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Chapter 10
Known bugs
FreeCol is still alpha software. In plain English, this means that it is full
of bugs. Some of these bugs have already been reported, but have not been
fixed yet. You can find a list of these bugs, and report new bugs by using
our SourceForge bug tracker.
Even in single player mode, FreeCol is a client-server game. The communication between client and server can fall out of step. If this happens, the
server often tries to recover by requesting a reconnect. If this occurs, please
accept in order to continue playing. In some cases, the game may come to
a halt during the turn of a computer opponent. If this happens to you, you
can generally reconnect to the server by using the reconnect option in the
game menu or by pressing ctrl-r.
A reconnect is often an indication of a bug. If you report a reconnect problem, more detail is available in the java log file (usually called FreeCol.log)
which is very helpful to the developers if attached to the bug report. The
log file can sometimes be large enough to exceed the attachment limit at
SourceForge, in which case feel free to omit the bulk of the file—the critical information is likely to be near the end (in the form of a java exception
message), but you should always retain the first few lines which contain the
FreeCol version and system information.
Possibly the most frequently reported type of bug amounts to “A computer player did something stupid”. This is only too well understood. The
FreeCol AI players are weak, and blatantly cheat to compensate (which can
be partly controlled by the ‘AI-Cheating’ difficulty options). We hope one
day that the FreeCol AI players will be interesting and challenging opponents
without having to cheat, but much work needs to be done to get there.
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