I should have known from the gloating edge to his voice that he’d found a bug. On our last Tuesday call, Jesse had me bring up the game and go to the city stuff.

See, the way it works – there are huge encounter databases in Solar Trader. All sorts of weird shit can go down. And part of this is how much time it costs you. Stopping to consider a market stall does not take the same amount of time as arranging to have a pod of Earth slaves loaded. In our data, there is a minimum and maximum time. The time it takes is randomized between these values. But because of a typo, I was never setting the top end. So, instead of something taking 30 to 60 minutes, it would take between 30 and 0, which would come out in the formula as 30. Everything was done very, very efficiently.

Of course, once the gloating was done, I sat down that night and fixed it. I didn’t think to consider what this meant, but suddenly the average time taken for a task jumped (in the case above, by an average 15 minutes). Now my ship-chores (find a cargo, get the old one removed, the new one on, and then ungrade and fuel the ship) were taking nearly all day (these were big tasks, and had huge variations that had never been used before). I couldn’t get everything done.

So this morning, I bumped the values to average around the prior minimum time. This should make the game play roughly as it had before. I guess, at least. I’ll be grabbing up my jacket and taking my ship out for a run, and see how long it takes.

Hopefully we’ll have the alpha version on the pad for Christmas.