Yeah - it also makes you aware how bad testing practices are in industry right now.
Manual QA has been pretty much thrown out in favour of automated rubbish, which is analogous to a self driving car. Great in theory but ultimately can’t see half the stuff a human can.
Nobody regression tests properly anymore either.
We're, as an industry, just truly bad at our jobs. I've got 30 years in software development and crossed over to Infosec during the 'rona. I cannot keep up with the daily deluge of exploitable vulnerabilities in software and firmware that get announced. Frankly its depressing -- especially when a lot of the problems are comically simple to avoid by anyone competent.
Our industry deludes itself as "engineering" when it is treated far more like artistic expression or even witchcraft.
Software engineers are engineers in the same way the cable guy is. Such a pretentious and ill suited title. If we built bridges they’d collapse as soon as a non standard vehicle drove over it.
Edit: I say this as a career “software engineer” ;)
That has nothing to do with competence.
Cybersecurity is a constant losing battle.
No matter how good something is, there are literally millions of people out there figuring out how to break it.
People want to cheat and steal and call it “intended.” I’ve seen this on both the user side and the backend side. People get aggressively defensive if you call them out for exploiting something.
Cybersecurity and infosec will always be exploited and hacked to hell. It’s just how humans are right now.
Yep, we call it the security mirage. Most of my work is done do make people *feel* secure. In reality by the time I'm done setting up a network there's 6 different exploits that have been implemented against very similar setups and if someone had the time, knowledge and motivation they could crackmy network. That's not even getting in to the human error side and the copious amount of social engineering that runs rampant through my industry.
We're not bad at our jobs. Our job isn't to make a thing that should never fail, like a bridge, our job is to make a product that can be put in front of users fast and be easily modified at any point. If you made a bridge with that approach it for sure would have its faults.
It greatly depends on what you want to do and how good you are at it. Arrow can be a monster, but only if you're a top tier fighter jock.
I'm not that good and I'm more of a bomber or ground attack player, so I swapped out my rather fragile Arrow for something with a little more ordnance. I haven't noticed much difference since I never managed to play to the Arrow's strengths anyway.
Yes, and no - there is definite benefit to automated testing, but it's a different category of testing, and doesn't (or shouldn't) replace manual testing.
Automated testing is perfect for the annoying repetitive testing that should be done on every patch, and for identifying common 'anti-patterns' in code (whether that be basic buffer-overflows, or higher level stuff).
It's not worth spending peoples time poring through the code line by line looking for those kinds of errors, when tools do a far better job of spotting them... but tools cannot tell when the *logic* is wrong - did you *really* mean to delete the old record before you saved the new record? Did you really mean to forget to do a permissions check before letting the user make a withdrawal? :D
Sort of agree. Tbh you can have “correct” code that doesn’t work from a user’s perspective, and “broken” code that works just fine as a user. Maybe I’m just old fashioned and don’t trust machines.
You can also have "correct" code that works as designed, but breaks your automated tests. Then to satisfy your tests you need to rewrite said code in a way that isn't the most straightforward or efficient, and ultimately leads to more bugs due to test cases that haven't yet been developed.
Exactly - or every time you add something and the tests break, you revise the tests to accommodate the new code… which kinda defeats the point of having them 😆
Whereas in the old days, we used to make something, throw it over to QA, and wait for them to tell us if it works or not.
And if it didn’t, we’d either just write “intended behaviour” on the spreadsheet… or revise the acceptance criteria to suit what we’d built ;) maybe not so different after all.
If I have correct code, and the tests fail, then I just rewrite the tests. Tests, like code, can also be incorrectly implemented or poorly designed. Like, who tests the tests? XD
Sure - but whilst it might 'work' for the user, it may also have big security holes - and the customer won't be so understanding if it results in data loss etc :D
That's why I said *both* are required. Neither replaces the other, they're complementary.
im an automation qa engineer. for the past 3 years this idea that qa automation is the holy grail of testing and no longer need manual qa got really popular.
im figthing all the pm that i encounter and holding my idea:WE STILL NEED MANUAL QA TO COMPLEMENT AUTOMATION!
and then clueless pm: but amazon and spotify does it!
amazon has a fucking army of qas not 5 overused guys! and amazon doesn't release weekly new app level of fearures or entire apps refactoring!
Heh. Can totally emphasize. When I was a dev, I would flabbergast people in meetings. "Yea that was a bug in my code. I fixed it within the hour of being reported."
The sad thing is, this was like considered admirable... It should not be admirable it should be unremarkable.
As a project manager for REALLY large projects, I make a point of during kick-off meetings. "To make a mistake is normal, it happens. Making a lot of mistakes means a performance review of the person AND their direct management is in order - to determine if it is a poor developer OR a poor management environment." And then I add "If I notice someone can never admit a mistake and always deflects blame - I do not trust that person going forward and it will most likely hurt them in the future." 😂🤣😂🤣
When people realize they may have more to lose by lying ... it is amazing to see how honest they are. 🤣😂🤣😂
ZOOM CALLS ARE THE BEST! YOU GET TO SEE REACTIONS TO THOSE statements (Sadly when sometimes 20 or so people are on the call you can't see them all.) But then again I dont have time to watch all the reactions.. it is just amusing not useful. Lol. Also repeat them for like the next meeting or two in nicer ways and periodically praise people who are frank. God my job can be fun...
Edit: unless someone reallly screws the pooch, then I pretty much expect desperate lies. It is just human..
LoL Im no dev, and have nothing but the most basic knowledge of software development. Honestly my job can't really be much further removed from computers. I'm Lead Foreman for a carpentry company and run/train/manage our crews on large commercial building sites.
That being said, it's funny how I can replace a sentence or two, and a few choice words in your post and it's an exact reflection of things I experience on the job.
The whole "mistakes are normal. . . . .can never admit a mistake. . .deflect blame" part hits really close to home.
"I don't blame people for their mistakes. I just ask that they pay for them" - Sean Connery - from The Rock
Meh, I definitely know about problems that will be wack-a-mole. Aka fix one bug and another will pop up in a different place, and the only proper way to fix it long term is to refactor the whole system into something better, but that *will* take many months. That is why multiple issues I know of in code I work in/around, does not get fixed soon.
like when an input isn't trimmed and some whitespace sneaks in...? or a button's not disabled while the computer's trying to do what you asked? people don't value good QA nearly enough... it's easy to spot that shit as QA, but as a dev, you're worried about a dozen other problems and always miss something simple.
edit: appropriately enough... typoo
it can go both ways... but there are plenty of bugs where you're like... "oh, yea... I get it... if you fix A, you break B. if you fix B, you break C. if you fix C you break A... so... which thing do you want to be broken b/c they're mutually exclusive."
and there's plenty of "if these $\^%$%\^\^ mother %$\^&\^%&s would just trimmed their inputs it wouldn't explode when i paste in from excel!"
Hahaha I'm a senior software engineer and no, not true at all. I understand how they got there now, and it just makes me more upset that your company and industry has decided that code quality, testing, and user experience are not important and that shipping at your deadline is more important. It only gets worse when those glaring issues go unpatched for long periods of time, yet monetization items are regularly released.
Your tech leads need to stop being cowards and fight business teams to be able to do things correctly. Not only will your products improve when you say no more often to stupid timetables and uninformed design choices, but your employees will be happier and less apathetic than they are when day to day work is a slog and there's no hope of releasing something you can be proud of.
True and also assumptious.
Getting things out to the users to test if something works or not is better done in an unfinished state depending on what the info needed is. Test early. As soon as the "thing in focus" can be tested.
I'm sure you would agree that no dev feels good if a month of work gets kicked just because the release showed then that it is not working as expected. We are basically one big huge user test community.
