Monday, July 21, 2008

Report It, Don't Fix It

I just found two bugs in the scenery system in beta 7 (both will be fixed in beta 8):
  • If an object had a blank TEXTURE statement with no trailing white space (this is legal in OBJ8, at least I think) the sim would crash when it rendered the object.
  • DDS-based terrain textures with the new paging system would show junk when they were far away.
One of our users did the right thing: even though it wasn't his scenery, he reported the problem and sent me the packages, rather than fixing the problem and going on.

My goal with scenery is to avoid regression bugs - that is, if it works in 900, it should work in 920. So I was glad to get these reports. I cringe when I read posts where people report "fixing" problems with content that are new to 920. Those are my bugs to fix!

1 comment:

Ryusennin said...

I wish Austin would dedicate the same sort of backward compatibility support for aircraft models (scenery is great, but last I checked, X-Plane was a *plane* simulator).

You know, like the V6/7 legacy panels which have been broken in XP8/9 for ages (more precisely, the test_linear and test_nearest instruments), and no amount of bug reports from me have changed anything in Austin's opinion that "V7 panels are dead" (spot on, Captain Obvious).