No Path Found - Development Log #503

The Colonization release is live, and Michi shares the typical ups and downs of a release day.

Michi (molp)

Last week saw the release of the Colonization update, see Release notes on the forums, if you missed it.

I am happy that the release is out now, for several reasons:

The first reason is that I was very close to postponing it because I received a bug report from a player that has tried out the release on the test server and found a bug in the navigation system. It was not possible to fly to one of the new systems, the flight controls would always fail with a "no path to destination" error. This error is expected when trying to fly a regular ship to a detached sector, but it should work with a colony ship.

At first, I was confused because I obviously planned hundreds of missions during the development of the colony ship features, then it dawned on me: I only tested the colony ship and navigation systems with a fresh universe that already had the detached sectors in its world data. I didn't test the pathfinding in a universe that started without detached sectors and then received them during the migration. This is kind of funny, because I tested the migration several times, but not the pathfinding and the migration at the same time.. In the end I was able to fix the issue on the same day and decided to do the release and not postpone it.

With that issue out of the way, the release went smoothly, until it didn't. Usually when I stop the servers, I also check if our cluster needs an update to minimize downtime. So while the build servers compiled the client and server parts of the update, I also updated the cluster to a new version. To do that, we stop all services, do the update, start the database, then start the rest of the services. The issue was, though, the database didn't want to start up again. Unfortunately, the provider we use doesn't support the database anymore, so to start it, I had to find another provider, all while you were waiting for the servers to restart. No pressure! Even the emotional-support-boss wasn't available, he was in a meeting! Long story short: I managed to get everything back online in the end.

The second reason why I am happy that the release is live now is that we migrated the inventory system on the server to a new implementation. This has become necessary because of the way we handle shared inventories for the construction and upkeep stores for the upcoming gateways. The old inventory system couldn't handle the new requirements, so we rebuilt it a while ago (I think I have written a few devlogs about it). Until now, it only has seen the light of the day on the test server, but not in production. Now that it is live, and I haven't received a single bug report or anything related to it and noone noticed it. That makes me happy :)

As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!