#game debug

[ukgk]

there a couple of textures featuring Nini-tan/Sakura (Ukagaka's first default ghost) hidden inside the game files for Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim (Windows)(2003) and Ys: The Oath in Felghana (Windows) (2005) developed by Nihon Falcom.

the test map tiles featuring Nini-tan titled TEST1-1.png and TEST2.png were found in a folder titled 'hidden'.

in The Ark of Naphishtim the texture is featured on the walls of 2 unused maps, S_HIDDEN0 and S_HIDDEN2. the maps lack proper boundaries

in Oath of Felghana it's used again in (a slightly different) unused debug map, S_HIDDEN0

they're probably not intended to be seen during normal gameplay, presumably put there at some point by a developer who uses Ukagaka as placeholders for debugging purposes and leftover in later Windows Ys games from Ys VI. the rooms remain in Ys Origin but with the Nini/Sakura image removed.

source: (★) , (★), (★) (initially discovered by 'koa' from the Ancient Ys Forums back in 2009)

[criticalamityz]

you were still budding

[impossiblefeat]

Silver's future is FUCKED and he's playing rugby.

[bloodbluepearl]

mouthwashing- utility room, notes and other things!

journal- misc notes!

manage your cables!

things to read & notes on different electrical components

outdated textbooks

dog picture, presumably swanseas?

!!

[ynfg-gifs]

The Dreams Of Fritz - Asylum (Room Event)

[psi-hate]

pj64 decided to close improperly and remain a background process and now it looks like i've been edging it far longer than i usually do

[shellsy-woolbag]

Ts so tuff

[risingsunresistance]

please ignore all the cryptid mod stuff happening here-

i never showed techno off after i finished tweaking his card! yes he is overpowered but that's just because i wanted him to fit in with cryptid, an already overpowered mod lol. i still never figured out how to add my own cards in (i am not a mod maker at all) so i just overwrote one of their cards. that's why he still has the cryptid sticker (plus some silly "credits")

he's designed like the legendary cards are, so the card editions only affect the background and not him. i love the polychrome one, and i like that the negative variant makes everything gold :]

he's basically canio, but he will take any sacrifice. he's not picky 🐖⚔️

[fereldanwench]

You hit your head or something? You're in Emerald Vale. We're a Spacer's Choice community.

[akyrahaiato]

I tried Mumagi: Stellar Saviors and here's my opinion!! @saffronaa

(btw you should totally try the demo https://store.steampowered.com/app/3689240/Mumagi_Stellar_Saviors/)

Okay, so I played a little bit of a solo run and let me say: This game is really freakin fun

Seriously

Like, I took a moment to figure out how things worked but I really like it. I kind of appreciate the automatic attacks, I love that you can collect attacks from "different builds" so to say, it's really fun, the style is extremely cute, Mr. Bee is OP (as he should be) and the UI is honestly really satisfying.

I can entirely see this being an absolute delight to play with friends (and its super fun solo too! but it'd be even better with friends) and I sincerely, dearly hope the best for this project, because it's really fun to play. i look forward to continue playing around with the demo and eventually, the full game. 💙

(also did you do all of this on your own?? because really its impressive as hell the game is great TwT)

[impossiblefeat]

Espio's 2nd/3rd place animation in Mario & Sonic at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.

[code-tryperse]

Bugs in Sky: CotL: Broken Gates and Lonely Areas

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way to TGC. Barring confirmation from the developers, everything below is a hypothesis based on observed game behavior.

From January 16, 04:02 GMT (the release of update 0.28.0) up until January 20, 04:03 GMT, Sky players experienced a bug where players rarely encountered other players, resulting in a rather lonely experience playing the game. At the same time, gates and other objects which required lighting an interactable element to activate didn't activate even after lighting said element. Most players attributed this bug to server merging (i.e.: a function where two servers have their players and state combined into one) not working as intended.

This wasn't the case, however, as it was still entirely possible to encounter other players at times. It was just happening a lot rarer than it used to. Instead, a related function — server splitting — was not working as intended which, in turn, caused server merging to happen extremely rarely.

Potential explanation of what happened below the cut.

TLDR: The 0.28.0 update to the game likely accidentally disabled server splitting in all areas of the game, causing server merging to rarely happen and for some gates to stop working.

Keeping Players Close: Server Splits and Server Merges

Have you ever had an experience where you were with your friends when all of a sudden, they all disappear in front of you? And when you teleport back to them, they apparently were still in the same place as they were? Congratulations, you just encountered a server split. A server split is where a player or group of players get disconnected from a server they're currently in and pushed into their own server. Sometimes, the server will separate everyone out of it in what will be called here a "full server split". In that case, everyone gets pushed into a server where they're the only player. The scenario mentioned above is a very noticeable example of a full server split happening. Most of the time, however, server splits don't happen to every player in the server. Instead, it only happens to one player or group of players in that server. This kind of separation is what this blog will refer to when mentioning the term "server split".

The exact criteria needed for a server to split a player or group of players isn't known. However, one criterion that can be easily observed is that the server will split a player or group of players when there are no other players within close proximity to them. "Close proximity" is not defined in strict terms here as it is currently not known how far this distance needs to be. However, to observe this behavior, you can do the following steps:

Stand on one of the floating islands in Sanctuary Island.

Have a friend fly towards the main island.

Keep honking in order to see your friend's name.

As they fly down to the main island, eventually, your friend's name will stop appearing when you honk. A server split just happened. Because you are far from your friend, the server thinks that it is alright to split the two of you in order for a server merge to bring either of you to a server where players are close to you or your friend.

