Mimesis Online from Polish Developer Tannhauser Gate, is a role-playing game which transports you to a world where the borders between reality and illusion do not exist. An unimaginable catastrophe on a cosmic scale transformed this world, playing havoc with the natural order of things, twisting everything, even time itself, wiping out civilisation as we know it. For the Universe itself, everything changed and nothing changed - a new order was established, one where entropy rules, without intelligent beings working to hold it back. The beings who survived the catastrophe have tried to rebuild their world, each in their own way. They once again want to enforce on the natural chaos their order, their ways - authority, money, prejudice, cruelty and conviction of their own superiority. Once again, they are showing the unlimited ability of intelligent races to adapt and survive. The forgotten civilisation is waking up and slowly but surely emerging as the "new" civilisation - and how similar it is to the old one.

On a regular basis we will feature a developer's diary made by the Mimesis Online development team. In this diary Derek Handley talks about hunting bugs.

Part 10. "Bug Hunt"

Today's Developer's Diary was going to be titled "Fix your shirt, your influences are showing...", but i decided to shuffle the order a little, particularly as I didn't write anything last week - there should have been an entry last Monday, according to the schedule - and I thought I'd write something about the work as it's progressing, rather than talking about influences on our work.

Hunting Bugs
Bug hunts, otherwise known as Beta Tests, are a slow and demanding process, but so necessary. The things you pick up during them - bugs and other errors - range from things you should have noticed to things that you'd never have found on your own.
Our Beta Tests are cracking along, and we've released a whole slew of updates and patches, and watched with the testers as things in the game have been polished and debugged. We're almost ready to go with the next stage of the tests. Touch wood! Always do that if you say anything positive about computers - they'll throw you a curve ball every time.

The Viper
I found two big bloopers that were entirely my fault, things I'll have to change. One of those is the movement of a species called a Viper - there are four sub-species in the game - the Lava Viper is the commonest, the Hill and Cave Vipers are the rarest. It's a being that was assumed to be a monster by the first humans who saw it, their primal fear of snake-like creatures coming through. It has turned out to be more primate-like in its behaviour - curious and clannish, the Vipers stay away from settlements, but seem to be trying to learn from the bipeds they share the world with.

But I digress. The Viper has two powerful forearms and a long muscular tail, and I had originally envisonged the species as having been amphibious before the Day of Rage - once more at home in the water, now adapted to life in a variety of environments, even in the desert. This rapid adaptation is thanks to the phase gene. When it came to the beast's movements, we (Artur, Tomek and myself) had this concept of it reaching forward with those powerful arms, digging in, and dragging itself forward. Y'know, even as I write that now, I realize that it even sounds ridiculous. But I only realized the impracticality of the movement when I saw it in the terrain. I don't know why I didn't see that before. So that's one change that I want to implement - not a bug, in the computerific sense of the word, but something that the Beta Tests showed us that we need to change.

Let's Race
The second thing, again coming from my department, is my use of the word races. I could blame TSR...but no, that would be unfair. I referred to the Hirudon, the Skirros, the Humans, the Riven, et al. as races. They're species. Slaps forehead. Another thing to change. Races are all part of the same species Derek. They can interbreed. They look vaguely alike. Write that out 100 times. Bad Biologist.
Oh, and if you ever discover that you've written the wrong word several times in a long document, and you want to quickly change it to the right word, be careful if you do it with the 'Find' and 'Change' functions under 'Edit'. I thought I'd quickly do so by hitting 'Change All'. And ended up with: 'The inhabitants of Gotrath would find themselves in a desperate species against time to evacuate the city.'
Think about it.

The other bugs that the team has been working out of the game are things like texture problems, the length of messages from the computer to the player (some were getting cut off), stuff like that. There were a few changes to the interface that testers will probably have noticed - repositioning things, adding prompts. And above all, the programmers have focused on reducing the size of the data packages being transferred, to speed the overall gameplay. There's still work to do, but as I say, we're moving along at a satisfactory pace.
If you've never worked on something like this, you might find it strange that we wouldn't have noticed these things earlier. The truth of the matter is that you really don't. Until you actually see something in someone else's metaphorical hands, you don't realize certain things - you begin to see it through their eyes, begin to notice things. Also, the fact that the game is running 24-7 means that things that only show up when X, Y and Z are all in place. Actually, before we started the tests, we were more inclined to notice things that we'd like to change the colour of, rewrite, redecorate...

Okay. The picture I've included is Tomek Gardiasz's concept art for the Viper. And I'm out of time for this week. But I'll be back double-quick - see you next Monday, instead of in a fortnight.
Take care!
Derek Handley.