Trenches comic: Thursday Nov. 17, 2011 - Recursion

Bogey

At least it’s better than “GAME OVER.”

11/17/2011 - Anonymous

We had a fairly good title, one of the few made by the company that people didn’t hate. A lovely baseball game with beautiful graphics, wonderful game play and easter eggs aplenty.. it was glorious.

Then they added the cinematics.

This is normally done in the final days of the development cycle, as they take time to make, among other reasons. The cinematics were added during Crunch TIme, and unfortunately, a small error popped up.

Basically, the game would HARD CRASH when you won the World Series.

The problem was traced to the cinematic. Crap. Not enough time. Strip out the cinematic, replace it with a slide show? STILL crashes. Ok, not enough time.. put a still victory screen up of the trophy. STILL crashes?! On-screen text? No?

It turned out that ANY acknowledgement of winning the World Series would cause the game to die horrifically. So they left it out entirely and shipped a baseball game where winning the most important game in baseball is the same as winning a sandlot game in Podunksville. OUCH.

VALVEjunkie

hahaha ouch

captainkeytar

I gotta say, in the beginning of Trenches, I wasn't all that impressed or amused. But the last few comics have been getting funnier and funnier. I actually LOL'ed (IRL!) at the last two.

"W00t," I guess? Yes, w00t.

Rathorius

I dunno. To me it seems like the problem was the reference to completion that was causing the error. If they were using C++, they might have been able to fix it with a filename.cpp->variableName reference.

Henroid

Both the story and comic are great today.

Fandeathis

Haha, that story is awesome. The strip has gotten better as well.

rabidmuskrat

It's painful when that type of thing happens. It even happens to devs.

"Wait, you mean I worked 80 hour weeks to finish this feature and it's being cut?"

Man in the Mists

In this case, I think it's even worse. There's non-zero chance Q already knew Portallis was cut before assigning the test to Isaac. If that's the case then Q just made himself look like a major goosehole.

Gaslight

It was already pretty clear Q had it in for Isaac. Why would anybody be surprised if he did it on purpose? I had figured Q was going to be the primary "antagonist" of the strip for some time, until he and Isaac eventually grudgingly come to respect each other and reach an understanding of some sort.

Anyway, I sure hope they take that thing about Portallis off the box before the game ships or people are gonna be piiiissssed.

Sekkyo

This game should be easy enough to identify from our collective past experiences. So, which one was it?

PikaPuff

I swore I read about that baseball game. Oh well. Can't remember.

Zazu Yen

Set a flag in memory saying the World Series was won, then when they're dumped back to the title screen or main menue have the flag looked for and the video played then... well it's easy to second guess having never even looked at the code but still, harsh. I pity the poor artist(s) who probably spent a week of their lives working on a cinematic that got cut because playing it crashed the game.

Could be worse though, they could have not tested winning the World Series due to time constraints, assuming since the other cinematics worked so would that one, and shipped it crashing hard on a win.

Aegeri

It's taken a long time, but the last few strips of this comic have been as entertaining as the actual stories. I am slowly coming here for both now!

irishsoul19

Love this strip. I work for a software company that has a lot of different departments help with QA to see issues from different angles and this is totally something that would happen to us. This strip is dead on and gets better every time.