Was I referring specifically of the OP? No.Originally Posted by dagrommit Go to original post
Does the fact that other games also screw up make it ok? No.
Christ I hate these forums sometimes.
Now you're being disingenuous.Originally Posted by Sircowdog1 Go to original post
This thread is the only one talking about software development and bugs. And you're posting in it.
Pointing out that other games suffer from the same problems doesn't mean that this games problems are "OK". It illustrates that it's an issue across the industry.
It's even a little more subtle than this: the developers using third-party code may avoid re-creating the wheel, but they also end up using a third-party module that may not be solving exactly the problem they think (or wish) it was solving.Originally Posted by dagrommit Go to original post
Add to this that most languages don't allow exact specification of APIs (e.g., function type signatures in a lot of languages do not let you specify and enforce that the function never returns "null"), so developers often just specify this in the API documentation, which is usually not automatically checked. In such cases you end up relying on developers not to make the kinds of errors that we know human beings regularly make.
An example I gave in another thread in this forum was documenting that a remote server function returns null even though in the current version of the code it never does. (This could be because the server developers plan future changes to the server that would make the function sometimes return null.) If the client code developers calling that function miss that in the documentation, no amount of testing against the current version will ever see the problem in the client code; the client out in the field will start breaking only after a later server upgrade.
Even if you could get perfect test coverage (which for a PC game is impossible in practice: effectively every player runs it on a unique configuration) that's not going to solve your bug problem. As Dijkstra pointed out around 1970, "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!"Originally Posted by hyper---sniper Go to original post
I think that's overstating the case. In almost four months of heavy play I have not encountered a single problem where I would have paid more for the game not to have that problem. By far the worst was the recent Ubisoft Connect incident, and even there it was only a day, so I've had 98.8% availability. I can live with that for something that costs me a few tens of dollars for months or even years of play.Originally Posted by hyper---sniper Go to original post
I think that Ubi and Massive certainly could be doing a better job here, and would support you if you held them to a reasonable standard, but insisting that PC games never crash for anybody is not a reasonable standard. It's also a very poor place to start if you want to determine how good or bad a job they're doing, because starting from such an unrealistic measure the only answer can ever be, "so badly that they should never have made the game."
To be fair, I'm pretty sure he was referring to me. I've made only two or three dozen posts in these forums, most only in the last few days, and Sircowdog1 has been rather displeased with some of them. According to him, having so few posts here has somehow invalidated a couple of decades of software development experience focused on systems reliability.Originally Posted by dagrommit Go to original post
Absolutely agreed with this. On a related tangent, I think you'll be amused by this thread: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1229641258370355200Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
It's also a good example of the limitations of testing. No amount of testing would have caught that issue unless both pieces of software were running on the same machine.
In which case, mea culpa. I don't follow the forums as closely as I used to.Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
Originally Posted by Robert-of-Hague Go to original post
Loving the "Give Up Attitude". Let us be honest. Bugs that aren't fixed, aren't fixed because they are BER, Beyond Economic Repair. It cuts into the profits. So instead of fixing the problems, they just get players to believe that they just can't be fixed. It's cheaper if you buffalo the players into accepting it. If you accept a lesser product, then the bar at which a company set for quality gets lowered. Cause the customer is accepting of poor quality. This is comin from one who has been in the Technology Field for over 30 years. You want things to get better, we need to give them a reason to get better.
I remember the old days of when game consoles used game cartridges. They had less bugs because alot more testing was done because after sale there was no such thing as patches on an offline system. Hence probably why they cost so much. I think I paid like £60 for N64 games and this was in the 90s, which was literally 1/3 the price of the console itself.
Now the consumer are the testers, just need to be in a good enough state to sell initially.
That's beautiful. It's also a good example of, "You're not doing what you think you're doing," not to mention the joys of cut-and-paste programming and sometimes StackOverflow.Originally Posted by dagrommit Go to original post
The homework assignment he gives is a really good one:
I'm tempted to say that if you can't understand the above problem well enough to make at least a good attempt at that assignment, you probably shouldn't be commenting on developer skills. (FWIW, Windows or .NET knowledge isn't needed: I have no development experience whatsoever with .NET nor do I even know what a ".NET assembly" is, but what's going on there is still quite clear to me.)Think about how you'd find this bug in your own programs. You copy/paste the code, it seems to work, and you don't realize it's broken because you don't run either of these programs which made the same mistake.
All but the last sentence is quite correct. But it's not just about profits, it's also about what you're not doing when you're spending your time on bugs. Be honest, would you really be on board with Massive saying that there would be no new content or anything but bugfix updates for the next year because they'd decided to put their entire development team on bugfixes? Would you trade all the new content from the past year for a year of bugfixes? (I know I certainly wouldn't.)Originally Posted by YodaMan 3D Go to original post
You could try getting together with your friends and raising a few hundred thousand dollars a year for some more developers dedicated to reliability and bugfixing.You want things to get better, we need to give them a reason to get better.
I am pretty firmly convinced that most gamers neither want to pay significantly more nor accept significantly fewer features in trade for more reliability. Like me, they prefer rolling the dice on a reasonably cheap game over spending a lot of money, and they just move on to the next game if they happen to get unlucky. (They may not say this, but they demonstrate it in how they actually behave.)
Again, my usual disclaimer: this doesn't mean that Ubisoft and Massive couldn't be doing a better job with the resources they have. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that their software development and release processes are not hugely better than industry average, which means that there's a lot of room for improvement. But no matter how much effort they put in and how much money they spend, they'll never get truly reliable software as long as their users insist on running their program along with essentially random collections of the game's dependencies and other software in what amounts to a completely uncontrolled environment (i.e., on their personal Windows PCs).
I think it's better thought of as, "Fast food chains serve what they serve; if you don't like it you shouldn't be patronizing them."Originally Posted by Licher.Rus Go to original post
Alternatives, such as the console versions of the games, are available. If you don't like the costs (monetary and otherwise) of using those instead, well, that's a choice you've made.
It's fair to demand a certain level of quality from PC developers, but it really does sound like most people here are demanding a level of perfection that simply cannot be achieved on PCs in the real world.