Space Exploration Closed Testing Update

Space Exploration 0.7 has been in closed testing for a month now, so how’s it going?

Slower than expected. Part of that is from me being unwell for over a month (I’m finally better now), but a lot of the delays are just down to the nature of the task. There are just a lot of corner cases due to API changes that are hard to predict and resolve. Also in some cases the game engine needed some API fixes to get things working again and that really slowed things down because we couldn’t progress in certain areas for a week or two.

Here are some examples:

There have been a wide range of problems with Space Elevators. The changes to how the game engine handles trains caused all sorts of problems for how the space elevator fakes the train changing surfaces. 

Previously the train schedule was cloned and altered to address some issues of the train wanting to stop inside the elevator, or go backwards if the elevator exit was blocked, but trains are part of groups now so that wasn’t possible anymore.

Trains have per-train temporary stations, and initially it wasn’t possible to properly replicate them to the new train (that’s fixed now).

Per-surface evolution made certain secret parts of the game way too easy, so we needed to correct the evolution factor each time one of those surfaces are spawned.

There were more corner cases of losing attachment to your character after using the starmap. We still need to use some hacky workarounds to get this view mode working. There might be better API support for this sort of view mode in the future, but for now most of the issues with the hacky way are fixed. There may still be some weird cases of starmap + editor mode + space elevator interactions that cause a weird state, but that’s not part of normal gameplay so it’s not too bad. 

Factoriopedia causes a whole new set of problems because SE has a lot of alternate recipes for things, but it wasn’t possible for to group an alternate recipe with the main recipe because the game engine would merge the main recipe into the same entry as the item so it was sorted as an item, but the alternate recipe as forced to sort as a recipe, meaning it always ended up in a different section. The API has changed now and most of the Factiopedia issues have been fixed. 

I had someone working on updated Space Rail graphics, but it ended up getting too complicated so I’ve taken that on as one of my main projects. It might not seem like an especially complicated problem, but there are a lot more pieces that need to line up now and the rails are actually in 5 layers so that when two rail lines cross the graphic layers can overlap in a way that doesn’t look too broken. 

There have been a number of problems with the API not having proper read-write support for the player zoom level, meaning that for things like Jetpack and pinned views, it’s just not possible to keep the same zoom state.

The changes to the factorio fluid system means that most individual entities don’t have their own fluid values. For example, rocket booster tanks and the cargo rocket silo used to have their own internal supply of fluid so you’d know how much each one has. Now the only value you can read is the total value of that fluid network, so a lot of the calculations for these sorts of entities went quite wrong as they vastly overestimated how much fluid they contained.

Another consequence of the fluid changes is that the way that the fluid connection ports are specified had changed, and with hundreds of fluid ports to update inevitably some ended up misaligned, and the failure cases weren’t immediately obvious. I think we’ve found them all now. 

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. So far there have been about 100 individual changelog lines covering fixes for all the little things that have changed, and some of those entries contain many fixes and changes themselves. 

The good news is that the game is stable enough for people to keep persistent saves and make real progress in a new run. 

For now, I’m expanding closed testing to include all of the existing people that have signed up as testers. Some of them are particularly good at finding obscure bugs and this is the right time for that. I’m concerned that non-patron tester access will lead to a large influx of new tester applications so I won’t be accepting new tester applicants for the next month. New Patreons / Patrons still have access of course, but that’s a small manageable number of people. Basically if 5k people apply for the tester role then I’ll be stuck spending more time managing applications and reading the closed testing chat than working on space rail graphics and fixing bugs, and that’s not good for forward progress. 

Thanks to everyone for your patience. Space Exploration does so many weird things that it’s been far more affected than most other mods by all the little API changes. It’s taking a long time but we’re getting there.