Patch Notes September Update - Patch 2

Soron Silin

Soron Silin
AveCandido said:
Do not you think it is a bit unreal that statement of distribution of employees that you do?
I do not think that Frontier has published how many are dedicated and that not even that the distribution of developers is equitable as you propose?
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Factabulous said:
Please don't say that. Fdev have stated a team of 100 Devs, you're just feeding the trolls by posting estimates.
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I was merely pointing out that the fact that Frontier now has 500 people on its staff, that doesn't mean that all of them can work on Elite Dangerous.

It makes little difference if there are 100 working on Elite and only 50 on each of Planet Zoo and Jurassic World Evolution, or fewer marketing people and more on the development team. It's still around 20-ish working on these bugs and fleet carriers. Maybe fewer, maybe as much as 30. The time required and the decisions to be made would look much the same.

Now if they took the entire 2.0 team and set them to fixing bugs, or even robbed the other product teams, that could make a huge difference. But they couldn't afford to do that for long and the more people you add, the more they get in each-other's way; there's diminishing returns.

I expect another one or two patches, much smaller than this one with the tricker bugs fixed. But they can't afford to spend much more time on them without impacting the December release and that would be another PR nightmare.
 

Dutchman141

Dutchman141
Soron Silin said:
A couple of years ago I wrote probably the largest and most intricate piece of code that I've ever written. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that it was on par with the whole planetary landing stuff, maybe add atmosphere to that, (although probably not the shader bits.) It was a tour de force and a nightmare all in one. It also had a bug. After running for around two hours the program it was part of would crash. I worked for months on that bug. Every time I got close to it the symptoms would change; it still crashed but now it crashed miles away from where I had tracked it to. It was like hunting a man-eating tiger in the forests of rural Nepal and finding its empty den just as the news reports sightings of it in Delhi. I was taking so long that the management put two other guru-level developers on the task along with me. After spending probably six man-months on this single bug, one of them found it.

The function to create a new thread takes the stack size of the new thread as a parameter. If you specify zero, then Windows uses a default size of 2Mbytes. This was plenty and I had had no idea how much I needed, so that was what I had done. But the environment I was using was not Windows, and it used a default of only 2Kbytes. Even that would have been enough, except for one single function. It wasn't called often or even all the time, but when it was called it used 6Kbytes. Even then it didn't crash all the time, the memory it corrupted was usually empty, but every now and then, maybe after about two hours, it hit something important.

Six man-months, and the fix was five characters long: delete "0", insert "16384". The particular digits aren't important; anything over about 8000 would have done the job.
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Yeah I remember a similar situation but let me ask you this.
Did your company let the customer do the testing for you or leave them hanging for weeks not being able to use that particular application?
The company I worked for sure didn't, when a bug wasn't solvable in a very short time we'd revert to the previous version that did work.
 

VR SenseiMatty

VR SenseiMatty
Dutchman141 said:
Yeah I remember a similar situation but let me ask you this.
Did your company let the customer do the testing for you or leave them hanging for weeks not being able to use that particular application?
The company I worked for sure didn't, when a bug wasn't solvable in a very short time we'd revert to the previous version that did work.
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Am I the only one here not working in the software industry? 😜

In my company if the system we "develop" has a "bug", our "product" is "grounded" and in some case our customer loses a lot of money:
AOG
 

Dillon Fallon

Dillon Fallon
Stephen Benedetti said:
Hey Commanders,

We have updated the thread with the following:

The team has investigated the disconnect and mission list communication issue for console players, and we have implemented a change that should reduce the amount of times players encounter this.
However, if you have any further problems, please let us know.
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Thanks for the update. That's much appreciated.
 

Dutchman141

Dutchman141
SenseiMatty said:
Am I the only one here not working in the software industry? 😜

In my company if the system we "develop" has a "bug", our "product" is "grounded" and in some case our customer loses a lot of money:
AOG
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Yeah, that's a whole other line of work, far more responsibility compared to a video game.
So was our work though, I'm retired now, we exclusively worked for the military, national and international.
They were our only customers and they tend to not take less for granted.
In your work but also ours, lives were at stake, a bit different from not being able to play a video game for a couple weeks.

Still I'm gutted by what gamedevelopers get away with at the cost of the customers without any real consequences for them.
 
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Dutchman141

Dutchman141
Stephen Benedetti said:
Hey Commanders,

We have updated the thread with the following:

The team has investigated the disconnect and mission list communication issue for console players, and we have implemented a change that should reduce the amount of times players encounter this.
However, if you have any further problems, please let us know.
Click to expand...

Very good, I hope this solves the problem.

Any news on the screen tearing on Xbox?
 

ShadowOfRaxxla

ShadowOfRaxxla
Stephen Benedetti said:
Greetings Commanders,

The Elite Dangerous servers will be offline for all platforms on the 3 October at 07:00 (UTC) to apply the September Update - Patch 2.

