[0.79] Bugs

These movement issues have been around since WoM.  It's unacceptable that they still exist.

*Insert very angry Rant about legacy movement bugs*

It was the main factor in my first rant-y review. Seeing the legacy movement issues (and new ones) made me say that the coding and bugs were copied verbatim from previous games. It's sloppy. It's annoying. It's been reported many, many times... so it suggests that bug-reports aren't being listened to (suggesting poor support, over multiple games from WoM onwards, over multiple years) or given appropriate priority (dismissing feedback, ignoring issues, poor allocation of developer time etc.).

It may seem like a small display problem... but to me, it matters. It is as unsettling as finding half a maggot in an apple (even if it tasted fine, it looks bad, very bad). I've been trying to take the emotion, walls of text, purple prose and author filibuster out of my bug reports but yes... movement bugs make me *furious*. In a way that no 'new' issue ever will. Those need no forgiveness, they are understandable, easily explained and expected. I like encountering new bugs, I enjoy finding them and feel content to see them corrected. They are temporary hiccups next to a lingering rattling cough that suggests an underlying sickness in the coding.

Legacy movement bugs I just can't forgive, excuse, condone or forget. They should not exist. They should be fixed in this game and all previous games the moment they were noticed several years ago. The fact that they haven't been fixed is like a restaurant serving rotten fish after the first customers fell ill, it is negligent, careless and wouldn't be tolerated in any other product. It doesn't matter about the rest of the meal, care put into the presentation of the starter and sweetness of the dessert shouldn't cause you to overlook re-serving rotten fish scavenged from other meals. Movement issues are, at the very lest a major embarrassment. At worst a sign of shoddy workmanship on the part of whoever originally coded movement, who did QA and the other members of the team that let such poor coding slip through unchecked. (maybe those people don't even work in the company now, it's been quite a few years since then).

Experience in the game industry does not make your coding skills perfect. You still need to document, check your work, take lessons and work with others from time to time to improve your abilities. I watched Frogboy on the coding dev-stream and felt itchy all over seeing bugs being added to the game even as I was impressed by the speed and ease of changing the game. (things like: set shard health to 0 [Bug: friendly shards not destroyed by the spell, spell can be cast multiple times in one turn], not noticing other values set at 0 [the quests with no rewards]... changing only the effect but not description [bugs: skills, quests etc.], not documenting changes [all of it], not communicating with others before making changes [almost all of it], not testing changes with a new game to check the effect [all of it], not considering balance or gameplay ramifications of major changes... no proofreading/double-checking/spellchecking etc.). Jokes about coding while drunk, I hope they were jokes... but after watching it I'm honestly not sure.

I felt a little unwell after watching it... and held my tongue (till now, it was that or shout STOP! you're adding a bug!! with each rapidly made change). It makes me feel a little sick just thinking back on it. When I've worked on computers in the past (e.g. during a summer job at age 15), I typed things out twice, compared them, double-checked, tested (with graphs) and discussed things with the team. Had regular meetings, even sat in on the board of directors meeting and felt like each person was considered an equal member of the team. (Fast, cheap or done well, choose one to focus on. Always choose the latter). When doing science I used to set up experiments at 5am then had breakfast and lectures before coming back to a clean, organised, well-documented experiment done as one member of a team of equals. And I don't consider myself a good programmer, scientist or writer. But not being good, having to work hard to do something doesn't mean you have to produce poor quality products. Especially if people are paying for your product.

I hate human errors... When they can and should have been avoided.
I hate knowing something is incorrect... And not fixing it.
I hate mistakes... When nothing is learned from them.

Movement bugs are examples of all three.

But I don't hate errors, bugs, mistakes... those are natural. It is the reactions to those mistakes that feels unnatural, wrong and unsettling. Yes, I understand it's an awful lot of emotion to feel from one little movement bug. But seeing that maggoty apple, or tasting the rotten fish in the restaurant suggests: the kitchen staff didn't clean or check the food, they didn't wash their hands, they bought inferior produce, the food has been stored improperly, they may have rats and other pests, I may vomit, I may be off work, my date really isn't going to be impressed, I'll have the trots tomorrow and so on. One small indicator that has a very long line of unfortunate and undesirable implications, inferences and conclusions. If you don't want that chain of logic to pass through people's minds then you go out of your way to never show them a half eaten maggot. (even, or especially if, you hope to get away with serving poor quality food).

