2018-11-02 Street Light Tweaks, Crash, Critical Landscape Bug

[Haxus]

Street Light Tweaks
In old cities, street lights gave off dim candle light when there was no power.

Street lights got several tweaks.

• Street lights now give off candle light when there is no power. Attenuation distance is 5m, unless that is brighter than the light bulb was configured.
  
• The size of the glow sprite is based on the attenuation distance of the light.
  
• Maximum attenuation distance increased to 250m.
  
• Road highlight increment was changed to 10m, to make street light spacing easier. 40m is a good spacing.
  
• Light color presets updated. UI changed to a combo box, ordered by Kelvin value.
  

Client Crash
Client program crashed when switching avatars.

Fixed crash bug.

[expert700]

Street Light Tweaks
In old cities, street lights gave off dim candle light when there was no power.

Street lights got several tweaks.

• Street lights now give off candle light when there is no power. Attenuation distance is 5m, unless that is brighter than the light bulb was configured.
  
• The size of the glow sprite is based on the attenuation distance of the light.
  
• Maximum attenuation distance increased to 250m.
  
• Road highlight increment was changed to 10m, to make street light spacing easier. 40m is a good spacing.
  
• Light color presets updated. UI changed to a combo box, ordered by Kelvin value.
  

Client Crash
Client program crashed when switching avatars.

Fixed crash bug.

Have you ever considered moving to a per-pixel lighting model? At the moment it looks like you're using Gouraud shading (per-vertex), and that has always looked especially jarring on the terrain. Even low end modern GPUs are powerful enough to handle per-pixel lighting using a simple model like Phong or Blinn-Phong, and it would make lighting generally look a lot smoother.

[Deantwo]

Can I also add a light to a building design? Or is the light unique to street lights?

[Haxus]

I considered allowing real light-emitting lights on buildings but opted against it. However, street lights can be placed on existing building sites.

Also, artificial lights can be created using nav lights. They light up at night and they get a glow sprite. They don't blink or oscillate and they don't illuminate their surroundings.

[Haxus]

Critical Landscape Bug
A player added a landscaper and all the roads and landscapers on their planet disappeared.

This critical bug forced a late day update and server restart today. The problem is fixed.

Client updates were posted.

Servers were updated and restarted.

[kirakira]

woww, thank you so much! good job fixing it! I'm sorry that it caused the late day update.
what was causing the bug?

[Haxus]

Sorry for the short notice shutdown, 10 seconds. That was not intended. It wasn't THAT critical.

[Haxus]

The bug was caused by a collection of objects that was serializing its count using a byte. Once the count exceeded 255, it rolled over and only stored/transmitted the rollover amount. The collection contains all geological features plus bomb craters, roads and landscapers. The 8 bit count used to be sufficient because old style roads are not stored in that collection. Bomb craters are safely limited by throwing away the old ones when the max craters is reached, somewhere around 50 I think. I overlooked it when I put the new style roads in there.

You got lucky because you must have deleted some roads and/or landscapers today. In the backup from last night, your world only had two mesas and a chasm. It lost all your roads and landscapers plus two rivers. If the servers had restarted, that's what your world would have come back with. Since you deleted a few, the count went back below the magic 256 and they got saved properly in the backup I made just before this fix.

I updated that collection to use a 16 bit integer instead. I doubt if you add 65k roads.

[Haxus]

This bug may have bitten Ceruleas in the past. I seem to recall him whittling away a moon using landscapers and them all disappearing at some point. That would be consistent with this bug.

[kirakira]

wow, that's really amazing, I remember when I deleted two or three of them when I was first realising that the roads were coming back when the value was looping. but if I knew that it was looping before I did that I wouldn't have deleted them, so that is very lucky. thank you! I like hearing about the details of what was happening with it

it's a really big relief now for me that the bug is out of the way. it has been about a week now with just the one day that it was working again for some reason

thank you for fixing it!!