v0.1.48 (Early Access)

I am sorry about v0.1.47. It broke a lot of things that had been working fine, and if you spent the last few days wondering whether your datacentre was misbehaving or the game was, it was the game.

The cause was a rewrite of how the world gets from the simulation to your screen. It was meant to make multiplayer usable on a normal connection, and it did, but it also quietly stopped sending some updates at all. Panels froze on stale numbers. Equipment vanished from lists when you walked away from it. Incidents would not resolve. Cards you had just fitted did not show up. Those all had the same root cause, and none of it should have reached you.

What made it worse is that most of it was invisible from my side: the tests passed, because they were checking that the right thing was sent, not that it arrived. That has been fixed too, and there are now checks that run the real game client against the real engine and compare what each of them thinks the world looks like.

This release is mostly repair work. Thank you to everyone who reported these, especially the people who went back and forth with screenshots and logs to pin down exactly what was and was not updating. That is what found most of the bugs below.

Fixed

• Live readings update again across the whole game. Panels, consoles and gauges could sit on a stale number until you clicked something, because a change was worked out correctly and then not sent.
• The Connectivity page is live. Carrier lines, throughput and the border status were frozen until you changed the uplink policy or interacted with the page.
• Router and firewall consoles keep up. Their port readings refreshed every couple of seconds while a switch beside them updated continuously. They now update at the same rate as everything else.
• A server's CPU usage is now correct. The processor figure on the host inspector only moved when something else about that machine changed, so it could read minutes out of date.
• Your machines stay in the panels wherever you stand. Only racks within a few metres of you were sent, so capacity, network, services, incidents, segments and the customer list lost the rest of your fleet.
• Incidents resolve, and the repair button works. Both read the machine list, which emptied as you walked away from the hardware, so an incident could not clear and a repair had nothing to act on.
• Servers show the parts you fitted. Network cards and power cords appeared minutes late, or only after something else forced a refresh. In a shared game they arrived in whatever order the connection managed.
• Falling behind in a shared game no longer feeds on itself. A lagging player was sent the whole world instead of the changes, which takes longer to arrive than the gap it closes.
• Joining a large world on a slow connection completes. This was the same fault: a guest still loading was already too far behind to be sent anything small, and never recovered.
• Quit to Desktop saves your game. Quit to Title always did. The button beneath it did not, so anything since your last save was lost on the way out.
• A customer asking for more storage now tells you how much storage. Object storage and database tenants listed processor and memory instead, which is what the machinery behind the bucket needs, not the ask.
• Modules and fibre leads sit the right way up in the bottom row of ports. Every one faced the same way, so the lower row of each pair looked upside down against its socket.
• Objective text wraps at words, not letters. A long objective could break one character per line, turning "Reach the Data Center" into a vertical column of single letters.
• Other players stop blinking in and out. A player whose position updates were briefly held up by a busy connection was treated as having left, so their character vanished and reappeared.

Changed

• A shared game uses a fifth of the bandwidth it did. Equipment sends its readings separately from its description, so a changing number no longer resends the whole machine.
• The host does less work per player. It was working out what had changed once for every player instead of once per tick, and the answer is the same for all of them.

Notes

• Saves work in both directions with v0.1.47. The format did not change, and none of these faults could write anything bad into a save. What was on disk was always correct.
• Multiplayer needs everyone on v0.1.48. The world update format changed for the work above, so players on different versions cannot share a game.
• Readings from distant equipment refresh a little slower. What you are stood next to updates as often as before. The rest of the site cycles instead, which is what pays for the bandwidth saving.