is to work on testing and improving the Network AI system and the multiplayer, and then add more content to the story systems.
Since most of the bugs that I have found have been fixed, I have been focusing on adding quality of life improvements to the project, such as improvements to the GUI’s and user feedback, etc.
I have added some safety checks to prevent the player leaving their ship during FTL trips, and I have added more messages to inform the user what is going on when the game is performing procedural tasks in the background (Such as finding a safe ocation to spawn an item, etc).
This prevents the player from being confused as to what to do.
I will probably have time to run one or two more complete retests this month.
I am still working on the tests and improvements for the introductory story.
All of the major bugs seem to have been fixed.
I have had to fix a few minor bugs related to procedural object placement, but these were not difficult.
There are some bugs that are related to the network-AI system that I will leave until next month, and there is one bug that I cannot reliably reproduce that has not been fixed yet, but everything else seems mostly done.
I have spent a substantial amount of time testing and improving the AI.
I believe that the system is now working much better, and much more reliably, than before.
There were several bugs found, both small, and large, but with these fixed, one of the most complex and error-prone systems in the game is much more stable.
There may be some very minor issues left with the AI, but the main issues that I was having seem to be mostly solved.
I have completed another complete re-test of the introductory quest of the game, and even though there were more bugs discovered, there were fewer of them, and they were much more minor, than the last run.
I am hoping to get all of the bugs with this storyline fixed either this month or next month, and then I can move on to the next step.
I have fixed a large number of additional issues with the project, focusing mostly on the main story.
There were issues with placing and deleting story items, and placing items persistently, etc.
There were also issues with navigation over large distances and high speeds, etc.
There were aa myriad of minor issues and improvement that I also made, which have contributed to making the project much more stable, but still more testing is needed.
I have begun another full retest of the story.
There was nothing major found in the first phase of testing, mostly minor placement offset issues, etc. These took some time to solve, but weren’t too complex.
I also made some improvements to NPC placement and interaction, and fixed some additional bugs with the movement of the capital ships, etc.
The main issues that I discovered were again related to AI pathfinding when the players ship is rotating rapidly, and an issue with the navigational radar that causes some objects to stop updating on the display.
The AI issue is the one that I am most concerned about, the AI navigation system needs to be extremely reliable.
The next objective with the debugging was to fix some issues with the player movement in zero and low gravity environments.
The players up vector and was slightly off. The problem was that the players upvec was always pointing toward the center of the object, which worked for large objects, such as planets, etc, but for small asteroids, (which are not perfectly round) the upvec was incorrect.
This is not fully fixed, a complete solution will take more time, but it is substantially improved from what it was, and movement in zero gravity environments is now a lot easier.
I am still focusing on the debugging for the main story sequence in the game.
I have added several quality of life improvements to the object spawning code, such as making sure that the height offset is always correct (so that the object isn’t beneath the terrain, or floating above it), etc.
I have also improved the paging system, to make sure that all colliders are disabled when the player moves away from the object.
I have also fixed a longstanding bug with the placement of AI in the world that resulted in their place position being wrong.
I have fixed several issues with the AI system, and there is certainly an improvement in reliability here, but I will need to do more testing to see if the issues are fully resolved.
I have also added a lot of quality of life improvements, and minor bug fixes, such as preventing the player from accidentally leaving vehicles when they are travelling at high speed, and greater feedback to the user if they enter an invalid destination ID, etc.