The Bug-Eyed Wolf and Other Bugs

Most game bugs are not particularly entertaining, but we happened to see several that were lately, so today we'll share them for your amusement. These represent several different kinds of bugs:

1) User Error (or PIBKAC*): The titular bug today's video occurred after Steve (our 3D wolf artist) made a few changes to the wolf models, so I then had to swap in the updated model. Tommi (our lead Unity developer) had made this task quick and easy -- except for the IK stuff, which requires that we manually assign bones in the rig to several IK slots. Not hard to do, but I made a couple mistakes and voila, the bug-eyed wolf.

2) Data Disagreement: The undead hare bug occurred when a bug caused the host and clients (the other players in the game) to have different values for the hare's health, so when a client player killed the hare, it still had a bit of health in the host's game. Since the host runs the game simulation, Mikko (our multiplayer developer) found that "the hare was alive but in the wolf's mouth, while its AI on the client was trying to run away but couldn't, and the remote animal movement code got very confused."

3) Chokepoint: The Elk bug occured during a multiplayer stress test to see how spawning a large number of animals affects game performance. When we had over 150 animals spawned, another player joined the game, so the host had to send them an enormous amount of scent-track data. And that caused the game memory to run out of buffer space, which then threw an error, so, according to Mikko, "proper cleanup was not done and the data was left in the send queue. Then every time the host wanted to send updates, it first tried to re-send the already queued data, which kept failing so it couldn't actually send anything." And that left all the NPC animals high and dry, awaiting instructions.

4) And finally, the Death Trap bug isn't really a bug -- everything is working properly -- but it highlighted a problem that needed some attention: the bison only occasionally moved around while grazing, which wasn't a problem normally, but it becomes a problem if you happen to die right behind a bison. Fortunately, it's easily addressed by making the bison move more often when grazing (though you'll still want to be careful about when your click Revive.)

These and many other bugs have been identified during many, many hours of playtesting by George and Noah (our QA team), along with our dedicated group of private beta testers. We've fixed dozens of those bugs and, while we have many more on the to-do list, we're definitely making great progress with multiplayer. We don't have a date for multiplayer public beta testing and release, but we expect both before the summer is over.

PIBKAC: Oldschool tech support speak for "Problem is between keyboard and chair."

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We have released the first episode of WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition (Amethyst Mountain) for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. While in Early Access, we are updating the game frequently with more features, multiplayer, and ultimately the Slough Creek episode with pups. The mobile version will come after the game is completed on PC/Mac platforms. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall (DLC).