Sorry for all this... I will resume normal, emotionally-detached and constructive bug reporting in due course. Consider this entire piece me just flagging Movement issues as: High Priority.

/*End of very angry Rant*

Dr Franknfurter - do not get upset so much That's Stardock - you never know what they listen to and when they pay attention. Sometimes it seems they are all ears, sometimes there is no way you can make them listen. 

Of course, bad for them. I have seen on the forums some extremely dedicated people, who for free test their game thoroughly. I have some experience of serious programming myself, and it is priceless to have someone testing your product and giving you feedback. Not all feedback is good, but it is so easy to distinguish them anyway, and it is not like 1000 emails/ day. Right now there are like maximum one post per day with the bugs being reported .... 

In the end that's why both FE and SK will have a reputation of "buggy" games and the sloppy product. It is true, that nowadays game are so complex there is no way you would avoid bugs. However, some bugs are so easy to fix that if they happen they do show devs in a really bad light.

When was last time that you saw a game where move points are badly calculated? Even free indie one-man made games don't have those bugs. Similarly, save-load bugs .. Or path finding bugs - it took stardock like 2 years of complaining before they somewhat fixed it. It seems that they are so enticed by the big vision and picture that they forgot to pay attention to those tiny details. But then people buy it, look at it, and they say - if devs cannot fix those simple things, how can they fix the big picture? They quit and the reputation is gained .... 

Actually, I got so used to this movement bug I do not even notice it any more - I just know - joining/separating your armies cost you whole turn. Period. It's actually quite sad. 

This is the very first report of movement bug I could find: 

https://forums.stardock.com/395320

It is 4 years old  

I am beginning to understand why FnF wrote his first review as he did. I agree that the legacy issues are unacceptable. For that reason alone, I'd understand the 'Not Recommended' review. I think that the game is still enjoyable - probably more so than any other Elemental game for me - but the fact that bugs remain from THE VERY FIRST Kumquat game makes me really, really sad. And frustrated.

I'd love it if Stardock had a proper, itemised Changelog (with a list of actual bugs fixed, something more helpful than "Lots & lots of misc bug fixes"), a Known bugs list (so you don't waste time reposting stuff)... I don't know if there is any point at all to spend my time reposting bugs that have been posted before and never fixed. Be it one week ago, a month ago, or as bpalczewski quoted... by Black-Knight four years previously (In WoM, FE, LH and SK). Obviously there is a point, if they haven't noticed someone needs to keep shouting. There's just... such an awful lot to shout about.

I've spent a while toning down my overt levels of frustration. Perhaps the only way to get Stardock to fix the 4 year old bugs is to say:

The movement bugs are not acceptable.
You have known about such bugs for FOUR YEARS.
The bugs are present in FOUR games.
It is a small but disgusting blot on your work and you should be ashamed to leave it in place.

Anyway, I've been looking at other bugs to see if they are still present. (and I played LH and found amusing bugs there too... before getting a ctd. Had an AI settle a city on top of a shard as the most amusing bug.)

Fixed bugs I've noticed:

Champions no longer get injured. (But Iru Elixir still claims to cure injuries... that now no longer exist)

Bugs I've mentioned before that have yet to be fixed (incomplete):

Duplicate crafting recipes,
Description of skills and effects don't match. e.g. Drain shard. "This skill does not affect the doomsday counter." Actually it causes the same Doomsday increase as killing a shard normally would.
Enemy units stack on top of each other in battle
Misc_shrills still have missing icon and description
Naphaz the warlord... all exactly as 0.751
Units still have no combat AI relating to skill use
Movement above 10 still reads as 11...

Also, old crash reports.
(I only just found where they were saved to from cbray's steam post... I've certainly had more than two crashes, I think the others just didn't generate a report. Still, quite stable all things considered.)
First,
Second

I really like Stardock games and the way Brad and crew treat the customers, but the bugs that have been around for 5+ years just make the company seem lazy and ignorant in many respects.  If some of these silly bugs were fixed I would easily spend many more hours on these games, because the game design is really solid. Last night as I played through Beta 2 I was truly frustrated at the bugs that plagued the game (I know it's a beta, but these bugs have been around forever) and had to quit after an hour or so.

As of now I'm not going to spend more time playing the SK beta until they clean up the legacy bugs and artwork/iconography that still exist from predecesor Elemental titles.  It's really hard for me to see through this shit at this point to give good honest gameplay and balance feedback like I know the devs want.

