Benoit Beausejour · Chief Technology Officer

On error codes, I'm going to go and merge pop-ups into that. Because the error pop-ups date back to the very original start of the project. Nobody's touched these things in forever. So the nicely misaligned cancel button, it's my favorite pet peeve, right? Why haven't we fixed that button? Well, we're fixing it. So we actually have a CL right now to change all these pop-ups to make them at least readable and aligned, right? We start with that.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

No, you start with the elevators, then you fix the button.

Benoit Beausejour · Chief Technology Officer

So the error codes themselves, right? So there's already good categorization for issues. So every kind of, like 30,000 errors, 40,000 errors, 60,000 errors are all families of errors. Unfortunately, over the years, we've added more systems, we've grown the infrastructure, and there's a lot more causes for exit or fatal errors than there are actual codes assigned in those categories. And so what we're doing now is kind of seeing if we can surface more information. 30,009 is typically related to your character during login, but there's a million causes that could cause a 30,009, whether it's that the shard can't unstow your player or your player is missing a component. And we're trying to surface more of that, so that there's more of these cases, so that you, as a player, know a bit more about it. Also, the wording for some of those errors is being revamped, because they're not always very clear. And so adding more details and more granularity to our error codes, changing the wording, making sure they're more effective at representing what they are, and eliminating a bunch of the... There's a couple cases where we fall to a default error code for kind of unknown conditions. That's what we need to flesh out, is the unknown. What is the unknown condition? Try to surface more error codes from the other systems to get more of that information in place. So we need more clarity on that side, so that players aren't going, oh, again, a 19K error, what does that mean, right? I go in Spectrum a lot, in SC testing chat, and I see players going, what's the fix to 19K errors, right? And a raw 19K error is your client can't talk to the backend service at all. So it's typically a client-side problem. Firewall, machine connectivity, something like that. But the error message itself is really unclear. It's like, oh, we failed to log you in. Well, what can I do as a player to fix that? So we're trying to get a lot more clarity on these error messages. That's part of the improvements of these things that have been plaguing us forever. These goddamn pop-ups are one of them. Hey, you want a funny one? Here's a funny one on these pop-ups, right? Because we're all complaining about them. But we lost those pop-ups during the 4.0 preview, right? Everybody was having a black screen. Everybody was complaining about a black screen. I got a black screen, right? Well, what actually happened is that someone that I shall not name, right, but a developer, fixed another issue where, when you die, we need to move the camera and move your character, and it looks like crap. So we didn't want to see that. And so the way to solve that was to fade out the game UI, including the pop-ups. That was it. And so in this case, if you got disconnected, then the pop-up would fade to black.