Over the coming weeks, Konrad will take us through a range of different topics as we continue progressing with Combat. First up is one of the more annoying problems the team has faced recently - a memory issue that has been causing any build to crash quickly after launching.

Konrad - Design

"Godus has seen a great many changes to its code base in the last few months. As we were expecting, at some point this would mean trouble. Recently this really caught up to us - builds were becoming so unstable that it was time to roll our sleeves up and do some serious maintenance. Just imagine how annoying it has been trying to develop game that crashes every few minutes! Unfortunately the root of many of these issues have proved to be very difficult to track down, the debugging tools we've been using so far insufficient. Richard has been tracking down and dealing with it"

Richard - Programming

"The first step towards solving memory issues of this sort is to hook up some powerful diagnostic tools. As with any game codebase, Godus is far too big and complicated for us to go through by hand finding these issues - it would take years! Instead, the tools have given us a load of data pointing towards potential issues. Lately, I've spent time sifting through this and fixing issues where necessary. We're starting to get the benefit from this as we uncover more issues, but there's still more work to be done to get to a point where we're happy with the game's stability."

Konrad - Design

"So what does this mean for Godus? Well, it's but a mere setback of course! These kinds of challenges are part and parcel of game development. We've been hard at work creating a special build of Godus to run on a specialised debugging and memory logging machine which will provide us with highly detailed data allowing us to identify the source the instabilities. While it has meant we've had to divert a significant portion of Richard's time from the development of features, it will ultimately mean a far more stable and robust game going forward."