Management and correction of reported bugs

Before going into details, I wanted to tell you that I am well aware that the system currently in place for the effective correction of bugs is not efficient since it only allows for the correction of bugs between each new version, whose releases are increasingly spaced out in time for several reasons (personal life, work, launch of new mods projects, etc.)

However, I would like to remind you that every bug report, which is sent to me through the official procedure (via the "Contact" tab of the site, via e-mail to grandutopia.map@gmail.com or via the #bug-report room of the Discord), is taken into account and will be dealt with, if it is indeed something that I consider a bug.

And, while I concede that there is currently no real support for maintaining a public list of reported bugs that need to be fixed, I am faced with many identical reports dealing with the same bugs. The three most frequently reported bugs at the moment are :

∟ the crash in Meulan
∟ the crash at Utopia - Quartier du Stade
∟ the invisible wall at La Josefine

You can imagine that my aim is to solve them. I often claim to want to provide a quality work and it would be illogical to leave such bugs as they are. That's why I say it again, these bugs will be fixed in the next version of Grand Utopia. And I say it again, creating map mods is an extremely slow and time consuming activity that requires finesse and patience. And I have been doing this for the ETS 2 community for more than 4 years with great pleasure, and for free. Don't forget that it's also a real job and that some people are paid by game publishers like SCS to do this.

I understand your impatience with these bugs that are still not fixed but I remind you that, to this day, my mods are developed on my free time and they are not my main source of income. Like many of you, I have a job that takes most of my time, a family and friends. It is not yet possible for me to devote 100% of my time to the development of my mods, although this possibility is slowly but surely on the horizon, thanks to the generous members of my Patreon who are supporting me financially in ever greater numbers.

All this to say, mainly to those who take offence at Grand Utopia not working as well as before, that it is not a question of will but of time.

Now that my point of view has been made, I will discuss the solutions that are being considered (or already taken) to try to improve the tracking of bug reports.

∟ First, I have decided to provide all my Patreons, regardless of their level of membership, with beta versions of Grand Utopia. These beta versions will be published on the Patreon each time the creation of a village or a city is completed. Thus, my Patrons will be able to report bugs they encounter and I will be able to correct them even before the publication of updates to the general public.

∟secondly, I think it is necessary to create a space where you can consult the reported bugs. This space, which you can consult before sending your bug report, will therefore avoid receiving dozens of reports for the same bug but also give you the possibility to know if a bug has been corrected or not. However, this idea would have a cost in terms of time. The creation and maintenance of such a space needs to be done carefully to be effective. On the other hand, the introduction of beta versions should significantly reduce the number of bug reports submitted by the general public.

∟thirdly, following a recent poll submitted to my Patreon members, it was decided that future public updates of my mods would be more frequent. For this to be possible, the content offered in each new version would have to be reduced (in terms of quantity, not quality, of course). Currently, each update had between 4 and 5 cities/villages. From now on, there will be less.

I hope you will be understanding in making these decisions. In any case, I thank each and every one of you for making Grand Utopia the mod it is today.

Good morning/day/evening to all!