#squigish bug reports
blazing grotto
There were lots of good ideas in the KMA discord channel, which has since been deleted. I'll try to summarize the ones I remember
The biggest one is massive memory leaks in the Android app. Perhaps in the iOS app too, I wouldn't know. On Android, the app frequently and unexpectedly freezes and locks up the whole system, during normal activities. Most of the time this generates a system ANR (app not responding) dialog, which provides some access to system logs that show what's going on. What's happening is that the Android system is running a procedure called oom_kill, which is part of the Linux kernel which is triggered when the system has completely run out of memory. (OOM stands for Out of Memory). During this process, which takes several seconds, the phone is completely non responsive, while Android decides what process to forcibly kill. Since it prioritizes foreground apps, it usually doesn't kill STFC, but instead kills some background system process. This is a futile fix, because the background process generally is important (the unimportant ones were killed already, when memory was low but not zero), so it notices it was killed and restarts itself, which then uses just as much memory as before, and starts the cycle all over again. I'm playing on a Pixel 3 XL.
The fix for this issue is to get a developer who really understands how memory management works to go through your codebase and find resource leaks. It's the kind of problem where a junior developer wouldn't even know where to start.
That's a big issue, which probably won't be easy to fix, but will provide a huge improvement.
As far as smaller, low hanging fruit ideas, ...
- The mining rate displayed by the Northstar doesn't include the mining boost from officer health. This mining boost is huge, and is basically the entire point of the Northstar. It actually mines at the correct rate, but the timer is wrong, so it's hard to estimate how long it will take.
- There are several ships with mining boosts for specific resources: Botany Bay, Northstar, D'vor, Feesha, Meridian, faction miners. On the Botany Bay, the boost from mining officers like 10 of 11 or Joaquin makes a big difference in the actual mining rate, presumably because the officer bonus is multiplied by the ship ability bonus. On others, like the Meridian, using officers like Makinen or 10 of 11 provides a very small boost, presumably because their percentage boost is being added to the much larger ship ability bonus. Can you pick one behavior for all of them? Multiplying seems like it would make the most sense, and would encourage more active mining.
- Lots of display bugs around armadas. Sometimes the armada styling with the timer isn't applied to your ship if you have a different ship active in a different system when your armada ship joins. Sometimes (less often than before the recent fixes, but still sometimes) it looks like your ship is powerful enough to be included in the armada, but then you don't actually fight because the server made a different calculation.
- Travel time bugs related to armadas. I should either be prevented from warping to the armada, or I should be able to make it. I've seen this fail in both directions. Sometimes I send a ship to an armada, when it looks like I will make it in time, but then I don't, presumably because it doesn't consider the "charging" time before you start warping, or because of the difference in impulse travel time to whichever point it uses to calculate vs whichever randomly chosen point in the armada circle your ship eventually navigates to. I think the bug in the other direction happens when your ship is faster than the app thinks, due to officer abilities, research, or something else that's calculated differently between the client and server. When this happens, I can set a course to a point near the armada, and arrive with more than 10 seconds to spare, then join once I'm in the system, but if I just try to join from a faraway system, the app tells me I'll be too late.
- In general, officer abilities are a mess. Many don't work at all (Barot, Domita, probably more), or work differently than described. Others have different descriptions in different places in the app. If you do fix Domita, you should change it to "cargo more than 99% full" rather than "cargo is full", since there are situations where, due to rounding, you end up 1 or 2 units away from full, and can't get any more even if you try.
- Various situations where it is difficult to get to a particular screen. For example, when I have research in progress in all my slots, and am upgrading the r&d building, I can't easily look at my research. I can get to station research by trying to build an extra drydock, which shows me I need a higher level fleet commander research, and provides a link which works fine. I haven't found workarounds to get to the other research screens.
A more common situation is where I want to see the manage ship screen, but the ship is mining, or docked and damaged and not repairing. As long as I have at least one ship which lets me see the manage ship screen, I can go there's, then cycle through ships to the one I want to check, but it would be so much easier if you just didn't hide the manage button.