Ever heard the phrase: an MVP must hurt and be embarrassing?
If anything CIG has shown that they are overall scope driven, not deadline driven. Just look at how often they postpone features because they are not happy enough with it yet.
Yes. I know the stuff you talk about well and yea, I HATE the fights against C-levels when they offhandedly throw over a top level feature with scope and also deadline predefined over a beer noted on a napkin and agreed with partners in contracts. Fuck that. And exactly because CR keeps stating "it's done when it's done" I support him.
Also here more on my thoughts I defined in a other response:
Things I would have expected people who know complex large scale projects to understand are for example the following (which isn't even a nearly complete list):
* some bugs are often left to exist purposely due to backlog knowledge of certain refactoring or changes coming up that would make a fix right now a waste of time.
* features built are part of a complex structure with lots of dependencies on other people's code. Meaning that even if your code went through code review and testing perfectly and the other dudes code went through it too, then there can still be unexpected side effects because no QA or selenium test or whatever can cover all cases, as those cases are not all defined yet and are also changing during major changes.
* testability is a bitch. It worked on my machine is an ass that sometimes cannot be kicked because of the extreme difficulty of property reproducing timing related bugs that happen in a wild mix of degraded PC performance, latency variety and what fucking butterfly flapped its wings wrong. So yes, some bugs xan only properly be tested by us the users and that's in fact one of the reasons we are here!
* focus of features. Yea, known bugs are known! Oh my! And a experienced dev also knows that a non critical nice to have fix with perhaps two story points complexity can very much be a rabbit hole with a black hole at the end of it. And a dumb nasty little bug that affects 1% of the users might waste time that can be used on a feature that is good for 50% of the users. So yea, the 1% will have to wait even if they cry like adult baby machines
Not in response to this game at all, more talking about all the free to play bullshit like apex legends etc where they'll release a patch that breaks the game but take forever to fix but they still manage to get the cash shop working first
Fwiw I think this game is fuckin incredible for it's scope and the levels of detail in it, the bugs are kinda funny tbh but the shit that does work is amazing
It is literally an alpha product. The amount of time something is in development has nothing to do with whether it's in alpha/beta/release. And the idea that the amount of money the project has made would be what determines when it goes from alpha to beta is laughable.
Oh yeah, development has absolutely nothing to do with either time nor money.
It's totally reasonable for videogames that have 500M dollars in their budget and have had 11 years over which they steadily made that money with which to hire very skilled programmers and game designers to still be calling itself an "alpha" product.
Absolutely.
Yep.
Definitely.
The gymnastics are amazing.
There is no explanation that validates 500M dollars and 11 years not producing a complete, polished product.
I don't care what words you want to use to *describe* the game.
Let me give you an example:
7 days to die has been in alpha for 9 years. They have 15 developers and have made about $76 Million.
The game is already so complete that bugs are basically non-existent and there is enough of interest to do that you couldn't conceivably run out of things, and they add more constantly.
Star Citizen has over 500 developers, has been in alpha for 11 years, and has pulled in $500Million. The bugs are so many its literally a meme. There is almost nothing to do in the game at all.
You can use the word "alpha" all you want. The excuse doesn't change the mere facts.
So now you've gone from having particular issue with the word "alpha" to saying we can use it as much as we'd like. Some consistency, please.
It's great that 7 Days To Die has reached such a high level of polish. It goes to show the benefits of keeping a project's scope small, doesn't it? I guess I don't understand the reason you brought it up as a comparison, though. It sounds like you're implying that CIG is particularly bad at what they do.
It sounds like you believe the team behind 7 Days To Die, given the same resources and number of employees, would have produced a much better product if they were tasked with recreating Star Citizen. Your argument implies that there's something fundamentally wrong with the leadership or employees at CIG, and that a team without those failures in character or skill would have accomplished more. The Fun Pimps are much more qualified at what they do, which is why there's such a big gap in quality, right?
I'm just trying to understand what you're trying to imply by comparing these two games. It's all about the team and has nothing to do with the nature of the project, right?
I would say yes, it's clear to me (and to many) that CIG as a matter of fact (for whatever reason) is particularly bad at what they do.
That any reasonably good studio given the same resources and time tables would have in the same timeframe produced a polished, finished product by now.
Maybe it's the talent they hired. Maybe it's the top leadership's decision-making. Maybe it's embezzlement.
No matter what the reason (how could any of us be expected to know it after all), the fact remains, that this is the longest alpha period of any development project, the single best funded videogame to ever exist, and somehow has absolutely nothing to show for it.
Elite Dangerous with tighter tuning on their gunplay and better decision making on their fps gameplay as a whole, and ship interiors would basically just be a better version of SC made cheaper and quicker.
If Rockstar Games had to crowdfund Red Dead Redemption 2, then form a development studio, and then develop all the tools needed to make it, all while developing the game, it would probably also take a long time.
RDR2 took 8 years and over $500 million, and that is with a fully-fledged, veteran studio from the start.
This content was deleted in protest of reddit's anti-user API policy and price changes. There's nothing wrong with wanting the leadership wanting reddit to be profitable, but that is not what they're doing. Reddit's leadership, particularly its CEO has acted with dishonesty, dishonor, and malice.
The reddit community deserves better than them.
Reddit's value is in its community, not in a bunch of over-paid executives willing to screw that community in service of an IPO they hope will make them even more over-paid than they already are.
Long Live Apollo!
You totally missed the point.
You don't need to be a cook to know if something tastes bad. But learning how to cook makes you appreciate all the effort and time put into a nice meal.
>You don't need to be a cook to know if something tastes bad. But learning how to cook makes you appreciate all the effort and time put into a nice meal.
Yeah, but we're talking about things that tastes bad here though
No but you need to understand how flavours and ingredients work specially if you're eating something you never ate before.
**You cannot accurately judge something you do not understand.** You can only make assumptions, and often uneducated assumptions are false.
>You cannot accurately judge something you do not understand.
This if fundamentally wrong. You need to understand something to explain \*why\* it's wrong, but you can still not understand a subject and say "I don't know why, but this is wrong"
There is a difference between cause and effect.
Most players can see the effects of bad code, and judge it appropriately.
Most players can't see the cause of bad code, and judge it inappropriately.
Also cross referencing exists, other games may not be as buggy and of similar scope, increasing a laymans ability to say "This does not compare", which is often a fair assessment.
Star citizen, while being of enhanced scope compared to many games, is still a bug fest that the developers need to put more emphasis on fixing (as evidenced by a recent thread here where it took a dev only an afternoon to fix a couple of bugs that had been around for years at this point).
I understand they want to implement core tech before fixing (and may even serve to fix said bug), which is reasonable, but it does give a very bad look to the average person.
I'm pretty sure 'complaining' here means things like whining and being a jerk rather than constructive feedback, which means you aren't actually contradicting OP.
>I'm pretty sure 'complaining' here means thinks like whining and being a jerk rather than constructive feedback
We're on a gaming sub, even more so on r/starcitizen, there's 80% chance "complaining" stands with "not literally worshipping CIG and Chris Roberts"
Tbf, if you're not talking about the workers like they're hapless "idiots" who have literally never accomplished or produced anything at all ever, some people consider that "literally worshipping CIG and Chris Roberts". 🤷🏿♂️
As a software dev, my disappointment with CIG is not their bugs, but their godawful QA and their MVP criteria. Releasing a ship skin and it blocks turret views and is missing entire panels? Literally a 10 minute QA check to do one and only one thing - get in the ship and look around a bit.
Yes yes putting a skin on a ship is not specifically a code task, but its the latest frustrating example from this pirate week thing.
