Development Media

Staring in the mirror, but something ain't right...

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Aren't we forgetting something?
...nahh, it's fine

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The name's Box. Beam Box

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Full size image:

 

The squeak peek

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A simpler way to straighten your frame. Repair shops hate this ONE TRICK!!

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Here's a small insight into our development process:

Trying to maintain compatibility with old versions ("retrocompatibility" we call it) is a vastly underestimated and unappreciated amount of work. For example, modern versions of Windows are able to run 20, 30 year old software - that's pretty much a miracle of software engineering, has to be tons of monumentally hard work to achieve it. And just like computer security, this retrocompatibility only gets noticed when something goes wrong. It's incredibly difficult to do when your software is not stuck in the past, but constantly evolving with new features, bugfixes, improvements, optimizations, etc - which we constantly do. This difficulty is why each update will normally break a handful of mods, despite all our invisible efforts.

Today I'm sharing a simple screenshot of an internal tool I've needed to create to speed up the testing of certain retrocompatibility code:


This is not a tool that will be released publicly, just something I wrote quickly for development purposes. It's not related to retrocompatibility of mods, but rather to retrocompatibility of the "user folder" (the place that stores your settings, vehicle configs, mods, screenshots, level modifications, etc). The overall goal here, is to simplify how your precious files are handled after each update is released: currently we move files around, do some cleanups, etc. We want to reduce this complexity and minimize confusion (like people unaware that their files are still available in the old place), we also want to have Steam Cloud sync working again, maybe squash some bugs in the process, and various other benefits.

I've spent the past few months slowly planning and implementing this transition. And this internal tool is now helping me in the final testing phases. It provides an overview of everything related to userfolders, helping test varied scenarios more easily: what happens if a user hasn't played in 2 years and comes back? Now make that 6 years. Make it 1 month too, of course. What if the user is constantly jumping back and forth between the latest version, and some old unsupported branch for windows 7 compatibility? Etc.

Hopefully the transition will be transparent to everyone and bug-free. Ideally nobody will notice a single thing, it'll be just another update. But we're only humans, so we'll see... much more testing needs to take place still, and we'll still miss some corner case, I'm sure. Fingers crossed!

Thanks for reading - hope this post wasn't too technical and somewhat interesting

 

Things have spun out of control

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Well done

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