Cities in Motion – Developer Diary #6 – Testing

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co_martsu

Colossal Order CEO
Colossal Order Dev
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Aug 25, 2010
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  • Colossal Order Staff
Testing is one of the most demanding parts of game development. Not only is it quite boring, but it also takes a lot of time and repetition, and trained testers are generally few and far between. With Cities in Motion, we did most of the testing with our team, just checking that the designed features work as intended and playing if we had some extra time on our hands.
Some of the bugs that came up were just general glitches but some were really funny, and those are the ones I’d like to share with you!

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First, there were the invisible waterbuses. All of a sudden, about half of the waterbuses in Amsterdam turned invisible. You could still see the smoke coming from the pipes and the number of passengers on board, but the vessels themselves were nowhere to be seen. Also, this affected only half of the waterbus fleet, even when they were all of the same type and on the same lines. The passengers didn’t seem to mind; they confidently walked onto the invisible boats. This bug was likely due to old saves in a new version of the game, so your waterbuses should stay visible!

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Next, we had people with supernatural abilities: they could walk on water! Again, this one has to do with the waterbuses. Every waterbus has gates through which the passengers enter and leave. All of the boats are different and are inspired by real boats and ferries, so the gates were positioned differently on each vehicle. Every vehicle in the game has certain entry and exitpoints for the passengers, so the little people really walk in and out of the vehicles through the doors. These points have to be marked on the vehicles' 3D models. Unfortunately, one of the waterbuses with a port on itsrear side had its entry and exit points a bit off. This made the passengers walk to the rotor of the ship, and since the piers are of a fixed size, they had to take a shortcut over the water to get there. So, there you have it: passengers walking on water!

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Then on to my personal favorite: the flaming obelisk! There can be fires in the cities: sometimes, a building catches fire and the fire trucks arrive and block the street until they extinguish the blaze. However, this feature was built so that it affected all the structures that were not props, so everything that wasn’t a small detail, like a phone booth or a park bench, could catch fire. During the first closed beta test, one of the testers found a stone obelisk on fire in his city. All weird bugs are now called "flaming obelisks"by the team.
The best part is that you can enjoy your own flaming obelisk in the game! The possibility of it happening is really small (since there are around 3-10 statues in a city and hundreds of buildings) but it’s still there, so keep an eye out for this rare and pretty funny feature. We decided that most of the statues in the cities have been coated with flammable paint.

Karoliina Korppoo
Cities in Motion’s lead designer
Colossal Order Ltd
 
Please please, make a cheat to create "flaming obelisks" for sure !

I like the walk on water thing, but picture show more that the boat is invisible that people can walk on water.
 
It was one of the funniest workdays at the office when we first saw the flaming obelisk :D And thanks for the encouragement, solving bugs is not always so much fun..
 
Thanks for revealing also some of the funny mishaps that have happened while the game has been under development :)

IMHO such details and (at least) one member of Colossal Order answering punters' questions on this Forum leaves a positive image = some might be more likely to buy the game because of this.
 
IMHO such details and (at least) one member of Colossal Order answering punters' questions on this Forum leaves a positive image = some might be more likely to buy the game because of this.

Karoliina and I are glad to answer your questions! And btw, that makes 30% of our staff active here on the Forum. We still have quite a small team :)
 
Karoliina and I are glad to answer your questions! And btw, that makes 30% of our staff active here on the Forum. We still have quite a small team :)

I feel sorry for whoever lost 5% of himself :p


But, the flaming obelisk is just pure awesome. I can imagine the conversation in the office when it was discovered.
 
Sorry, I should have said over 30%, but you'll be happy to hear that it's now 50% of the staff active, since our technical director gebbiz is around too. So nobody's lost a piece of themselves :D
 
Hi all. I don't know whether I can write here, but today I was playing beta, and I saw this bug/mistake:
My buses blocks with trams.
And my next question is: in "shop" version of Cities In Motion, all buses and trams will have so small capacity? In Poland buses can transport to 200 persons, in CiM onyl 24 ...:( (I had in mind articulated buses.)
 
Well, there is a reduction of the city size and 24/200 >> game population of the city / real population of the city.
It's like 1/10 of the vehicle capacity for 1/100 of the city population. (not sure of the number, but it's sonething like that).

So this doesn't really seems wrong. What can be wrong is the percentage of the population taking the public transport.
 
I know what you want say to me. But how I can transport 80 passengers at one tram stop, using trams with capacity 24 persons ?
When I send a few trams, people are staying at a tram stop, when I send many trams then road is blocking.
 
If they are not getting on your tram, it means ticket prices are too high for them to pay. So they keep waiting until a cheaper tram arrives. Instead of adding more vehicles you should consider lowering the prices.
 
Ok, I thought they are not getting on despite empty seats. Anyway, this means you need subway there, not extra trams.
 
Basicaly, there are 3 reasons to this :
1 - you have a tram line where a metro line would be necessary
2 - you have a single tram line leading to where people wanna go. If you can make 2 line sparated which split the passenger all we be better.
3 - you have a circle system when it would be great that this stop is an end of the line (so that tram are always empty at this station)