Finding and reporting the problems with new engines so we can finally update

The engine we use is nearly two years old. Significant improvements have been made since then (vehicle pathing etc) but we cant take advantage of them because of the problems people have with the engine versions the improvements were released in. We also lack the ability to get engine features updated/fixed on an old version of Spring.

To my knowledge the two major problems with updating to a newer engine version are ATI compatibility and performance in 10v10. If those were fixed it would be possible to use a newer engine version and take advantage of all the improvements that have been made. To do this it will be necessary to find out when the problems occur, on what hardware setups etc and see if there are any patterns to it. Engine devs may be able to find and fix the problems if detailed reports are provided about them.

It could be much harder than that. A lot of engine versions have been and gone so it might be difficult to find where the problem started, which would be very useful information for getting it fixed.

I think it will be important to be able to work with the engine devs to fix bugs found after releasing on Steam, which wont be possible on 91.0. What are others' thoughts on the matter?

quote: ...97.0.1-19. It is as fresh as plasma spirals.

quote: For the record, the game is also unplayble for me on 97. Unless solution is found in some reasonable timeframe, I will push for revert.

-Licho
The 10v10 room still uses 91 too.

can some one post a step by step tut to isolate problem and reporting it?

I saw so many rage and so little resource provided for bug fixing.

and I am quite lost as well trying to report bug tbh.

We used to have a list of active tester but there is no reliable way to communicate with everyone, any suggestion?

old tester list:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Asgbickq501_dGJoX3lwVzF1RW5DNzdPTllIQlBFblE&usp=sharing


old testing plan:

http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Testing_Zero-k_Draft

svn [old system] and git hub [new system] have native bug log just not as robust as bugzilla.

and remember for each extra component we need more man power to establish and maintain [we have no manpower].

will the old issues list be moved?

there is an import script(python) to migrate the issues list from googlecode to github. see https://github.com/arthur-debert/google-code-issues-migrator

is there someone who is doing this? else i would take care within the next 2-3 weeks.

according to the migrator script, each issue will generate github watcher notification email anyway. spam it will be, so spam it is. so you dont say let there be spam? can i get some other dev's opinion too?

The performance issues some people experience don't seem to be based on how powerful your computer is. I can play in a 6v6 without too much lag but people with much more powerful computers lag out. In the game I linked all but one of the enemy team dropped or quit because of the performance (the last one with ~1400 elo then steamrolled us, it was a funny game). Maybe it is something to do with specific hardware setups?

I played one game yesterday http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/267744
It wasn't lagging until I started to build puppies. The number of them changed several times between nearly zero and 100+. I don't know what happend at other points of the map, but I cpould see that I started to lag every time the number of puppies started to get over ~50 and I cached up, when they were destroyed.

One more remark. I have a Radeon HD7500 and I had to switch to the newest driver to run the 97 engine.

yanom its more like people want to play not lag...