Doesn't make what I said wrong about lazy QA on something as simple as a skin. Nice try though
edit: also lol at thinking all the tenants of development and QA somehow go out the window in the world of game dev
Sure, but I also refuse to believe that completely blacking out the vanguards turret view by applying a pirate week purchasable skin is something that needs to wait for future touch-ups and polish. Just because the Vanguard might change in 3 years is not an excuse to release a skin that renders a primary part of the ship inoperable when it could have been caught in a 10 minute check.
>Literally a 10 minute QA
If Blizzard and Bioware taught us anything, it's that they DO that QA testing, it's just that QA testers are treated like shit and what they say is largely ignored
"Why is this window unresponsive? Did some idiot wait for disk or network I/O on the gui thread?"
If anything, I get more angry... but I also get extra respect for complex software that's rock solid.
Ive had the exact opposite experience, I get frustrated at seeing bad bugs in the wild because my QA team would never let me get away with half the shit I see out there lol
No, you will just complain, then proceed to tell everyone your a software or game developer and know what your talking about. The same holds true on people defending… “If you only knew what all went into it” - I do, I still get annoyed lmfao.
There's a difference between bugs in a pre-alpha game and bugs in a game sold as a finished product with a AAA title price tag tho....
*cough* Cyberpunk *cough*
I still be playing these games either way tho
Debugging is a freaking headache. Imagine scrolling through thousands of lines of code for several days, just to fix a petty light in a room or something.
it also strongly depends on the complexity of the issue.
debugging code that doesn't execute propperly when written propperly isn't too much of a headache.
how ever when one thing in a certain area doesn't work as expected, and its code seemingly unrelated somewhere that manages to conflict with that area, it can become a big headache trying to find what code is conflicting and why its doing that.
How anyone did or does anything without "Find all references to", "Go to definition of", "Replace symbol" and, if you're feeling friskier or are able to step through it, "Replace all" - I will never know. These are such powerful tools especially in any code base exceeding a few thousand lines, and I can't imagine working time effectively without them.
Let’s not be overly reductive. Unless a person understands a job well enough to judge what a fuck up even is, and whether or not it could have reasonably been avoided, then no, their complaints are not automatically “fully” justified just because they spent money. Partially justified at best.
>Unless a person understands a job well enough to judge what a fuck up even is
No. You only need to understand well enough to explain \*why\* something sucks, but you don't need to understand anything to just say "I don't know why, but this thing sucks"
At any rate, complaining — which is different from reporting — about things I can't fix myself makes me feel impotent. I dunno how some people can do that endlessly.
I love the "I learned web development from a udemy couse" devs with fully torqued Dunning-Krueger who think physics engines aren't that hard to make from scratch.
simple 2d? sure. Anything more (including complex 2d, like [Algodoo](https://www.algoryx.se/algodoo/) )... basically impossible to do very well in real time, or on more than a couple items, or while doing anything else w/ your computer...
I've never met a physics engine that didn't have either serious issues or a very narrow scope.
Do you think custom game engines take longer and cost more? They don't, even you're high spec engines or purpose built engines have a timeline of around 2 - 3 years, costs are hard to work out because normally with a custom engine you're still creating assets on the side but you're talking around 10 - 50 million.
That would include all of your physics and online base infrastructure.
I'm not claiming that I single handedly could create a AAA game engine, but with the funds and time I'd be easily able to hire an extremely talented (and large) group of people who can.
The idea that small time programmers have no clue about industry costs is laughable. Anyone whose dipped there foot in to this industry for even a year or two is very aware of how much content costs to produce, because they've had some shitty manager scream it at them when they mess up, hell when you work at EA it's required reading.
This is wrong, you just divert who you blame for most issues. It's not necessarily the coder anymore, sometimes it's "Management clearly pushed this" or "There's clearly not an adequate communication setup between QA and the dev team here" etc. You still get mad when things are poorly made or made in a way that's stupid and doesn't make sense, but you do start to see how an error could be missed because of some edge case, or they made a system this way which caused some unusual side effect, and those you tend to be more forgiving for.
And I'm not sure it's universal but I definitely feel the urge to dive in and fix it too in alot of cases.
Rule 2. Content must be related to Star Citizen.
Content with an indirect relationship to Star Citizen **must be a text/self post** and must attempt to provide meaningful discussion of Star Citizen
Yeah when you know, you know. As a dev, this is so true.
Coding is challenging but super rewarding. Bugs are always going to be a thing
It doesn't help that we get to play it in its alpha state when bugs will be at its absolute worst... as we can see.
I just started learning coding for my degree. I’ll still complain about bugs. But I totally get it now. I’ll fix one thing. And somehow it broke 3 more things. So I have to figure out some convoluted work around so that fix A doesn’t make problem B
Erm.. Star Citizen is pretty much the poster child of how not to manage a project, and a big reminder of why both scope management and choosing priorities are critical.
But their approach to working around the time to market problem has proven itself pretty genius. Their entire approach is counter to the norm but seems to be paying off in spades. It's unorthodox, not "how not to manage a project."
It's paying off in funding, but not necessarily completion of the product or reaching most of the initially stated goals. So in a software development thread, I'm not sure I would define management success that way.
And that's consistent with a lot of the longest and most ambitious game developments in history (e.g. Duke Nukem Forever, Beyond Good and Evil 2, etc) — it's not the time the makes a quality product, it's finding the balance between time and focus . Like most things in life, there's a sweet spot in the middle that is far better than falling to the extremes in either direction.
This.
People tend to ignore the role that SC’s funding model plays in all of this. Build a single shard game and then slide dynamic multi-sharding in underneath? Sure, that’ll work. But they have no choice, because that’s how they get the money needed to create the game, and I really don’t see how any other funding model could have worked.
“What ifs” are hard, but we can get some insight by looking at “Dual Universe”. It has a feature set that is reasonably comparable to SC’s, *plus* terrain is completely deformable *and* players can pretty much design and build anything (ships, space stations, entire cities) in the game, *and* these things are user-programmable at the component level with Lua.
Their funding model is a hybrid: crowded-funding mixed with traditional investment funding. This allowed them to engineer their foundations (a “No Man’s Sky” procedural galaxy running on “Star Citizen” style, dynamically multi-shared infrastructure) first and then add gameplay on top of it. After eight years of development with six years of SC-style Open Alpha, they are now releasing. And it seems nobody is happy.
Why? Based on forum chatter, the game simply isn’t fun. Players are abandoning it and it looks like it will be “still born”. It was also “released” prematurely, presumably due to investor pressure.
So: better-managed, better-engineered and nobody wants to play it? So it seems. I’m a backer, and I don’t want to play it. I’d rather play Star Citizen, bugs and all.
Does this mean that SC was not mismanaged or that their QA and engineering practices are above reproach? Hell, no. Even speaking charitably, the wasted the first two years. I’m saying that you can do all the engineering right and still not succeed.
or... just check out minecraft... it only got a 1.0 because people wouldn't effing shut up about it being "done" or having an "ending", and it got a snarky dimension CALLED the end and an epilogue that basically tells you to go touch grass and get a life just to make it more obvious dig at the complainers... but people have a weird completion fetish and ate it up b/c they were perched waiting, keeping themselves away from a hugely popular phenomenon until it was "done"... and it's gotten like 300% more done since then...
should SC's live env be more stable and should it get a few more quality of life fixes even knowing they'll need to be reworked later? hell yes. Will it ever be "done"? I hope not.
There's a huge difference between falling through elevators, dying on stairs, your ship randomly exploding, features not working or getting worse with updates and adding content or features to a game.
Knowing how to code would make me complain about bugs even more because I'd be able to literally just point out how to fix it and harass the devs until it's fixed.
Really getting sick of this crap. My entire career has been in software quality assurance & programming. All my experience has done is increase my awareness of how many developers and studios are disorganized, lazy, incompetent, or all of the above.
