Modding Bugs and Fixes

The editor rework needed to fix drainage regeneration was finally completed early this weekend. With that, I moved ahead and fixed the other big issue plaguing this release which was a localization bug with mod files. When I first implemented modding, I didn't take into account that players in countries other than the US would not be able to load mod files because their systems would not recognize US-specific number formatting. I fixed that by making mod file parsing 'culture invariant'. Which means that mod files will be interpreted the same regardless of the system locale.

Besides that, I started working on fixing some rarer issues that have been reported by players of the current public version (0.3.2). There's a weird bug that crashes the game at random moments by assigning negative trigger dates to events that are supposed to happen far in the future. Although it looks like an overflow, I'm still not sure what the cause for it is. Nevertheless, at least I implemented a safeguard that will prevent those events from crashing the game (though those events will never trigger again for the particular cells where they occur). I'll continue investigating in the mean time.

Another issue that has been plaguing the new release is a very noticeable slowdown in the simulation that happens not long after agriculture becomes somewhat common in the world. It appears that many groups that try to adopt agriculture never quite do so and start forgetting and rediscovering plant cultivation in a semi-permanent cycle with very high frequency. This situation spreads like a decease into neighboring groups, triggering the eventual slowdown. I'm still trying to figure out the cause, and perhaps I might need to rework discovery modding to solve this. But hopefully it won't be something that will take that long to do (famous last words).

Anyway, I'm down to 10 issues to go through for 0.3.3. Of these, I think I'll fix just 4 more and punt the rest depending on how nasty they look. A release within this month seems very likely.