glitch screen

[amirnatsheh7]

what happen to the SCREEN?!?!?!?!

[Holger]

If you do not describe in detail what you have done exactly, nobody will be able to help you.

[Eizzoux]

First off, this, again, fits more to the Bug report category, second, it seems to be the same issue I've been experiencing a while ago (where the game's window rather warps or just turns completely black aside from toons and animations appearing over it).
Funny enough, when I changed some of my hardware around two years ago, such issues just stopped appearing for me, but... just two months ago because power went out just for a millisecond for me, my motherboard just completely noped out and stopped booting up, constantly staying on black screen. The point I'm going here with is that when I replaced the motherboard with an older one... these game screen issues started happening again, pretty much just as aggressively as Amir's game. In short, for some reason depending on the hardware, the game may just occasionally warp it's visuals, can't tell the exact reason behind that. But Holger probably remembers screenshots and a video I've been showing with some of the most wretched and gormless visual changes. This doesn't seem to be very predicatable, but at least that seems to depend on different hardware.

[Holger]

Yes, I do remember reports of such somehow similarly looking issues. And, unfortunately, I not only have not the slightest idea what might have caused such strange visual glitches, but also wasn't able to reproduce something like that so far (although I really tried hard, especially on Windows, as I never ever encountered such things on Linux or Mac).

And indeed it seems plausible that this may depend on some strange or rare combinations of hardware and/or drivers, and maybe also SDL versions. :-/

Therefore, I would *really* be interested if any of such visual glitches would be reproducible, and if so, how.

Regarding the initial post (although this specific bug is probably hard to track down even with the best bug report in the world), I really would like to repeat here what is needed to work on a problem or bug, that is, what's required for a good bug report:

• which version of R'n'D are you using?
• which operating system are you using?
• the necessary steps to reproduce the issue
• the expected outcome
• a description of the behavior
• a small, self-contained example exhibiting the behavior

Else I have no chance to reproduce a bug or problem, let alone fix it.

[jm28121977]

Hi Holger,

Is it possible to set up a bug report form, with required fields, so that we're forced to give all the helpful information?

Best wishes,
Jamie x

[Holger]

Hi Jamie,

yes, that's possible, and probably indeed a good idea, which could be done by adding a sticky post to the "Bug Reports" sub-forum. However, I don't want to force anyone to anything, and I am happy about every bug report I get, to be able to make the game better and improve things that currently do not work as they should.

When looking at the current sticky post in that sub-forum, and when thinking about this topic, I realize once again that most "normal" people (who bother to report a bug in a game they may care about) often don't like to use a bug tracking system or other formal procedures, but probably prefer to just write some post like "hey, this and that does not work that well in your game". Even in times when this forum had some more traffic, nearly nobody wanted to use the (in fact still functioning) Bugzilla bug tracker, and I can perfectly understand this. You have to register, log in, report a bug, cannot adjust it later, all using a very old software from the 90's, that looks and behaves like that (and I currently don't have anything better than this, although I checked out some possible alternatives).

So yes, maybe I should remove Bugzilla, and just add a sticky post with some recommendations (like those mentioned above) for those who care enough to create a useful bug report (or which I can link to if people have not seen it so far).

[Eizzoux]

What I think could also be a neat addition is the topic tag for the bug reports (and maybe new ideas as well), where if you just made a topic, the topic would automatically display as "Not reviewed", if the report was read by you, it would be "In progress", if you fixed the bug, then "Resolved", if you disagree with the idea or disprove the bug's presence, then it's "Declined". The last two tags would also automatically lock the topic and not allow us to send any more messages. Just for at least better sorting, because there's quite a few bug reports and ideas you rather forgot about or just missed completely (or just kept quiet, can't always tell).

[ncrecc]

What I think could also be a neat addition is the topic tag for the bug reports (and maybe new ideas as well), where if you just made a topic, the topic would automatically display as "Not reviewed", if the report was read by you, it would be "In progress", if you fixed the bug, then "Resolved", if you disagree with the idea or disprove the bug's presence, then it's "Declined". The last two tags would also automatically lock the topic and not allow us to send any more messages. Just for at least better sorting, because there's quite a few bug reports and ideas you rather forgot about or just missed completely (or just kept quiet, can't always tell).

is there a BBcode plugin that does that?