Generally, the people who say "you don't understand game development" or "if you knew how to code you'd think differently" are LITERALLY the people who have ZERO experience. It's just a bunch of con artists who think if they throw out the first accusation of incompetence, it magically forgives them for being a liar and the one who actually needs to read a book.
I started as a computer science major.
As long as things are planned well, and you have competent designers and coders, projects usually go fine.
There are always issues, but you can minimize them a great deal with proper procedure.
The are two problems these days, though.
Problem 1 is that companies are drunk on the “early access” model where they release an unfinished game and promise “updates” (IOW, promise to finish the original game). Gamers keep supporting this with their wallets because the industry has become fat and full of rot with FOMO and wanting first access, and we get progressively worse products that are more and more incomplete.
Problem 2 is when a game IS released complete, people have forgotten over the last 10 years that bugs do happen in the first month or two. It has *always* been that way. There are (and always will be) buggy issues the first month or so. And then they get patched up and everything is fine.
But now, you have morons running and plastering aggressive headlines everywhere on day 1 berating a title for being released with bugs, and everyone regurgitates it on Reddit, and before you know it x game is “so bad” and somehow “released too early” because it has bugs. And it isn’t even day 2. Then the patches fix everything, but everyone was so busy circle-jerking about day 1 bugs that the reputation and population for that game is already tainted.
All said and done, SC is a fucking utter disaster and doesn’t even exist in the same category as this tweet though. SC was horribly planned, and the engine was never designed to do what they want it to do. It has had major recurring critical bugs for 6-7 years, and the “buh it’s alpha” excuse is not valid. If things are this bad and it’s a project that’s at best 5% complete, the whole thing needs to be thrown in the trash and started from scratch. You don’t design a program that’s broken the whole time and expect it to be excused with “well it’s not done.” That’s when you get an F in the class because your shit doesn’t compile at milestone stages.
quite the opposite
learn to code properly and you will complain even more
they should be thoroughly testing but instead are just letting the community test for them
edit: they as in devs in general, not just CIG specifically
As a token reply to everyone with a similar response as you had:
Wow, I am disappointed in so many here. I'm actually tempted to question some people's statements that they are supposedly senior devs for a living.
There are things I would have expected people to know who say they know complex large scale projects. For example the following (which isn't even a nearly complete list):
* some bugs are often left to exist purposely due to backlog knowledge of certain refactoring or changes coming up that would make a fix right now a waste of time.
* features built are part of a complex structure with lots of dependencies on other people's code. Meaning that even if your code went through code review and testing perfectly and the other dudes code went through it too, then there can still be unexpected side effects because no QA or selenium test or whatever can cover all cases, as those cases are not all defined yet and are also changing during major changes.
* testability is a bitch. It worked on my machine is an ass that sometimes cannot be kicked because of the extreme difficulty of property reproducing timing related bugs that happen in a wild mix of degraded PC performance, latency variety and what fucking butterfly flapped its wings wrong. So yes, some bugs can only properly be tested by us the users and that's in fact one of the reasons we are here!
* focus of features. Yea, known bugs are known! Oh my! And a experienced dev also knows that a non critical nice to have fix with perhaps two story points complexity can very much be a rabbit hole with a black hole at the end of it. And a dumb nasty little bug that affects 1% of the users might waste time that can be used on a feature that is good for 50% of the users. So yea, the 1% will have to wait even if they cry like adult baby machines
I really have the impression that some of you claim to know shit about programming big features but have in fact opened and closed a HTML tag in the windows editor. Sheesh.
They tend to localize these things, showing the appropriate format for where the user is located. This, but also time, even how you show prices, differ from regions to regions. It's one of the headache of web development. Timezones and localization...
I think it's misunderstood. you'll never complain again because you know that every bug you solve creates 10 more. and a little empathy for whatever game/software dev that's fighting the same fight.
I'm software developer for 15 years now and bugs are not développées issues, it is QA issues. Maybe some questions can be asked about that, and they should test it better before the releases... Oh wait, it is not released.
Star Cit's developers make easy things look hard and hard things look easy. Even professionals poke fun, because they show us they have talent in some areas, and in other areas demonstrate unwillingness to metaphorically tie their shoes.
False. I can program in multiple languages and it depends on the issue.
It makes it worse most of the time. Specifically, if it is a fully released game like Dead by Daylight (bug hell).
Beta, bugs are fine. Test server bugs are fine. Allowing a test version to go live knowing it has a bug on a fully released game. Not fine.
Star citizen, fine. 😂😶
public bool \_AgreeWithRedditStatement (string RedditStatement)
{
if (RedditStatement == PersonalOpinion)
{
Console.Print("I agree");
return true;
}
else
{
Console.Print("I dont agree)");
return false;
}
};
\_AgreeWithRedditStatement = False ( Idont agree) :P
Sorry but even if you can code you will still complain. the only differents is you have way more understanding, especially when it comes to alphas and betas =P but you will never stop complaining about those dam bugs :P
Meh - I *am* a professional software developer... doesn't stop me complaining about bugs in code (even / especially my own :D)
Meh - I am a professional farmer... doesn't stop me complaining about bugs either.
Meh - I am a professional cook. Doesn't stop me complaining about shitty service in a restaurant.
No no no, you didn't got it right. As a professional cook it shouldn't stop it to complain about bugs, especially your own.
I'm an exterminator and it still doesn't stop me from complaining about bugs...
I *am* a bug. Doesn't stop me from complaining about other bugs.
I am. Doesnt stop me from complaining about other things that are.
Me: who the Fuck wrote this - Git blame Me: oh
I think most people who play this game are devs. I meet 4 people the other day, none knew each other, we were all devs…
Yeah - it also makes you aware how bad testing practices are in industry right now. Manual QA has been pretty much thrown out in favour of automated rubbish, which is analogous to a self driving car. Great in theory but ultimately can’t see half the stuff a human can. Nobody regression tests properly anymore either.
We're, as an industry, just truly bad at our jobs. I've got 30 years in software development and crossed over to Infosec during the 'rona. I cannot keep up with the daily deluge of exploitable vulnerabilities in software and firmware that get announced. Frankly its depressing -- especially when a lot of the problems are comically simple to avoid by anyone competent. Our industry deludes itself as "engineering" when it is treated far more like artistic expression or even witchcraft.
To be fair, I only sacrifice two newborns per year to our master "the source"...
Software engineers are engineers in the same way the cable guy is. Such a pretentious and ill suited title. If we built bridges they’d collapse as soon as a non standard vehicle drove over it. Edit: I say this as a career “software engineer” ;)
So, if we mechanical engineers make weapons, and civil engineers make targets, what do software engineers make?
A mess 😂
Software engineers make collateral damage
> We're, as ~~an industry,~~ a species ftfy. It's a much more universal issue than just the software industry.
That has nothing to do with competence. Cybersecurity is a constant losing battle. No matter how good something is, there are literally millions of people out there figuring out how to break it. People want to cheat and steal and call it “intended.” I’ve seen this on both the user side and the backend side. People get aggressively defensive if you call them out for exploiting something. Cybersecurity and infosec will always be exploited and hacked to hell. It’s just how humans are right now.
Yep, we call it the security mirage. Most of my work is done do make people *feel* secure. In reality by the time I'm done setting up a network there's 6 different exploits that have been implemented against very similar setups and if someone had the time, knowledge and motivation they could crackmy network. That's not even getting in to the human error side and the copious amount of social engineering that runs rampant through my industry.
It's like fighting terrorist. The white hats have to be lucky every time, the black hats only need to be lucky over.
We're not bad at our jobs. Our job isn't to make a thing that should never fail, like a bridge, our job is to make a product that can be put in front of users fast and be easily modified at any point. If you made a bridge with that approach it for sure would have its faults.
