Tuesday 18 December 2018

A Note On Logo Creation



Hi everyone. So I have some good news and I have some less than good news.
 
Last week we released a content update for both Sony and Microsoft that corrected a memory leak inside the Team Uniform Editor. That issue seems to be completely fixed and we’ve had no other reports of problems with that. Some have even commented that it’s faster to work with now – which is a good thing.


Unfortunately, the ‘fix’ for the logo save issue didn’t quite work 100%.


Logos save correctly but, for the time being, it is not possible to save logos into all 50 logo slots.


The reason for this turns out to be a “single file size limitation” that I simply didn’t realize was there. Each logo in Maximum Football is roughly 1MB in size when saved. For the sake of efficiency, all the logos were kept in 1 large file (roughly 50MB if all slots were filled). During testing here, that seemed to be working – I could save 50 logos in 50 slots.


Then I received a couple of reports of “The 12th logo doesn’t save” and did some further digging. After being pointed towards some rather obscure documentation, I found that believe it or not, there are file size write limits on consoles. Limits that you don’t get with desktop systems. 


For example;  


What that means is that logo saves were failing because the file was growing too large to save in one large file. Other titles work around this issue by saving many smaller files – sometimes hundreds of them.


Why wasn’t this found during testing? That’s a good question, the answer boils down to ~how~ it was tested.


We tested that we could save 50 logos by creating 1 logo, then via code, saving that same data in all 50 slots. What we didn’t realize was that during the saving process, all that duplicate data was removed and replaced with references to just the one logo we created. This meant that we could get 50 logos in a 2MB file. It looked good but was actually a false positive.


The solution short term is to simply not save more than 10 logos. We’ll be posting a content update in the next few days for both platforms that enforces that limit.


Yes, I do understand that a drop from 50 slots down to 10 is rather drastic, annoying, and not what was advertised, but for the time being it’s the best solution we can provide that doesn’t erase all your existing work.


Going forward with future iterations of the game, we’ll be using the “1 logo – 1 file” method so we shouldn’t run into this problem in the future.


Thanks for your understanding.

David