As someone with almost 500 hours in the game, it is pretty buggy and has got serious issues that should've been worked out in early access, however those are almost exclusively on the technical side of the game, and not what new/most players would see.
The sub editor is glitchy in of itself, and that's the best functioning of all the editors. Glitches are a problem, and when reported, are often dismissed as "working as intended". The creature editor is in an even worse state, as for what I know, it's barely functional, and a mess to work with anyways. There's little to no documentation on how it works, as nobody wants to use it because of how awful it is, and it has actively pushed people away from the modding scene (example: MN Creatures mod.). The encounter editor is even worse. It's barely *mentioned* online because of how obscure it is, it isn't even fully integrated into the game, you have to use console commands to access it.
The devs pay little to no attention to bugs, allowing things that have been reported as significant issues to get out of betas, by just claiming it's not a problem or that they're just not gonna bother (Quote - "also as for "patch only for bug fixes and stability" would be a waste of dev time" (Hex, one of the devs.)) Not to mention how they have just been outright rude to prominent community members.
It honestly feels like Undertow don't actually want this side of the community. So many people are pushed away because of a lack of effort on their part. Sorry for the small rant, but the game has definitely got its problems.
The devs pay little to no attention to bugs, allowing things that have been reported as significant issues to get out of betas, by just claiming it's not a problem or that they're just not gonna bother
This is kind of disheartening to read, considering we currently spend a sizable chunk of our time on nothing but fixing bugs, and have a dedicated QA team testing the game full-time to minimize the amount of bugs that make it to the public version and to help the programming team diagnose existing issues.
But I agree that there are quite a lot of bugs to iron out still, many of which I really wish we would've had time to fix before leaving Early Access.
I also admit that we can be quite hasty in closing issue reports as "non-issues" - we get so many reports about issues, that we generally can't put that much time into diagnosing a single issue and figuring out whether it's a bug or for example some issue at the player's end, or something caused by a mod. However, even if we close a ticket, we do often re-open them if we get further information that suggests it might be an actual bug in the vanilla game.
It's also worth noting that we close reports that are not technically bugs (e.g. "this thing isn't that well thought-out and should be improved"), but that doesn't mean we disagree nor that we don't intend to address the issues, it's just that we use the issue tracker for bugs only, and other things like ideas and suggestions for improving some features go in the "discussions" section.
Quote - "also as for "patch only for bug fixes and stability" would be a waste of dev time" (Hex, one of the devs.))
I feel like this comment has been unfairly taken out of context. Hex was saying that since we have several devs working on the game, many of which aren't programmers, we can't have the entire team only focusing on bugfixes and stability. Or in other words, the time that let's say our less programming-savvy team members spend implementing new content is not time away from bugfixes and improving stability. However, it is true that new content tends to introduce new bugs, and it is important that we don't just keep piling on new content and new bugs on top of old bugs, so we do need to consider how sensible it is to add things to the game as opposed to holding off on new content and focusing on stability. And now after the full release, the focus has shifted towards the latter.
Thank you for even responding to a comment like this, and I do admit that I may have been too aggressive with it. I wrote it pretty soon after I saw that the latest update had completely broken the majority of the things I design in the sub editor, even though the bug causing it had been reported while the update had been pushed to unstable, and had been marked as a non-issue. I hadn’t thought much of the bug until then, as it seemed major (for people who do sub editing), had been reported and it was during the unstable phase, so I had assumed it was to be patched out, and as it wasn’t, it meant I was very frustrated with this topic at the time, given that I’ve dedicated several hundred hours into the sub editor. Recently though, I’ve heard that the bug in question is in line for a fix, even though it had been marked as a non-issue.
As for the comment on an update on bugfixes and stability, I had seen it myself with the context you mention removed, as I was not there when the message was sent, and rather had been talking to a person I know, and to be fair to y’all, the context does make it a much more reasonable answer.
