Foundry bug bashing thread: need data and details!

duncanidaho11 · December 2017

Greetings,

The Foundry is, at present, taking in a bit of water. Over the last few seasons a number of bugs have come up that materially affect the editor. They don't keep us from making missions, but they do make missions more difficult to build and the Foundry much more daunting for new authors. The two I'm most concerned about (for the purposes of this thread) are:

Objective state transitions do [occasionally] not fire after an objective is completed
Very occasionally, the player's ship in preview can only rotate, drops like a stone on spawn. Alternatively player character can't move on ground after spawn.

But since we don't know what causes these bugs, it's difficult to hand these off to Cryptic and hope for a fix in the precious dev time the Foundry receives. Maybe it's not something players are aware of (ie. server magic), but in case there is a cause, we need to do more troubleshooting.

For bug 1, we suspect that changes to the story tab will occasionally cause other objectives not to work properly. Where we can start is simply what types of objectives are breaking and what objectives around it. This will help us a lot with stage two: trying to cause it (by adding and removing objectives in the tab. If there's a pattern, we can focus on it.)

Here is an open google spreadsheet where authors can report this info:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mlxipvxwsX1Ckcn94mvh5NXacZ4kkjBJoImIWnDiMls/edit?usp=sharing

For bug 2, we need a little more basic info. The go-to fix is restart the STO editor. That's good (for authors) but there's some questions we need answered (to move onto trying to reproduce the bug. Namely:

Does the issue affect other maps?
Does this issue affect duplicate copies of the same map?
Does the issue persist when you remove all objects? (without saving, naturally)
What objectives does this map have? Have they been set yet?

Depending on the answers to these questions, we can move onto to trying to reproduce "can't move, my ship falls" (reply to the thread). So DON'T just try to clear the bug when it happens. Dig in and help us troubleshoot.