It is annoying that these things happen from time to time (especially for us!), but we are always working to improve Gang Beasts, which has been evolving for 6+ years now. In addition, there was a significant engine upgrade (Unity 2017 to 2020), which made unnoticed changes to the networking library we use, adding many more avenues for the issue to manifest.

It also appears that the more recent optimisations and fixes, which made certain aspects of the game quicker, inflamed the issue, making it more prominent for these users.

Although we have found out that some of the bugs have been there all along, they were very rarely triggered, at least on tests we did with the hardware we have. The trigger case is very hardware and connection dependent. You may be wondering why we released the previous update with such a glaring bug? Well, to put it simply, it hasn't turned up before. This highlighted to us that in fact, it was several bugs manifesting as one! All of which we have fixed and should never rear their ugly heads again. With this new tool we managed to reproduce the issue consistently, and in a way that we could generate logs to help guide us to a solution.

To find it we had to create a new debugging tool for the server and client builds to help us track it down.

The bug initially was just incredibly hard to reproduce internally, which is the first step towards finding out what was actually happening. We are happy to announce we have fixed the notorious loading screen bug, that has been plaguing some people, and we wanted to explain a few things to help shed some light on why it took so long for us t o fix it.

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