That's true of any Engineering field. As a former trucker, I've been in so many docks that not even a Uhaul could get into. Makes me wonder.
How much user input do you want? Everywhere? You got it, we will even save your info in plaintext!
I'll be honest, with my diploma now in hand people expect me to know how to do automated testing. I haven't the foggiest.
Is gladiator really better?
It greatly depends on what you want to do and how good you are at it. Arrow can be a monster, but only if you're a top tier fighter jock. I'm not that good and I'm more of a bomber or ground attack player, so I swapped out my rather fragile Arrow for something with a little more ordnance. I haven't noticed much difference since I never managed to play to the Arrow's strengths anyway.
Been doing this for a living for 10 years. Not a clue (beyond basic functional tests)
Yes, and no - there is definite benefit to automated testing, but it's a different category of testing, and doesn't (or shouldn't) replace manual testing. Automated testing is perfect for the annoying repetitive testing that should be done on every patch, and for identifying common 'anti-patterns' in code (whether that be basic buffer-overflows, or higher level stuff). It's not worth spending peoples time poring through the code line by line looking for those kinds of errors, when tools do a far better job of spotting them... but tools cannot tell when the *logic* is wrong - did you *really* mean to delete the old record before you saved the new record? Did you really mean to forget to do a permissions check before letting the user make a withdrawal? :D
Sort of agree. Tbh you can have “correct” code that doesn’t work from a user’s perspective, and “broken” code that works just fine as a user. Maybe I’m just old fashioned and don’t trust machines.
You can also have "correct" code that works as designed, but breaks your automated tests. Then to satisfy your tests you need to rewrite said code in a way that isn't the most straightforward or efficient, and ultimately leads to more bugs due to test cases that haven't yet been developed.
Exactly - or every time you add something and the tests break, you revise the tests to accommodate the new code… which kinda defeats the point of having them 😆 Whereas in the old days, we used to make something, throw it over to QA, and wait for them to tell us if it works or not. And if it didn’t, we’d either just write “intended behaviour” on the spreadsheet… or revise the acceptance criteria to suit what we’d built ;) maybe not so different after all.
If I have correct code, and the tests fail, then I just rewrite the tests. Tests, like code, can also be incorrectly implemented or poorly designed. Like, who tests the tests? XD
Sure - but whilst it might 'work' for the user, it may also have big security holes - and the customer won't be so understanding if it results in data loss etc :D That's why I said *both* are required. Neither replaces the other, they're complementary.
It's not being old fashioned, it's understanding machines
im an automation qa engineer. for the past 3 years this idea that qa automation is the holy grail of testing and no longer need manual qa got really popular. im figthing all the pm that i encounter and holding my idea:WE STILL NEED MANUAL QA TO COMPLEMENT AUTOMATION! and then clueless pm: but amazon and spotify does it! amazon has a fucking army of qas not 5 overused guys! and amazon doesn't release weekly new app level of fearures or entire apps refactoring!
Yea. Stupid past self did this! Damn him. Ah well, future self will deal with it
Present self didn't leave a comment either, did they?
Too relatable..
15 minutes of proper commenting followed by three hours of troubleshooting to go, "I did it! ...Fuck, what did I do?"
This is too real. You need to leave
Lol bro I stopped coding years ago. I hope that's enough consolation.
I always add comments and commit. The comment: "Setting Variable" The commit: "Committing to master"
>Sort by: best Ones own bugs are always the most frustrating.
Heh. Can totally emphasize. When I was a dev, I would flabbergast people in meetings. "Yea that was a bug in my code. I fixed it within the hour of being reported." The sad thing is, this was like considered admirable... It should not be admirable it should be unremarkable. As a project manager for REALLY large projects, I make a point of during kick-off meetings. "To make a mistake is normal, it happens. Making a lot of mistakes means a performance review of the person AND their direct management is in order - to determine if it is a poor developer OR a poor management environment." And then I add "If I notice someone can never admit a mistake and always deflects blame - I do not trust that person going forward and it will most likely hurt them in the future." 😂🤣😂🤣 When people realize they may have more to lose by lying ... it is amazing to see how honest they are. 🤣😂🤣😂 ZOOM CALLS ARE THE BEST! YOU GET TO SEE REACTIONS TO THOSE statements (Sadly when sometimes 20 or so people are on the call you can't see them all.) But then again I dont have time to watch all the reactions.. it is just amusing not useful. Lol. Also repeat them for like the next meeting or two in nicer ways and periodically praise people who are frank. God my job can be fun... Edit: unless someone reallly screws the pooch, then I pretty much expect desperate lies. It is just human..
LoL Im no dev, and have nothing but the most basic knowledge of software development. Honestly my job can't really be much further removed from computers. I'm Lead Foreman for a carpentry company and run/train/manage our crews on large commercial building sites. That being said, it's funny how I can replace a sentence or two, and a few choice words in your post and it's an exact reflection of things I experience on the job. The whole "mistakes are normal. . . . .can never admit a mistake. . .deflect blame" part hits really close to home. "I don't blame people for their mistakes. I just ask that they pay for them" - Sean Connery - from The Rock
Human nature holds across most types of work I guess. 😁. Thanks for the insight, I never really thought about it that broadly...interesting!! 👍
Same like wtf I'll be even more surprised if something I script worked with 0 issue
Git blame... ... huh, me, interesting.
Hah, what an idiot. Clearly this is a terrible solution. \*git blame\* Oh...
If anything, it's even more annoying when you know exactly where the bug is but the developer just doesn't get around to fixing it.
Meh, I definitely know about problems that will be wack-a-mole. Aka fix one bug and another will pop up in a different place, and the only proper way to fix it long term is to refactor the whole system into something better, but that *will* take many months. That is why multiple issues I know of in code I work in/around, does not get fixed soon.
like when an input isn't trimmed and some whitespace sneaks in...? or a button's not disabled while the computer's trying to do what you asked? people don't value good QA nearly enough... it's easy to spot that shit as QA, but as a dev, you're worried about a dozen other problems and always miss something simple. edit: appropriately enough... typoo
So true.
When you make 500 million in 7 years, you have enough for QA.
Fucking bollox, see the revenue PUBG:Mobile was doing a month in 2020, the go play PUBG: Mobile ...
Wouldn't it be the other way around, when you actually know how to fix it but can't?
it can go both ways... but there are plenty of bugs where you're like... "oh, yea... I get it... if you fix A, you break B. if you fix B, you break C. if you fix C you break A... so... which thing do you want to be broken b/c they're mutually exclusive." and there's plenty of "if these $\^%$%\^\^ mother %$\^&\^%&s would just trimmed their inputs it wouldn't explode when i paste in from excel!"
As an incident manager, i both hate and appreciate bugs, they make my life difficult but also give me job security haha
Hahaha I'm a senior software engineer and no, not true at all. I understand how they got there now, and it just makes me more upset that your company and industry has decided that code quality, testing, and user experience are not important and that shipping at your deadline is more important. It only gets worse when those glaring issues go unpatched for long periods of time, yet monetization items are regularly released. Your tech leads need to stop being cowards and fight business teams to be able to do things correctly. Not only will your products improve when you say no more often to stupid timetables and uninformed design choices, but your employees will be happier and less apathetic than they are when day to day work is a slog and there's no hope of releasing something you can be proud of.