If this is truly a new title, then make it anew, don't regurgitate your old trash and call it new.

I can vouch that reporting the same bugs (for years and through multiple games) is about as demotivating as it can get. DrF nailed it. It is not enough to ask beta testers to provide feedback to the devs. There needs to be feedback on the feedback. On one hand, reporting bugs that never get fixed essentially tells us the feedback meant nothing. Just tell us it's not a bug, it's by design, or it's not important. On the other hand, if dev feedback shows issues logged, who is working it, etc. then we have information to validate the value of our efforts.

I remember asking about SD making a log of issues 2-3 years ago. Someone from SD (I think it was Island Dog) politely mentioned SD had tried it before on another game but it did not work well. I do not know why.

Any employee in any organization needs feedback in order to know what he or she is excelling at or needs to make improvement. SD likes to foster a team environment with customers. If we beta testers are part of the team, we need to know our efforts are valued otherwise what's the point in spending my time on it?

The most recent example was the thread where Brad said he had not heard of a bug that had been reported multiple times. In that thread I pointed out where he himself had acknowledged the bug! I fully realize Brad is a super-busy dude but I can honestly tell you that exchange killed about 90% of my motivation to continue testing SK. I respect SD and dig these games otherwise I would not hang around. Please consider this beta tester feedback regarding the lack of SD feedback regarding beta tester feedback is coming from a good place, not a bad place.

IGNORE, DOUBLEPOST

First post. IMHO, this is the most important thread in this forum. The concepts behind FE, LH and SK are awesome, but as described above the execution has been lacking. Dr F is doing a fantastic job cataloging bugs that have existed for some time, as well as new ones that should have been be caught in regression testing. Although he's been the most vocal, I'd imagine he's expressing the frustrations of many, many customers. I've avoided becoming an early adopter of SK for these very reasons -- bugs present (and reported!) in FE remained in LH, and still persist in SK. There's simply no reason to believe they'll ever be fixed. And I won't buy the release unless these are specifically addressed. 

However successful the Elemental series has been, these issues have surely curtailed its potential. However many people take time to voice their dissatisfaction on these forums, more simply won't buy another SD product. However much money is saved by not addressing these issues (which must be a conscious decision, given how often they've been mentioned), more is lost in loss of customers like myself.

The only reason I'm paying attention to these games anymore is because I followed Derek here based on his work on FFH2. If not for his reputation I wouldn't have purchased FE or LH to begin with.

It's just good business to work to make this right, SD. 

We are the vocal minority. Their concern is for the silent majority, who just buy the games without commenting. You mentioned business practices. So you understand it makes good business sense to produce a game that appeals to them. (The majority).

And get new and better ideas from the relatively few squeaky wheels for free...

Now see, as a person new to Stardock, that is extremely disappointing to hear that there are bugs which are years old and have not been resolved.

Surprised this thread wasn't addressed.

unfortunate.

It does feel like bug reports aren't being listened to when no one from stardock is available to comment. Also, while looking at old bug reports I noticed more than just the movement issues in those 4 year old posts.

List of Legacy Bugs from War of Magic

Movement bugs, stacking in combat

bpalczewski brought up units stacking on tiles in combat, 4 years ago (can't find it today, but it involved armies starting on the same tile and generally sharing tiles). Brought up lots of old bugs two years ago and continued to post bugs. I'm impressed by that. (especially considering the abysmal level of feedback or thanks given).

The earliest version of the movement bug I could find was reported By GroWi on August 23, 2010:
https://forums.stardock.com/391483/page/1/
"Second problem - during the fight with the bigger spider I gave my units orders for more than one turn. The spider strayed into the path of one unit, which promptly (before I could intervene) stepped into the same square as the spider. Hilarity ensued - I could not attack, the spider killed two of my units, then a turn later the blocking unit left the spiders square. My channeler then killed the spider."

ZOC bugs? (I've seen lots in FE/LH. Not in SK thankfully)

One of the first Elemental bug reports was about the odd ZOC borders getting confused.
(which I've seen a lot in FE/LH, not noticed it so much in SK):
By Tagax on August 23, 2010
https://forums.stardock.com/391366/page/1/

Combat missing options (save/load/keybindings etc.) Still in SK.

Lord KiRon posted August 23, 2010:
https://forums.stardock.com/391409/page/1/  (reply 3):
"Also, there is no way to load game in the middle of combat or even exit it fast. That's annoying."

