06-01-2015, 07:03 AM
Andrew Pam, who uses High Frontier on Linux, sent us the screen shot below last night (after version 0.16 came out).
It looks like a flooded cylinder, right? But the Water Level is clearly set to zero, so that shouldn't be possible. And then it came out that this design isn't a cylinder at all; it's a barbell.
At this point, we thought we had some really weird Linux bug, perhaps one that made High Frontier unplayable on some machines. But Andrew helpfully sent us the colony file (as well as doing several other tests we asked of him). And it turns out, the same colony looks exactly the same on our machines.
Good news: it's not a Linux bug!
Bad news: it's a bug that affects everybody.
Good news: ...but it's easily avoided.
It turns out that this is simply caused by having barbells with a bell radius that's too small. For version 0.17, we'll fix it so that you can't create designs with a bell radius of under 35 m. Though even that is just barely playable... we recommend a radius of 50 or more if you want to have a reasonable amount of room.
It looks like a flooded cylinder, right? But the Water Level is clearly set to zero, so that shouldn't be possible. And then it came out that this design isn't a cylinder at all; it's a barbell.
At this point, we thought we had some really weird Linux bug, perhaps one that made High Frontier unplayable on some machines. But Andrew helpfully sent us the colony file (as well as doing several other tests we asked of him). And it turns out, the same colony looks exactly the same on our machines.
Good news: it's not a Linux bug!
Bad news: it's a bug that affects everybody.
Good news: ...but it's easily avoided.
It turns out that this is simply caused by having barbells with a bell radius that's too small. For version 0.17, we'll fix it so that you can't create designs with a bell radius of under 35 m. Though even that is just barely playable... we recommend a radius of 50 or more if you want to have a reasonable amount of room.
Joe Strout
Lead Developer, High Frontier