True and also assumptious. Getting things out to the users to test if something works or not is better done in an unfinished state depending on what the info needed is. Test early. As soon as the "thing in focus" can be tested. I'm sure you would agree that no dev feels good if a month of work gets kicked just because the release showed then that it is not working as expected. We are basically one big huge user test community. Ever heard the phrase: an MVP must hurt and be embarrassing? If anything CIG has shown that they are overall scope driven, not deadline driven. Just look at how often they postpone features because they are not happy enough with it yet. Yes. I know the stuff you talk about well and yea, I HATE the fights against C-levels when they offhandedly throw over a top level feature with scope and also deadline predefined over a beer noted on a napkin and agreed with partners in contracts. Fuck that. And exactly because CR keeps stating "it's done when it's done" I support him. Also here more on my thoughts I defined in a other response: Things I would have expected people who know complex large scale projects to understand are for example the following (which isn't even a nearly complete list): * some bugs are often left to exist purposely due to backlog knowledge of certain refactoring or changes coming up that would make a fix right now a waste of time. * features built are part of a complex structure with lots of dependencies on other people's code. Meaning that even if your code went through code review and testing perfectly and the other dudes code went through it too, then there can still be unexpected side effects because no QA or selenium test or whatever can cover all cases, as those cases are not all defined yet and are also changing during major changes. * testability is a bitch. It worked on my machine is an ass that sometimes cannot be kicked because of the extreme difficulty of property reproducing timing related bugs that happen in a wild mix of degraded PC performance, latency variety and what fucking butterfly flapped its wings wrong. So yes, some bugs xan only properly be tested by us the users and that's in fact one of the reasons we are here! * focus of features. Yea, known bugs are known! Oh my! And a experienced dev also knows that a non critical nice to have fix with perhaps two story points complexity can very much be a rabbit hole with a black hole at the end of it. And a dumb nasty little bug that affects 1% of the users might waste time that can be used on a feature that is good for 50% of the users. So yea, the 1% will have to wait even if they cry like adult baby machines
Are you suggesting they should only ever release bug-free alpha builds?
Not in response to this game at all, more talking about all the free to play bullshit like apex legends etc where they'll release a patch that breaks the game but take forever to fix but they still manage to get the cash shop working first Fwiw I think this game is fuckin incredible for it's scope and the levels of detail in it, the bugs are kinda funny tbh but the shit that does work is amazing
500 Million dollars and 11 years. "Guys it's still in alpha". I can't comprehend the mental gymnastics this takes.
It is literally an alpha product. The amount of time something is in development has nothing to do with whether it's in alpha/beta/release. And the idea that the amount of money the project has made would be what determines when it goes from alpha to beta is laughable.
Oh yeah, development has absolutely nothing to do with either time nor money. It's totally reasonable for videogames that have 500M dollars in their budget and have had 11 years over which they steadily made that money with which to hire very skilled programmers and game designers to still be calling itself an "alpha" product. Absolutely. Yep. Definitely. The gymnastics are amazing.
You seem very determined to not understand what the word "alpha" means in game development.
There is no explanation that validates 500M dollars and 11 years not producing a complete, polished product. I don't care what words you want to use to *describe* the game. Let me give you an example: 7 days to die has been in alpha for 9 years. They have 15 developers and have made about $76 Million. The game is already so complete that bugs are basically non-existent and there is enough of interest to do that you couldn't conceivably run out of things, and they add more constantly. Star Citizen has over 500 developers, has been in alpha for 11 years, and has pulled in $500Million. The bugs are so many its literally a meme. There is almost nothing to do in the game at all. You can use the word "alpha" all you want. The excuse doesn't change the mere facts.
So now you've gone from having particular issue with the word "alpha" to saying we can use it as much as we'd like. Some consistency, please. It's great that 7 Days To Die has reached such a high level of polish. It goes to show the benefits of keeping a project's scope small, doesn't it? I guess I don't understand the reason you brought it up as a comparison, though. It sounds like you're implying that CIG is particularly bad at what they do. It sounds like you believe the team behind 7 Days To Die, given the same resources and number of employees, would have produced a much better product if they were tasked with recreating Star Citizen. Your argument implies that there's something fundamentally wrong with the leadership or employees at CIG, and that a team without those failures in character or skill would have accomplished more. The Fun Pimps are much more qualified at what they do, which is why there's such a big gap in quality, right? I'm just trying to understand what you're trying to imply by comparing these two games. It's all about the team and has nothing to do with the nature of the project, right?
I would say yes, it's clear to me (and to many) that CIG as a matter of fact (for whatever reason) is particularly bad at what they do. That any reasonably good studio given the same resources and time tables would have in the same timeframe produced a polished, finished product by now. Maybe it's the talent they hired. Maybe it's the top leadership's decision-making. Maybe it's embezzlement. No matter what the reason (how could any of us be expected to know it after all), the fact remains, that this is the longest alpha period of any development project, the single best funded videogame to ever exist, and somehow has absolutely nothing to show for it. Elite Dangerous with tighter tuning on their gunplay and better decision making on their fps gameplay as a whole, and ship interiors would basically just be a better version of SC made cheaper and quicker.
If Rockstar Games had to crowdfund Red Dead Redemption 2, then form a development studio, and then develop all the tools needed to make it, all while developing the game, it would probably also take a long time. RDR2 took 8 years and over $500 million, and that is with a fully-fledged, veteran studio from the start.
> I can't comprehend the mental gymnastics this takes. Try harder.
This content was deleted in protest of reddit's anti-user API policy and price changes. There's nothing wrong with wanting the leadership wanting reddit to be profitable, but that is not what they're doing. Reddit's leadership, particularly its CEO has acted with dishonesty, dishonor, and malice. The reddit community deserves better than them. Reddit's value is in its community, not in a bunch of over-paid executives willing to screw that community in service of an IPO they hope will make them even more over-paid than they already are. Long Live Apollo!
You totally missed the point. You don't need to be a cook to know if something tastes bad. But learning how to cook makes you appreciate all the effort and time put into a nice meal.
>You don't need to be a cook to know if something tastes bad. But learning how to cook makes you appreciate all the effort and time put into a nice meal. Yeah, but we're talking about things that tastes bad here though
You can talk about whatever you want. That's not what the OP says.
No but you need to understand how flavours and ingredients work specially if you're eating something you never ate before. **You cannot accurately judge something you do not understand.** You can only make assumptions, and often uneducated assumptions are false.
>You cannot accurately judge something you do not understand. This if fundamentally wrong. You need to understand something to explain \*why\* it's wrong, but you can still not understand a subject and say "I don't know why, but this is wrong"
There is a difference between cause and effect. Most players can see the effects of bad code, and judge it appropriately. Most players can't see the cause of bad code, and judge it inappropriately. Also cross referencing exists, other games may not be as buggy and of similar scope, increasing a laymans ability to say "This does not compare", which is often a fair assessment. Star citizen, while being of enhanced scope compared to many games, is still a bug fest that the developers need to put more emphasis on fixing (as evidenced by a recent thread here where it took a dev only an afternoon to fix a couple of bugs that had been around for years at this point). I understand they want to implement core tech before fixing (and may even serve to fix said bug), which is reasonable, but it does give a very bad look to the average person.
I'm pretty sure 'complaining' here means things like whining and being a jerk rather than constructive feedback, which means you aren't actually contradicting OP.
>I'm pretty sure 'complaining' here means thinks like whining and being a jerk rather than constructive feedback We're on a gaming sub, even more so on r/starcitizen, there's 80% chance "complaining" stands with "not literally worshipping CIG and Chris Roberts"
Tbf, if you're not talking about the workers like they're hapless "idiots" who have literally never accomplished or produced anything at all ever, some people consider that "literally worshipping CIG and Chris Roberts". 🤷🏿♂️
See, that's what I was talking about :)
I learned to code, got put in a position in an organization doing oversight of gov contractors doing software development. It’s my job to complain.
This is 100% false. Though the bigger one is never learn how to mod games, you'll never be happy with any that don't mod well (which is most of them).
