Bug Reporting for Games with Fast Travel

Fast travel teleports the player across the game world, instantly moving them from one location to a distant one, skipping the journey, and it is a common convenience and a distinctive bug source, since teleporting the player requires loading the destination, placing the player correctly, and ensuring the world state is right on arrival. The bugs hide in this: the player arriving in a wrong or unsafe location, the destination failing to load, the world state broken on arrival, the player stuck after fast travel. Like the streaming and location concerns of open worlds, these depend on the destination and arrival state. Tracking fast travel bugs means capturing the origin, destination, and arrival context.

Fast travel teleports across the world

Fast travel instantly moves the player across the game world, from their current location to a distant destination, skipping the journey, which requires the game to load the destination, often a different part of a large world, place the player there correctly, and ensure the world state, the streaming, the systems, the situation, is right on arrival. This teleportation is a convenience for players and a complex operation under the hood, loading and transitioning the player to a distant location.

The bugs hide in this operation: the player arriving in a wrong position or an unsafe location, the destination failing to load correctly, perhaps the streaming not finishing, the world state broken on arrival, the player stuck or in a bad state after fast travel. These are like the streaming and location bugs of open worlds, since fast travel jumps the player to a location that must be loaded and set up, plus the transition concerns of any teleport. Understanding that fast travel teleports across the world, with bugs in the destination loading, the arrival placement, and the world state on arrival, frames the bug tracking: capture the origin, destination, and arrival state behind a fast travel that went wrong.

Capture the origin and destination

The core context for a fast travel bug is the origin and destination, where the player traveled from and to, since a fast travel bug is about the teleport between those locations and a bug may depend on the specific destination or the origin-destination pair. Capture the origin and destination when a bug is reported, the location traveled from and the location traveled to.

A report of a fast travel bug becomes diagnosable when you know the origin and destination, since the bug is in traveling to that destination, perhaps a destination that does not load right, a destination with a bad arrival point, or an issue specific to traveling from that origin. The origin and destination define the teleport that went wrong. Capturing the origin and destination is the foundation, providing the endpoints of the fast travel from which a bug emerged, letting you see which destination or travel the bug involves and reproduce the teleport, which is the operation where the fast travel bug occurred.

Capture the arrival state

The critical fast travel context is the arrival state, where and how the player arrived at the destination, the arrival position, the player state, the world state on arrival, since most fast travel bugs are arrival bugs, the player arriving wrong, in a bad position, an unsafe place, the destination not loaded, the world state broken. Capture the arrival state when a fast travel bug is reported, the arrival position, the player and world state on arrival.

A report that the player arrived in a wrong place, got stuck, or found the destination broken becomes diagnosable when you can see the arrival state, the position the player landed in, whether the destination loaded, the world state, revealing how the arrival went wrong, like the destination and streaming bugs of open worlds. The arrival is where fast travel bugs manifest, the teleport completing into a wrong state. Capturing the arrival state, the position, player state, and world state on arrival, covers the arrival dimension where fast travel bugs concentrate, providing the arrival situation against which a wrong-arrival, loading, or world-state bug can be diagnosed, which is the crux of most fast travel bugs.

Watch loading, placement, and world state

Fast travel bugs cluster in three areas: the destination loading, since fast travel jumps to a location that must be loaded and the loading can fail or not finish, leaving the destination not ready, like the streaming bugs of open worlds, the arrival placement, since the player must be placed at a correct, safe arrival point and a bad placement puts them in a wrong or unsafe location, even stuck, and the world state on arrival, since the world at the destination must be in the right state and a bug can leave it broken.

Capture the relevant context for each, the loading state for loading bugs, the arrival placement for placement bugs, the world state for world-state bugs, since these are the fast travel main bug areas. A player who fast travels and finds the destination not loaded, is placed badly, or finds the world broken has hit one of these. Watching the loading, placement, and world state, the three areas where fast travel bugs concentrate, and capturing the relevant context for each, covers the main fast travel bug dimensions, where the teleport operation, loading the destination, placing the player, setting up the world, produces its characteristic bugs, all manifesting in the arrival the captured state reveals.

Setting it up with Bugnet

Add an in-game report option and attach the origin, the destination, the arrival state, and the loading, placement, and world-state context as custom fields, with a screenshot. Bugnet stores them so a fast travel bug arrives with the travel-and-arrival context needed to reproduce a wrong-arrival, loading, placement, or world-state bug by recreating the fast travel to the destination.

Group identical reports into occurrence counts, watching whether bugs cluster at particular destinations, which would point at a problem with that destination loading or arrival point. Because fast travel teleports across the world with bugs in the loading, placement, and world state on arrival, the captured travel-and-arrival context is what lets you reproduce the fast travel and see the bug, finding whether it is a loading, placement, or world-state issue, keeping the fast travel working across the destinations players travel to, so the convenience of skipping the journey lands them correctly and safely rather than in a broken or unsafe state, which is exactly where the teleport operation produces its bugs.

Test fast travel to every destination

Because fast travel bugs are often destination-specific, tied to a particular destination loading or arrival point, test fast travel to every destination, verifying each loads correctly, places the player at a safe, correct arrival point, and arrives with the right world state, since a bad destination or arrival point produces the loading, placement, or world-state bugs, and a destination not tested may have a bad arrival point. Testing fast travel to every destination catches the destination-specific bugs.

Test the arrival placement especially, that each arrival point is safe and correct, the player not landing in a hazard, stuck, or a wrong place, since the arrival placement is where fast travel most often lands the player wrong, and a death-loop-like situation can even arise if the arrival is into danger. Pair the destination testing with your captured reports, which surface the fast travel bugs players hit at the destinations and in the situations you did not test. Together they keep the fast travel working to every destination, ensuring the teleport loads, places, and sets up the world correctly wherever the player travels, so the convenience reliably lands them in a good state, which is the whole point of fast travel and where its destination-specific bugs occur.

Fast travel teleports across the world, loading and placing the player. Capture the destination and the arrival state behind every bad landing.