As for what I said about the state of the editors though, it still does often feel like there is little care towards the modding and designing portion of the community, even if that is unintentional, as many incredibly talented faces have been pushed away from making mods, creatures and submarines because of issues such as how quickly bugs are seemingly dismissed as working fine, although I know alot of us haven’t really thought of the side that many issues are reported due to mods, and so I think alot of us haven’t seen the side that you believed the issue to be caused by a mod. Even though this may be the cause behind the scenes, it still can be incredibly frustrating to see that things you have spent a long time working on be destroyed due to a bug that has seemingly been deliberately ignored. Plus, most of the editors themselves are in dire need of polish, as they are often extremely difficult to work with, which is a large part of why these talented people have given up on the modding/designing scene (e.g. Morphine, the developer of MN creatures, which is arguably one of the most well made and polished creature mods on the workshop) I do really believe the editors themselves are a huge boost for the game, and the fact that they are simply built-in and still allow for quite a depth of detail is a major reason as to why the modding community for the game is as big as it is, but everything beyond the sub editor is incredibly difficult to use, as documentation is near nonexistent on how to use them, and something like the creature editor feels like it shouldn’t be on the main menu of the game. I do understand that the majority of dev time is always just going to cater for the people who just play the game, as it’s the majority of players, and I do like that things like the creature editor is on the main menu, yet it feels like it shouldn’t be there. I suppose something that could potentially ease some peoples frustrations with it would be, if it’s possible, so that instead of marking issues that were potentially caused by a mod as not an issue, to mark it as potentially caused by a mod, and allow it to be re-opened if either the reporter can show it’s not a mod, or if you see something that means it may not be caused by a mod, as you do now. Whether implementing that into the bug reporter is possible, I have no idea. But something following along a similar thread to that would likely go a long way to ease this sort of issue, as even though people would be annoyed that a bug reported is marked as a potential mod issue, it’d likely be less so than marking it as not an issue.
Thank you for what you do for this game, as I said my initial message was written while I was very frustrated with the situation, and the context didn’t really let me mention that I do genuinely love the game, otherwise I wouldn’t have stuck around for 500 hours i suppose.
No offense taken, I get how frustrating it can be to have stuff you've spent a lot of time working on get broken by some bug or change introduced by an update! I'm curious, which specific bug in the latest update are you referring to? We could possibly bump it up in priority and try to get it hotfixed soon depending on how severe it is.
I also completely agree with what you're saying about the editors. Especially the character editor: it's so complex and unintuitive that we not even all of us in the dev team know how to use it, and I would really like to make it a little more user-friendly at some point. I unfortunately can't give any promises on when that might happen though, considering there are more pressing issues to address than an editor that's only relevant to a very, very small portion of the player base.
something that could potentially ease some peoples frustrations with it would be, if it’s possible, so that instead of marking issues that were potentially caused by a mod as not an issue, to mark it as potentially caused by a mod, and allow it to be re-opened if either the reporter can show it’s not a mod
This is actually close to how we do it already: when we close a report, we add a comment explain why it was closed (e.g. if we could not reproduce it and it seems likely it is an issue with a mod). It's possible to comment on the report even after it's closed, and if someone adds more info that suggests it's an issue in the game that we can address, we reopen the ticket.
The bug specifically was that scaling below 0.100 in the sub editor was completely removed. I work with Decotrauma right now, and we do a lot of work on high-detail sub assemblies, so a large amount of items we use are scaled below 0.100, which ended up meaning around 1/3-1/2 of everyone’s work, including mine, is no longer correct. It had a huge impact on all of our work on Decotrauma and the subs we designed. And yeah, as I said it’s not like we expect you to put a heavy amount of developer resources into this sorta stuff, as always this part of the community is relatively small.
work with Decotrauma right now, and we do a lot of work on high-detail sub assemblies, so a large amount of items we use are scaled below 0.100, which ended up meaning around 1/3-1/2 of everyone’s work, including mine, is no longer correct.
Ah, yeah, that was a pretty dumb oversight on our part. We set a limit to how much items could be scaled down because very small scales caused issues with specific items, and naively assumed there wouldn't be any practical use for scales below x0.1 and made it a hard limit that applies to all items. But the sub building and modding community always seems to find creative ways to use features in ways we hadn't anticipated! :D
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