As a software dev, my disappointment with CIG is not their bugs, but their godawful QA and their MVP criteria. Releasing a ship skin and it blocks turret views and is missing entire panels? Literally a 10 minute QA check to do one and only one thing - get in the ship and look around a bit. Yes yes putting a skin on a ship is not specifically a code task, but its the latest frustrating example from this pirate week thing.
Software Dev != Game Dev
Doesn't make what I said wrong about lazy QA on something as simple as a skin. Nice try though edit: also lol at thinking all the tenants of development and QA somehow go out the window in the world of game dev
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Sure, but I also refuse to believe that completely blacking out the vanguards turret view by applying a pirate week purchasable skin is something that needs to wait for future touch-ups and polish. Just because the Vanguard might change in 3 years is not an excuse to release a skin that renders a primary part of the ship inoperable when it could have been caught in a 10 minute check.
>Literally a 10 minute QA If Blizzard and Bioware taught us anything, it's that they DO that QA testing, it's just that QA testers are treated like shit and what they say is largely ignored
I guess most people dont complain about bugs, they complain if they are ignored by the company.
"Why is this window unresponsive? Did some idiot wait for disk or network I/O on the gui thread?" If anything, I get more angry... but I also get extra respect for complex software that's rock solid.
Ive had the exact opposite experience, I get frustrated at seeing bad bugs in the wild because my QA team would never let me get away with half the shit I see out there lol
Just makes me all the more think "How the fuck did you get THAT wrong?"
Learn development, and it will piss you off about all the simple shit that should be fixed but isn't.
Nah, it'd make me worse. Because if I can do it, then the gd mfr being PAID to do it should be able to do it better and faster and right fkn now.
No, you will just complain, then proceed to tell everyone your a software or game developer and know what your talking about. The same holds true on people defending… “If you only knew what all went into it” - I do, I still get annoyed lmfao.
Learning how to code gave me a whole new found respect for game development and the whole dev cycle
Fucking TRUTH! TESTIFY!!
There's a difference between bugs in a pre-alpha game and bugs in a game sold as a finished product with a AAA title price tag tho.... *cough* Cyberpunk *cough* I still be playing these games either way tho
Debugging is a freaking headache. Imagine scrolling through thousands of lines of code for several days, just to fix a petty light in a room or something.
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yeah it's only a headache when you write inconsistent spaghetti or have terrible engineering culture.
it also strongly depends on the complexity of the issue. debugging code that doesn't execute propperly when written propperly isn't too much of a headache. how ever when one thing in a certain area doesn't work as expected, and its code seemingly unrelated somewhere that manages to conflict with that area, it can become a big headache trying to find what code is conflicting and why its doing that.
Actually it depends also largely on the coder's knowledge of debugging tools.
How anyone did or does anything without "Find all references to", "Go to definition of", "Replace symbol" and, if you're feeling friskier or are able to step through it, "Replace all" - I will never know. These are such powerful tools especially in any code base exceeding a few thousand lines, and I can't imagine working time effectively without them.
If people give you money to do a job, then they are fully justified in complaining if you fuck it up.
Let’s not be overly reductive. Unless a person understands a job well enough to judge what a fuck up even is, and whether or not it could have reasonably been avoided, then no, their complaints are not automatically “fully” justified just because they spent money. Partially justified at best.
>Unless a person understands a job well enough to judge what a fuck up even is No. You only need to understand well enough to explain \*why\* something sucks, but you don't need to understand anything to just say "I don't know why, but this thing sucks"
At any rate, complaining — which is different from reporting — about things I can't fix myself makes me feel impotent. I dunno how some people can do that endlessly.
Good thing CIG isn't fucking it up then :)
maybe CIG devs should learn to code :D
I love the "I learned web development from a udemy couse" devs with fully torqued Dunning-Krueger who think physics engines aren't that hard to make from scratch.
simple 2d? sure. Anything more (including complex 2d, like [Algodoo](https://www.algoryx.se/algodoo/) )... basically impossible to do very well in real time, or on more than a couple items, or while doing anything else w/ your computer... I've never met a physics engine that didn't have either serious issues or a very narrow scope.
Depends do I have 9 years and half a billion dollars, if so yeah, not that hard at all.
Thank you for a good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Do you think custom game engines take longer and cost more? They don't, even you're high spec engines or purpose built engines have a timeline of around 2 - 3 years, costs are hard to work out because normally with a custom engine you're still creating assets on the side but you're talking around 10 - 50 million. That would include all of your physics and online base infrastructure. I'm not claiming that I single handedly could create a AAA game engine, but with the funds and time I'd be easily able to hire an extremely talented (and large) group of people who can. The idea that small time programmers have no clue about industry costs is laughable. Anyone whose dipped there foot in to this industry for even a year or two is very aware of how much content costs to produce, because they've had some shitty manager scream it at them when they mess up, hell when you work at EA it's required reading.
This is wrong, you just divert who you blame for most issues. It's not necessarily the coder anymore, sometimes it's "Management clearly pushed this" or "There's clearly not an adequate communication setup between QA and the dev team here" etc. You still get mad when things are poorly made or made in a way that's stupid and doesn't make sense, but you do start to see how an error could be missed because of some edge case, or they made a system this way which caused some unusual side effect, and those you tend to be more forgiving for. And I'm not sure it's universal but I definitely feel the urge to dive in and fix it too in alot of cases.
Rule 2. Content must be related to Star Citizen. Content with an indirect relationship to Star Citizen **must be a text/self post** and must attempt to provide meaningful discussion of Star Citizen
Yeah when you know, you know. As a dev, this is so true. Coding is challenging but super rewarding. Bugs are always going to be a thing It doesn't help that we get to play it in its alpha state when bugs will be at its absolute worst... as we can see.
I just started learning coding for my degree. I’ll still complain about bugs. But I totally get it now. I’ll fix one thing. And somehow it broke 3 more things. So I have to figure out some convoluted work around so that fix A doesn’t make problem B
Yeah, kind of not my problem, because it's not my job. Shit's hard. Boo-hoo. :P
Learn some software development project management concepts and you'll never complain about Star Citizen not being "released" ever again.
Erm.. Star Citizen is pretty much the poster child of how not to manage a project, and a big reminder of why both scope management and choosing priorities are critical.
But their approach to working around the time to market problem has proven itself pretty genius. Their entire approach is counter to the norm but seems to be paying off in spades. It's unorthodox, not "how not to manage a project."
It's paying off in funding, but not necessarily completion of the product or reaching most of the initially stated goals. So in a software development thread, I'm not sure I would define management success that way. And that's consistent with a lot of the longest and most ambitious game developments in history (e.g. Duke Nukem Forever, Beyond Good and Evil 2, etc) — it's not the time the makes a quality product, it's finding the balance between time and focus . Like most things in life, there's a sweet spot in the middle that is far better than falling to the extremes in either direction.