Unknown bugs in combat, can only proceed with end-turn/autoresolve. (Still happens)

Same thread as above, same person, is this familiar to anyone?
"3. In one battle was unable to move my units - could not select them (could "select" but not move enemy) , felt like GalCiv "next turn" disappeared problem, but this time "next turn" is that actually cured it."

By redskull2 on August 25, 2010
https://forums.stardock.com/392306/page/1/
"1. Stops responding during tactical battles: Just what it says. I can select units, I can move around the tactical battle map but the turn button stops advancing the turn and I cannot move or attack with any units. I can move and rotate the map though and if I hit the autoresolve buttn, it will let me autoresolve the battle."

Standing on map objects without interacting with them (very common)

By Erik Secrest on August 23, 2010 12:15:42 PM from  Elemental Forums

https://forums.stardock.com/391465/page/1/

Combat infocards missing information:
(you still can't see poison/slow/curse effect and duration on infocard or by hovering over unit. Although it is shown if you hover over the unit in the action list for some strange reason.)
https://forums.stardock.com/392622/page/1/

By MrCapitalG on August 25, 2010:
"1. My unit was attacked by a spider with 'poison shot' and I couldn't identify anywhere in the UI that my unit was being poisoned each turn, this would make it hard to 'cure' if I had such a spell, which I would imagine there is one. Regardless, I should know which units are being affected by ailments."

Stardock reply LikeTheWhirlwind August 25, 2010:

"First off, thank you for the feedback.

1) You're right, this isn't communicated anywhere on the UI. This is an area that we will improve upon in the coming weeks. We definitely agree with you that it is important to be able to view the debuffs that a unit is afflicted with."

New Bugs in [0.79]:
(I've been trying to break things... not just noticing when things go wrong. It's surprisingly easy)

Cloth map doesn't update to show new mountains.

Land deforming spells cause stuff to float randomly:
(Goodie huts and spikes floating, not easy to show without moving the camera, notice the rocks have distant shadows).

Harvesting next to crystal makes it invisible. Also Building/destroying/building it turns the terrain from shadow to grassland:

Harvesting next to outpost half-buries it. (may be why the crystal went invisible):

Cursor location and target tiles don't match (I'm pointing at the mountain, target tile is over in the FOW):

Clicking on Crafting after clicking autoresolve, but before the pop-up allows you to make an infinite number of any item available for crafting:
(just keep clicking it, each one will eventually give you an item... once the menus all finish getting confused and broken).

Autoresolved escaped battled are described as victories (not 'You escaped'... I assume that's what happened):

Autoexplore gets confused:

Kingdom_low_unused terrain blocks spells, also beautify still has no applicable targets or obvious effect:

Rivers start and end randomly (actually rivers have always been a problem in Elemental, I don't know why)

Blank quest screen:

Spellbook shows blank pages:

Lastly,

These lack pictures so I'll have to explain (badly). Pressing space and enter randomly (to try to get things to break) succeeded (things broke). Turns went skewey and advanced rapidly and chaotically, the mouse cursor broke (became stuck, permanent egg-timer), you can delete a units movement while it's moving by pressing space after right-clicking. And generally pressing things out of order breaks stuff (as with the crafting bug, the moving onto enemy tiles bug, not interacting with map objects bugs etc.)

Ok, this is the first bug I've had in the game.  I was playing and the SK destroyed a shard.  I wanted to then move some units, because in the corner it told me I had idle units, but it wouldn't let me move any of my units, even though they had movement points.  So, I couldn't do anything at that point.  Frustrating.

Please understand that I say this with all due respext, but I will no longer be providing feedback or bug reports until it is clear we're being heard. The fact that we have actual proof of reported bugs never being fixed and now an entire thread of bug reports that hasn't even been acknowledged leaves me to believe that either Stardock is stretched too thin or doesn't habe someone combing through our reports. Either way, it's frustrating and disheartening. What good is Early Access if you're not going to take advantage of its benefits?

Also, for lingering Design issues raised by the community (randomness, glass-cannons and dice-rolls) but never discussed or changed:
http://forums.sorcererking.com/392412/page/3/#2735759

With the prescient comment by luketan August 26, 2010:

"PREDICTION

Even after 1 year of patching SD will not even include 1/10 of the ideas here.

SD gaming style tends towards simple linear models.. Nothing wrong with that, most games are like that.