[filbo]

(1) I don't think you should get rid of the bugzilla instance unless it's active trouble to maintain.

(2) the suggestions about automatic updating of comments on a bug thread here seem ... unwise. Like they would be really hard to get right, a lot of trouble to maintain, and full of exceptions and trouble.

e.g. 'automatically lock the topic' -- so if you were going to comment 'well, that fixes most of the problem except when I do xyz ...' -- you have to start a new topic? Maybe it's a 'new bug' in formal database terms (and maybe you would then bother to fill in the 'related bug id' field while submitting it). For casual use like in a conversation forum like this, forcing a 'whoops not quite fix' into a new un-linked thread is a terrible idea. (Yes, you can link threads here; would anyone actually do so?)

[filbo]

... and I think the status quo is pretty much just fine. If hundreds of bugs per week were being reported, things would be different.

People occasionally mention something. The dev team (of one) address them when he gets to them. There is no benefit to adding extra formalisms to Holger's process unless he wants them! Which it doesn't sound like he does :)

[Holger]

First of all, thanks a lot for your comments on this topic, which I consider quite important.

I think that Eizzoux is perfectly right that it would be *very* helpful to know (for a bug reporter, and for others) to be able to see if a reported bug was (a) noticed at all, (b) confirmed, (c) considered as "should be fixed" or (d) "finally fixed" (or maybe "cannot be fixed" or "will not be fixed for this and that reason").

In fact, I really wanted to review the reported bugs of at least the last few years (that is, threads in the "Bug Reports" forum) for a long time now, but just haven't done it so far (and when doing it, at least marking solved bugs by adding a prefix "[SOLVED]" or "[FIXED]" to the thread subject/title).

On the other hand, I also think that an automated process would do more harm than good, for the exact reasons pointed out by filbo. (Especially there's no reason to prevent adding further replies to a thread for a supposedly fixed bug that maybe isn't really fixed, or that comes back in a later version of the game, as it was the case for quite some bugs in the past.)

Regarding Bugzilla, no, it doesn't make that much trouble (besides having to fix some Perl modules every time I have to upgrade the server to a new Ubuntu version, which happens around every four years, so that's fine). It's just that it's quite orphaned for many years now, and I don't see that this will change any time soon (and if it does, it maybe would be time to really look out for a more user-friendly way to report bugs in a formalized way, but I really don't see this for the next years, so I thought it would be better to remove it completely, especially as there are only a few bugs in it, and not a long and detailed bug history that would be worth keeping for future reference). But we can keep it for now.

So, to sum things up, it seems best if I would just allocate a Saturday afternoon to go through the last few dozens of bug threads and just manually mark them accordingly by adding a prefix to the title (as described above).

[ncrecc]

What I think could also be a neat addition is the topic tag for the bug reports (and maybe new ideas as well), where if you just made a topic, the topic would automatically display as "Not reviewed", if the report was read by you, it would be "In progress", if you fixed the bug, then "Resolved", if you disagree with the idea or disprove the bug's presence, then it's "Declined". The last two tags would also automatically lock the topic and not allow us to send any more messages. Just for at least better sorting, because there's quite a few bug reports and ideas you rather forgot about or just missed completely (or just kept quiet, can't always tell).

is there a BBcode plugin that does that?

by "BBcode" i meant phpBB. i'm daft

[Holger]

by "BBcode" i meant phpBB. i'm daft

No problem, I did understand what you meant. However, I think I will go without such plugin (which may exist or not, not sure), because my experience with phpBB is that any change from "vanilla" phpBB makes upgrading harder, and more work. Then, I think it shouldn't be too much of a problem to do such tagging just manually. The only thing that I could think of that could really be done automatically by such a plugin would be tagging new posts with "[not reviewed]", which should also be clear if a new post has no tag at all yet. Any further tagging must be done manually anyway, I think. (At least I cannot think of any change that could be done automatically by such a plugin).

So it's my task to update bug report posts with an appropriate tag now.