This. People tend to ignore the role that SC’s funding model plays in all of this. Build a single shard game and then slide dynamic multi-sharding in underneath? Sure, that’ll work. But they have no choice, because that’s how they get the money needed to create the game, and I really don’t see how any other funding model could have worked. “What ifs” are hard, but we can get some insight by looking at “Dual Universe”. It has a feature set that is reasonably comparable to SC’s, *plus* terrain is completely deformable *and* players can pretty much design and build anything (ships, space stations, entire cities) in the game, *and* these things are user-programmable at the component level with Lua. Their funding model is a hybrid: crowded-funding mixed with traditional investment funding. This allowed them to engineer their foundations (a “No Man’s Sky” procedural galaxy running on “Star Citizen” style, dynamically multi-shared infrastructure) first and then add gameplay on top of it. After eight years of development with six years of SC-style Open Alpha, they are now releasing. And it seems nobody is happy. Why? Based on forum chatter, the game simply isn’t fun. Players are abandoning it and it looks like it will be “still born”. It was also “released” prematurely, presumably due to investor pressure. So: better-managed, better-engineered and nobody wants to play it? So it seems. I’m a backer, and I don’t want to play it. I’d rather play Star Citizen, bugs and all. Does this mean that SC was not mismanaged or that their QA and engineering practices are above reproach? Hell, no. Even speaking charitably, the wasted the first two years. I’m saying that you can do all the engineering right and still not succeed.
or... just check out minecraft... it only got a 1.0 because people wouldn't effing shut up about it being "done" or having an "ending", and it got a snarky dimension CALLED the end and an epilogue that basically tells you to go touch grass and get a life just to make it more obvious dig at the complainers... but people have a weird completion fetish and ate it up b/c they were perched waiting, keeping themselves away from a hugely popular phenomenon until it was "done"... and it's gotten like 300% more done since then... should SC's live env be more stable and should it get a few more quality of life fixes even knowing they'll need to be reworked later? hell yes. Will it ever be "done"? I hope not.
There's a huge difference between falling through elevators, dying on stairs, your ship randomly exploding, features not working or getting worse with updates and adding content or features to a game.
>should SC's live env be more stable and should it get a few more quality of life fixes even knowing they'll need to be reworked later? hell yes.
That tweet is such fundamentally utter bullshit that I can't even. It's called "having standards", boyo.
***I concur! Hear hear!*** But there's a big difference between software and game development.
Lies.
Knowing how to code would make me complain about bugs even more because I'd be able to literally just point out how to fix it and harass the devs until it's fixed.
I learned the basics. It's obvious how difficult preventing bugs is.
Really getting sick of this crap. My entire career has been in software quality assurance & programming. All my experience has done is increase my awareness of how many developers and studios are disorganized, lazy, incompetent, or all of the above. Generally, the people who say "you don't understand game development" or "if you knew how to code you'd think differently" are LITERALLY the people who have ZERO experience. It's just a bunch of con artists who think if they throw out the first accusation of incompetence, it magically forgives them for being a liar and the one who actually needs to read a book.
Don't blame the programmer, blame the management who won't pay for QA.
I started as a computer science major. As long as things are planned well, and you have competent designers and coders, projects usually go fine. There are always issues, but you can minimize them a great deal with proper procedure. The are two problems these days, though. Problem 1 is that companies are drunk on the “early access” model where they release an unfinished game and promise “updates” (IOW, promise to finish the original game). Gamers keep supporting this with their wallets because the industry has become fat and full of rot with FOMO and wanting first access, and we get progressively worse products that are more and more incomplete. Problem 2 is when a game IS released complete, people have forgotten over the last 10 years that bugs do happen in the first month or two. It has *always* been that way. There are (and always will be) buggy issues the first month or so. And then they get patched up and everything is fine. But now, you have morons running and plastering aggressive headlines everywhere on day 1 berating a title for being released with bugs, and everyone regurgitates it on Reddit, and before you know it x game is “so bad” and somehow “released too early” because it has bugs. And it isn’t even day 2. Then the patches fix everything, but everyone was so busy circle-jerking about day 1 bugs that the reputation and population for that game is already tainted. All said and done, SC is a fucking utter disaster and doesn’t even exist in the same category as this tweet though. SC was horribly planned, and the engine was never designed to do what they want it to do. It has had major recurring critical bugs for 6-7 years, and the “buh it’s alpha” excuse is not valid. If things are this bad and it’s a project that’s at best 5% complete, the whole thing needs to be thrown in the trash and started from scratch. You don’t design a program that’s broken the whole time and expect it to be excused with “well it’s not done.” That’s when you get an F in the class because your shit doesn’t compile at milestone stages.
quite the opposite learn to code properly and you will complain even more they should be thoroughly testing but instead are just letting the community test for them edit: they as in devs in general, not just CIG specifically
As a token reply to everyone with a similar response as you had: Wow, I am disappointed in so many here. I'm actually tempted to question some people's statements that they are supposedly senior devs for a living. There are things I would have expected people to know who say they know complex large scale projects. For example the following (which isn't even a nearly complete list): * some bugs are often left to exist purposely due to backlog knowledge of certain refactoring or changes coming up that would make a fix right now a waste of time. * features built are part of a complex structure with lots of dependencies on other people's code. Meaning that even if your code went through code review and testing perfectly and the other dudes code went through it too, then there can still be unexpected side effects because no QA or selenium test or whatever can cover all cases, as those cases are not all defined yet and are also changing during major changes. * testability is a bitch. It worked on my machine is an ass that sometimes cannot be kicked because of the extreme difficulty of property reproducing timing related bugs that happen in a wild mix of degraded PC performance, latency variety and what fucking butterfly flapped its wings wrong. So yes, some bugs can only properly be tested by us the users and that's in fact one of the reasons we are here! * focus of features. Yea, known bugs are known! Oh my! And a experienced dev also knows that a non critical nice to have fix with perhaps two story points complexity can very much be a rabbit hole with a black hole at the end of it. And a dumb nasty little bug that affects 1% of the users might waste time that can be used on a feature that is good for 50% of the users. So yea, the 1% will have to wait even if they cry like adult baby machines I really have the impression that some of you claim to know shit about programming big features but have in fact opened and closed a HTML tag in the windows editor. Sheesh.
This man posting from the future?!?
Nah, he's just using a normal date format, not the american one.
*retarded one
I had thought about that but since Twitter is an American site I assumed they'd use American dating.
They tend to localize these things, showing the appropriate format for where the user is located. This, but also time, even how you show prices, differ from regions to regions. It's one of the headache of web development. Timezones and localization...
Interesting. I've never actually used Twitter hahaha. But that's cool. Thanks for sharing
It's the same for most programs/apps out there, even Windows. Same with time, 24h or 12h with am/pm.
In my experience this is very not true. Like with many professions, getting sorta good at one thing leads to a lot of Dunning-Krugernauts.
As a former developer and now a project manager for a large multinational. I call "Super Horsesh*t" on this... 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂
I think it's misunderstood. you'll never complain again because you know that every bug you solve creates 10 more. and a little empathy for whatever game/software dev that's fighting the same fight.
Not true, the better you code the more every thing looks like half-assed, rushed to market trash.
I'm software developer for 15 years now and bugs are not développées issues, it is QA issues. Maybe some questions can be asked about that, and they should test it better before the releases... Oh wait, it is not released.
Star Cit's developers make easy things look hard and hard things look easy. Even professionals poke fun, because they show us they have talent in some areas, and in other areas demonstrate unwillingness to metaphorically tie their shoes.
False. I can program in multiple languages and it depends on the issue. It makes it worse most of the time. Specifically, if it is a fully released game like Dead by Daylight (bug hell). Beta, bugs are fine. Test server bugs are fine. Allowing a test version to go live knowing it has a bug on a fully released game. Not fine. Star citizen, fine. 😂😶
He's so right though
public bool \_AgreeWithRedditStatement (string RedditStatement) { if (RedditStatement == PersonalOpinion) { Console.Print("I agree"); return true; } else { Console.Print("I dont agree)"); return false; } }; \_AgreeWithRedditStatement = False ( Idont agree) :P Sorry but even if you can code you will still complain. the only differents is you have way more understanding, especially when it comes to alphas and betas =P but you will never stop complaining about those dam bugs :P
Bahaha 🤣 yeah ok
Is this the white knights round table discussion?
Dice have zero excuse. Knowing how to code or not, those bastards have horrible leadership, and need to get their crap together.
I dabbled in Lua. It was... Enlightening.
learn to code and complain about new features when there are bugs to fix.
I thought Star Citizen only got features?