MOM probably has the most complicated system for a TBS game. AOW was simpler."

Please fix the legacy bugs. Even if it means pushing back the delivery date of the game.

cut us a little slack. The thread went up Thursday late afternoon.

its a great thread and many of these are in the bug list, some already fixed (like the group unit, losing turns thing).

also, some things aren't bugs. Rivers trnches and such. Not every river starts at a mountain for instance. no early spies for guardian just meant they weren't in yet (I've got a page of them).

still good to report and talk about but don't confuse lack of beta content or cosmetic choices to bugs.

Also understand that just because legacy bugs aren't fixed, doesnt mean they are being ignored or are unknown.

Many times bugs are notoriously deeper rooted than their apparent appearance in the game. Fixing a bug may have cascade effects into other areas. A seemingly simple bug may require so much resources to fix as to not be worth it as well.

Which is kind of fine. But I think most of us would love to at least have some of that confirmed. Just a little "Hey, Bug#xxx has been on our list but we aren't going to be able to get to that."

I certainly meant no offense, Brad. I just think that the frustration is palpable among those of us that have been involved in your beta stages of each of the Elemental games and have seen the same bugs carry over from the last iteration to the next and have been given very little feedback as to why they haven't been addressed yet. 

As as fans of your games, it starts to become disheartening when we see them unaddressed for so long. Dr. FnF has linked very early reports (2010) of bugs that remain to this day and that particular bug is one that I have reported, too, because it is rather annoying. In a thread about frustration/fear of not being heard, it was frustrating to see that no one (other than yourself) is looking over the forums. 

There's some irony in expecting to be cut a little slack for not replying quickly... to the complaints about you not replying quickly. But yes, considering it's over the weekend it only works out to ~1-2 working days, which isn't bad really. You're forgiven for that... 4 years, that's still lots of working days to respond to all those bug reports and issues.

I don't think it's too arduous to add a note to each bug thread saying "should be fixed in version x", or "added to bug-list". As well as a Known Bugs list.

I think feedback on any bug thread is useful. Both for when we as bug-reporters are at fault (mistaking design choices we dislike as bugs, the original bug-report is still useful but more as design feedback than bug-reporting) and when you as Devs are wrong (thinking something is working because you misunderstand/dismiss/ignore the bug reports/incorrectly mark it as fixed).

Anyway, on the topic of stuff that in your opinion is not a bug. It's just a small graphical issue but I'd say the fact that rivers don't end at the sea a bit of a bug. The start point isn't the problem (although it is a bit strange to have a river start 1 tile from the coast, meander south and end by a mountain also 1 tile from the coast).

The river pictured above looks like this on the map:

(notice it and all rivers on this map don't reach coastal tiles but stop one, two or sometimes many tiles away. I wasn't complaining about the rocky 'spring' end of the river, notice the lack of rocks in the river pictured.)

Quite unlike this:

Lastly... since we're talking about rivers. A suggestion:
A Harvest River spell may be fun... especially if it leads to/enables some drought events. Messing with the game map is fun, and it'd fit nicely with the other spells.

Rivers not ending at the sea certainly doesn't bug me. One could easily argue they go underground, and feed back into the eco-system some other way, whether directly into aquifers or just as underground rivers leading elsewhere in the weird wrecked world that Elemental is supposed to be.

Completely agree with your other notes.

This is a great thread to be sure. And there's a lot of carefully researched stuff.

But a couple things I would caution on:

1. Demanding instant forum feedback from developers comes across as incredibility entitled. 

2. People have different cosmetic and aesthetic preferences. The rivers end the way they do because I prefer that look. While I would love to develop a more accurate erosion algorithm, that's not really a worthwhile use of engineering hours imp.

Now, that said, here are a few comments on the specifics:

• The movement issue discussed here was annoying enough that it was high up on the list and is fixed in our internal build.
• A lot of the things listed as "Bugs" are simply player preferences.  Not Saving games in the middle of tactical combat is not a bug.  You can argue it's a feature request but not having a feature isn't a bug.  If you want to actually talk to the developers, the quickest way to get them to ignore you is to disguise your feature requests as bug reports. 
• There are a ton of very good, very useful bug reports in this thread, don't throw away good feedback by inserting a bunch of personal preferences (rivers not ending at the sea is not a bug).

A bug is something where something is not working as designed.  There's lots of real bugs in this thread (the annoying movement bug being a prime example).