There was a bug in Gratuitous Space Battles: Galactic Conquest until today. It was a bit obscure, and very baffling. Basically, in seemingly random circumstances, regardless of file version, people would develop a bug where the campaign backdrop was just plain white. I could not reproduce this. Re-installing seemed to fix it, for *some* people.
Anyway, someone noticed when I asked about it, that a line in campaign.txt storing the background texture name was missing. They had the latest version, and I KNEW that line was in there. It made no sense. Then they noticed that they could paste that line in, when the game was running, and voila, it worked. How weird.
So I looked at my code, and sure enough found some code which overwrites campaign.txt. Old, boring, unused, debug code for doing the campaign editing from about three months ago. This was before that file had this line in it, so because that code had never been updated, it meant that whenever it ran, and saved out campaign.txt, it overwrote it with a new copy that had no data for the background texture (it used to be hard coded).
What a dork.
But even worse, I had left in this debug code mapped to the ‘H’ key (S was in use), and never remembered to remove it. So if anyone ever pressed ‘H’ during the campaign, it ran.
What a huge dork.
Anyway, it’s gone now. The bad news is, I am obviously a clueless muppet who could not code his way out of a paper bag. The good news is, I fixed this on Christmas Eve. Hurrah! It’s in patch 1.54, you will get it today / tomorrow.
Happy Christmas / Holidays / Festivus / Ascension of Kahless day to everbody!