This is necessary behavior because there's a limit of 8 players per server. In order for a server merge to be successful, there must be at most 8 players in both servers combined. By splitting players from the server they're in, it increases the chances that the game will find a server that they can be merged in by reducing the number of players in their server. This is why waiting inside the 8-player puzzle room when there's already 7 players there usually takes a long time. By having 7 players in the server, only a server with one player can be merged into it. However, the two-player door before the room means that most servers with players in that room will have at least two players. Those servers cannot be merged into your 7-player server.

Determining the Absence of Server Splits

To say that server splitting isn't working as intended, we can establish the existence of players that should have been split away from us within the server. Normally, it would be hard to determine such a case, as that entails having to search for the presence of players in areas we cannot see. Additionally, if we do spot a player, we cannot know if that's a player who was already there, or one who was just merged into the server. Thankfully, there is a way to determine the presence of players without seeing them: the chat history.

When you send a chat message in Sky, it is sent to all players in the server you are in, including yourself. This prompts the game to display that chat message on top of the player who said it as well as in the chat history. However, if you don't have chat unlocked with the player, or if either of you aren't in a chat bench (doesn't have to be the same one), the game will replace the text of the message with a bunch of asterisks when displaying it to you. Additionally, if you have a player muted, the game will not display the messages they are sending, but it will still store them. This can be verified by muting a player, having them say something, then unmuting them. The game will then show the messages they sent while you have them muted, which means that it stores their messages even when they're muted.

Because player messages are sent to the entire server, you can see the messages of players in other locations, provided that they are in the same server as you. You can verify this by joining a friend (chat can be locked or unlocked), going into a level transition, then having them chat something. Their messages will still appear in the chat history until the server splits you off from them.

We know that this happened during the period of the bug because there are numerous bug reports in the Sky Discord mentioning the appearance of messages from players who are nowhere near the reporter. These messages can only appear if a player had sent them, which means that there's a player somewhere in that server sending these messages. This player is far from the reporter, which means that they should have been split off from them. However, that is not the case, which shows that server splitting is not working as intended.

Gates and Their Dependencies on Server Merging

Another part of the bug is that none of the gates and other places which require lighting some sort of pedestal or key to open work. While the reason for this cannot be definitively determined, it is possible that these required a check that involved a server merge for it to start working properly. Given that a server merge usually happens often and sometimes unnoticeable, it is likely that a server merge was made as a requirement to ensure that some gates only work when there's multiple players in a given area. The presence of this requirement doesn't make much sense, as two-player and four-player doors already require multiple players on their own, and requiring multiple players for one-player doors is not intuitive and sometimes even harmful for user experience. However, this is the most likely explanation as to why this bug is related to the server splits bug.

Reworking Maps and Inadvertent Changes

To give a possible explanation as to how this bug happened, we need to look at a handful of places and scenarios, namely:

Homespace and Aviary Village

Eye of Eden and Orbit

Valley of Triumph Races and Red Shard Memory Collections

Homespace and Aviary Village serve as central hubs for players to go through. As such, it is important that players be capable of gathering in these areas. Server splits would require players to not explore the central hub while waiting for others, which can make for a boring experience for some. Additionally, full server splits may also happen, which will force the players to repeat the process of gathering, which can be annoying to deal with. As such, server splitting is disabled in these areas.

Past the first area of Eye of Eden, server merging is disabled. While the game's tip for Eye of Eden is to stick together, keeping server splitting enabled is too punishing, as it prevents a player straying too far ahead or too far behind from receiving help from other players. Additionally for Orbit, keeping server splitting enabled can prevent players from hanging around with the people they shared the experience of the end with, which can reduce player satisfaction. As such, server splitting is disabled in these areas.

Races in Valley of Triumph as well as memory collection in Red Shard events sum up all the light/memories that all players in a server receive. If a player within a race or within the memory collection activity were to get split off from the server, it could make the light calculation inconsistent. To prevent these, server splitting is disabled while a race or any other activity is active.

What this all shows is that server splitting is something that can be enabled or disabled when needed. In preparation for the new season, nearly all areas of the map have been updated for the new dye light mechanic. It is possible that, while updating the maps, server splitting was accidentally disabled in these areas, causing server splitting to be disabled in all areas of the game.

A Quick Hotfix

An update was released on January 20, 04:03 GMT which fixed this issue completely. Server splitting now works as intended again. This didn't require a manual update of the game, which meant that this was a fix that involved only editing the assets of the game and not the actual code. Either way, players can now continue playing the game, finding others who are also playing near their character.

[vina-vin]

Winion Virus

[thehattyguy]

Been deveveloping the world system for my game and ended up separating physics and logic from the rendering aspect of the game

That made it a bit hard to debug collisions and things related to the "logic" world because its all hidden within their own World3D so that I can have multiple worlds that don't interact with each other

So I made this small modular debug menu and added the first debug option which creates a duplicate camera inside the main logic world (maybe I'll make it move to the current focused world when I make ways of travelling between worlds) and overlays the rendered image on top of the regular game

This already helped me fix some bugs and there are still some others that showed up since I split logic and rendering that I'm still working on

Also! I had made the equipment section of the inventory binder and didn't end up making a post about it but it came out pretty nice aswell, I'll maybe post some more details about it when its more finished since for now you can only see and edit your deck

Here's how it's looking right now:

[mt-84--therelic]

just so everyone knows. I have a couple of TS4 households with some of my object show humans(which btw bless the fullhouse mod. i would fill up like EVERY lot in my game having to split them all up into 8 oughhh) and I'd really love to mention that ALL of my sims that live in my Hotel OJ re-creation constantly have the "poorly decorated" uncomfortable moodlet(unless its expired and hasn't come back yet) except for OJ himself.

[peachgull]

Debug scraps I found at :