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Trenches comic: Thursday Dec. 1, 2011
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I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator Mod Emeritus
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator Mod Emeritus
Untitled.
12/01/2011 - Anonymous
“Has anyone tried maxing out all 4 players’ coins and killing them all simultaneously?”
The team that I’d just joined shook their heads.
“Not yet. Dude, do you have any idea how long that would take?”
We were testing a newly-added multi-player game mode where players collected coins, and—should they die—dumped those coins into the environment for other players to steal. I’d just been added to the team, but the rest had been pulling 12+ hour shifts for months now. They were tired, ground down by the monotony, out of ideas.
“Do we have something better to do?”
It was 10 AM. We started right away.
We spent the next 12 hours collecting coins on 3 characters, getting two players up to 9999 coins and a 3rd up to roughly 7000 before the tedium overwhelmed us. We placed those three characters together and, using the 4th character as a “camera,” we set off a bomb that killed all three on the screen.
A deluge of coins dumped into the environment non-stop for 20 or 30 seconds. At first, everything seemed okay. But then, the frame-rates began to dip, then the screen began to visibly chug, then the game froze momentarily, and then… blue screen. A hard lockup.
We roared a cheer and began to congratulate each other..
“What did you do?!?”
The assistant coordinator approached us from his desk and we explained what we had done and how long it had taken to set up.
“Alright,” he said, turning, already heading to sit back down at his desk, “Reproduce it.”
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Isn't this another case where you can automate or debug set up characters to have that many coins? Save yourself some time?
Yes, buried under 26998 coins.
The story was a thing of blue-screened beauty.
http://www.burymewithmymoney.com
I would imagine that most of the submitted stories are true, if not embellished a tad, but the stupidity of some managers astonishes me.
Not 10k, closer to 1k. And actually if it took 12 hours both times for all 5 people it would be 1,200.00
Probably more like 2K, once you factor in taxes and so forth, but still, a terrible waste of money for a pretty standard hook. That said, some testers only make minimum wage.
Adding in cheat codes that work properly and don't otherwise mess up the normal play of the game would require more QA, so you have to take the cost benefit of do I spend $1200 to code in a cheat, QA it, and then another $50 to do the testing, or do I just let them test without the cheat code for only $1200. Sure, the cost-benefit may break out for some bigger/harder to reproduce bugs, but I imagine for a lot of bugs it just isn't worth it.
Not to mention that you have to take those codes out/turn them off before you ship, which requires more QA (and thus more money).
Sounds like it wasn't a waste of time because they apparently had nothing better to do anyways.
I really don't see that breaking things. I mean, I suppose if things are coded poorly, maybe. But ultimately it's probably just an easily-modified counter. Unless the game does a whole ton of other shit when you collect a coin besides just incrementing the counter, it shouldn't be hard to do that programmatically.
What the assistant coordinator said was nothing compared to what the developers would have said, they would have said something along the lines of, "Reproduce it until you can tell us just how many coins it takes to cause the crash."
I think that you're severely underestimating how much people like doing shit like that in games. That said, I think a player actually would use a mod or a cheat to pull it off, a la
Too Galactic for you.
I tend to agree. Here, that would come under the rare category of a high severity, low priority defect; it's really serious, as it causes a hard lock up and kills the user experience. On the other hand, the reproduction path is so ridiculous that only people *looking* to crash the game are going to find it and get their game crashed. SO it would go on the backlog.
That said, not working game QA, I'm finding some of these stories a bit bizarre - do people really have the spare time to spend on setting up an edge case like this? I suspect if I set my team doing something similar for a day, I would receive several angry emails from a righteously peeved PM.
Is this amount of dead time common over in the games industry? Seems like we've had a few stories about it...
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I can’t say what this task was hoping to accomplish, I can only assume they were attempting to test the graphical limitations.
They were asked to test dropping 9999x4 coins on the screen.
I can tell you right now that you don’t need to get 9999x4 to test performance issues. I’d bet dollars to coins that you could have accomplished that crash with just a few hundred coins.
If the test case was to SPECIFICALLY test WHAT would happen if 9999x4 coins are dropped at once, this team failed miserably. In fact, they didn’t even kill all 4 players, they only killed 3 of them and the 4 was standing off to the side. I can only assume it was the guy with 7000 coins and was probably napping most of the time. If I were to go to my producer and tell him, well, we got 9999x3, you’re damn sure he’d tell me to go back and do it again the right f-ing way. I don’t about you but here we don’t get paid to half-ass our tasks.
So incompetent testers aside, there are a myriad of methods you unimaginative peons could have used to save yourself some time.
Savant Way
Debug the coins to yourself. I don’t know what kind of sadistic programmer wouldn’t have a debug command to give coins.
Smart Way
Create a save file. This seems like the most basic step. Make a save file you can reload. You know, so you don’t have to spend another 12 hours reproducing nothing. Load the file with you maxed out, have everyone die, did you crash? Yes.
Ballsy Way
Ask the programmers to add a test creature that drops 9999 coins. Trust me, they can do it in about 5 minutes.
Ghetto Way
Grab a rubber band. Wrap up that controller and go to lunch. Come back and save yourself some time.
Spiteful Way
Make one person do the tedium and copy the characters.
It’s no wonder that this team has been pulling 12 hour shifts for “months” if they’re off performing meaningless tasks like this. Look, I know QA is all about performing monotonous tasks but what separates the kings from the peasants is the ability to perform tasks quickly and efficiently.
Achievement Unlocked: Waste combined total of 96 hours to perform a task incorrectly
Reward: Pink Slip
I hadn't seen any really silly gooses on this forum 'til now. I guess it's nice to know there's at least one.
Simply, addressing the writer's story in any of the ways you described would have resulted in no story. He may have actually done one of the things you describe, and made up the story anyway, 'cause people do that. Probably, there are specifics of the story he left out, because who cares?
Do people fear reprisals? Or is it just not important to the story? Trash talking past employers is always bad form. Exceptions might be made for specific heinous deeds that can be backed up with facts and you still managed to take the high road in the situation.
Wow, JPandarelli manages to be condescending, snarky and wrong all in one go. Well done!
A. They were not tasked with this, they chose to do this themselves because they had nothing else to do. This isn't their fault, it's a resource management FAIL. You would be a TERRIBLE boss for pink slipping guys who made their own work when their managers weren't making sure they were kept busy. Even if you don't value what they chose to do, it's not their fault they were directionless.
B. All of your "ways" assume these guys had access to dev tools and/or the developers themselves or that the game allowed saving mid-stream. I think it's pretty obvious that none of those things were available. This sounds like some kind of consol Mario/Sonic knockoff (if not an original) most of which dont allow saving mid level (I'm not aware of one that does, actually). Since it's in multiplayer I'm going to go ahead and say there's no saving.
C. If this is a big studio project it's quite likely the QA wasn't in the same building, city or even state as the actual programmers AND if done correctly any additional dev tool added to a product (particularly one late in development) would have to go through proper channels or the dev who did it could get in real trouble. Particularly if it caused problems or made it into production.
D. Also, since this was a late addition to the game it's quite likely all the dev tools were already cut out, or they were disabled for multiplayer to prevent cheaters.
E. The original Sonic could get over 100 rings on screen without crashing. Frame rate drop, sure, but actual death, no. I'm pretty sure anything made in the last decade targeted at anything more powerful than a handheld could get upwards of 1000 coins before destabilizing. (There are a LOT of factors involved in this, naturally, so your game milage may vary)
Achievement Unlocked: Snark Backfire