We are aware that there is an issue where some Commanders, specifically those on console, are experiencing the "Failed to communicate with server. Unable to get an up to date mission list from server" message when trying to access missions at a starport's mission board and passenger lounge. The team are currently investigating measures to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Update: The team has investigated the disconnect and mission list communication issue for console players, and we have implemented a change that should reduce the amount of times players encounter this.​
However, if you have any further problems, please let us know.​

Thank you for your patience and vigilance as we address these issues.

Please find the full Patch Notes below:

Crashes/Stability
  • Fixed a softlock that could occur when trading materials at a material trader
  • Fixed a crash that could occur during the new starter experience
  • Fixed softlock that could occur when hiring crew members
  • Fixed a crash that could occur after clearing a save and skipping the new starter experience
  • Fixed a softlock that would occur when attempting to perform a hyperspace jump in an Imperial Clipper that has a Ship Kit applied
COVAS
  • When buying a new ship, your selected COVAS will automatically be inherited from your previous ship.
  • When purchasing SRVs and fighters, they will inherit the COVAS currently selected for your ship.
  • For new commanders, the applicable localised COVAS will now automatically be selected based on which language is set in the options menu
Diamondback Explorer
  • Fixed mismatched Paint Jobs for the Diamondback Explorer
Exploration
  • Fixed a case where PlayStation 4 commanders' First Discoveries were not appearing correctly
Interdiction
  • Fixed an issue where interdiction wouldn't end after the player submitted
Livery
  • Fixed an issue that meant the confirmation popup failed to appear after selecting an item the player owns
  • Fixed an issue that could cause the sort feature to not sort correctly
  • Fixed an issue that could prevent the SRV livery options to appear after leaving the Dashboard items category
  • Updated various Bobblehead preview cameras to give a better view of the item
  • Removed the 'preview' option on Engine Colours in livery, as it was not intended
  • Changed message from 'Outfitting Unavailable' to 'Livery Unavailable' when the livery isn't accessible
  • Updated the 'remove item option' message to 'clear the equipped item'
  • Renamed 'Back' to 'Exit'
Localisation
  • Fixed various translation errors
Multi-Crew
  • Fixed an issue that could cause the host's ship to disappear when deploying a fighter
New Starter Experience
  • Fixed an issue that could cause visual issues with the star in Matet when the player arrives in the system
  • Fixed an issue that could cause the weapons to automatically fire after being returned to the training area
  • Removed the ability to damage ship modules as this can lead to the player becoming stuck during the experience
  • Removed the ability for players to view and turn off modules during the experience
Outfitting
  • Fixed an issue that could cause incorrect weapon mounts to be displayed (fixed weapons showing as gimballed, for example)
Pause Menu
  • Combined 'restart training' and 'exit options' into one confirmation screen. Now, when the player selects to either restart or exit they then choose to either:
    • Restart the checkpoint or the entire Starter Experience/Training
    • Exit to main menu or desktop
  • This new restart/exit option UI is also inline with other areas of the game as well. This update fixes text truncation in other languages and unnecessary duplication of options, without increasing the amount of clicks needed to exit or restart
Rendering
  • Fixed an issue that caused stars in the night sky to disappear (creating, in some cases, 'hard edges')
Server
  • Updated local news articles for faction summaries, engineer progression and megaship itineraries
  • Fixed many causes of transaction server disconnections (error codes: Scarlet Krait, Magenta Krait, Black Adder, Yellow Adder)
Ship HUD
  • Corrected the schematic of a targeted starport to match its actual orientation
  • Fixed an issue that made ship modules appear twice in the module tab after swapping to a different ship
Store
  • Changed the Store buttons that appear on Port Services menu and main menu to orange and reordered them:
    • Port Services - Livery > Holo-me > Store
    • Main Menu - Livery > Buy Expansions > Store > Buy ARX
  • Fixed an issue on Xbox One that causes the preview camera to pan without any player input
  • Re-added a missing scroll bar
  • Packs now display how many items are in it
Weapons
  • Fixed Enforcer Canons being unable to be restocked through synthesis
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All positive changes. Any word on when horizons disconnect issue will be resolved?
 

Soron Silin

Soron Silin
Dutchman141 said:
Yeah I remember a similar situation but let me ask you this.
Did your company let the customer do the testing for you or leave them hanging for weeks not being able to use that particular application?
The company I worked for sure didn't, when a bug wasn't solvable in a very short time we'd revert to the previous version that did work.
Click to expand...
That's a fair point, and I am on record as saying that FDev appear to need to drag their QA into the 21st century.

But in my case, customers had been promised this feature months ago, and they were screaming for it. It wasn't them that found it, they weren't unable to use any existing features, but they were still hurting.
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
Stephen Benedetti said:
Greetings Commanders,

We just updated the Patch Notes to include:

Fixed the edge case where the ship HUD could be switched off (by the Thargoid shutdown effect) during a jump to Supercruise, causing the HUD to never appear again.

Thanks
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So ... I guess from this we are expecting yet more hyperdictions? or else this is a really random bug to fix as it has such an easy workaround 🤔
 
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