Victoria 3: Hotfix 1.6.1 is now LIVE! - Not for Problem Reports!

[PDX_Pelly]

Hello Victorians!

Today we have a small hotfix targeting one of the known issues, namely the Mac SeaNode Crash! We are currently looking into other reported issues and will look into providing updates to them as soon as we can.

Not for problem reports, but rather file any bug reports in the bug reporting forum, thank you!

Patchnotes:

BugFixes
- Fixed Early game crash on Mac related to SeaNodes, blocking gameplay after a few years at the game start.


Previous Patchnotes
1.6

 

[Barón Hnida]

BugFixes
- Fixed Early game crash on Mac related to SeaNodes, blocking gameplay after a few years at the game start.

Thank you!
(I don't know, how many of us play on Mac, but I was really sad I could not play Vic3 yesterday evening...)

 

[Notme1]

How did that bug occur on Mac but on Windows?

 

[47pik]

How did that bug occur on Mac but on Windows?

I can’t answer this definitively since I’m not a PDX dev, but I am a software engineer.

Software, including games, is like a stack. Applications are built on top of other libraries and software, which are in turn built on top of other libraries and software all the way down until you get to hardware. Operating systems themselves are software that define a lot of the fundamental ways to interact with the lowest level systems, such as memory and CPU management. This means that deep down the Vic 3 stack there is pivot logic that will be different depending on the OS - for instance, the max time you can sleep a thread is different on Windows versus Unix-based systems like MacOS.

Problems can easily arise as a result of these differences even though Vic 3 (or more likely, the engine and drivers it’s built on) is made to handle them. Something slips through and causes a platform-specific issue. This small slip can then propagate up the stack until it’s manifests at the highest level of software (e.g. SeaNode issues in-game), often in some bizarre way, that becomes fairly difficult to trace back to its origin.

In this case, again, I’m not a PDX dev so I can’t tell you why it happened specifically. But I hope this look into software stacks was informative.