[TRENCHES] Thursday, August 2, 2012 - Idolatry

Geth

Idolatry
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/idolatry

Work Lazier, Not Harder

Anonymous

My short stint as a tester was almost entirely devoted to one game. My team discovered two holes in a map that just shouldn’t have been there. It looked solid, but if you walked over it, your character would sink into the ground up to his or her shoulders and be unable to do anything but spin.

One of these holes happened to be near a treasure chest, so rather than actually fix the hole, the developers merely moved the chest on top of it. The testing team had some fun debating whether the the developers were being clever or just lazy. Lazy won the vote on the simple merit that the other hole had not been fixed at all.

The ticket is re-opened and a few patches later they get around to “fixing” it. Not having a convenient treasure chest this time, they simply put an invisible object on that space anyway, so now there is a small area you simply cannot walk on.

Neuroskeptic

I'm worried by this strip. This had seriously better not be the lead up to "The Trenches is over", it's just getting awesome.

Stormwatcher

There's nothing wrong about the little story today. Making games work is hard. And we don't know if they tried any other methods before resorting to objects.

Juc

Lazy fixes are still fixes.
Actual fixes are usually better, but some times it's not practical / too risky especially near the very end.

DiannaoChong

Their fixes (although it probably could of been throwaway terrain instead of invisible) are actually good considering the alternative is rooting out what could be a bug you cant find the origin of and rewritting a ton of code.

Gaslight

Neuroskeptic wrote: »

I'm worried by this strip. This had seriously better not be the lead up to "The Trenches is over", it's just getting awesome.

Nah. This is only the second "season." They have just finally directly acknowledged the possibility of a romantic subplot between Isaac and Cora. They are not even close to done.

RMS Oceanic

My guess is "The Future" will be some sort of Anti-Mole strategy that is completely unsustainable and crazy.

Part of me feels this is like betting on the sun rising.

El Skid

There's very little available evidence to base the idea that the dev's fixes are "lazy".

- What was their non-bugfixing workload like? Were they working on some other portion of the game and working 100 hour weeks on that already? Sadly, fixing bugs often is under-prioritized.
- Did they spend 10 hours trying to find the cause of the bug and just failed to do so? That would not be laziness.
- Did they spend lots of time looking for other solutions and/or trying other potential solutions on the dev server and find this was the best solution?

When all you do is find bugs all day, it can be frustrating that the bugs aren't treated with the respect we feel they deserve. But honestly "the developers put in a quick bandaid instead of fixing the root problem, so they must be lazy" is just as bad as "some bugs made it through to the final release- did this shit even get tested at all?"

Daedalus

"If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid."

Ori Klein

Sounds like a moral booster meeting...usually means the company is in the deep end.

theResetButton

I have never even tried to make a game before, so these are questions coming from pure ignorance, but...

...is it actually that hard to patch a hole in a virtual landscape? Couldn't you, I dunno, copy the terrain tiles from a few feet over or something? Or is it way more complicated than that?

Cobell

theResetButton wrote: »

I have never even tried to make a game before, so these are questions coming from pure ignorance, but...

...is it actually that hard to patch a hole in a virtual landscape? Couldn't you, I dunno, copy the terrain tiles from a few feet over or something? Or is it way more complicated than that?

Sometimes it's not that it's hard, but it just takes more time and has the possibility to introduce more problems. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but sometimes a hole is in the level itself (rather than an object that is placed in the level). Because of this, the entire level sometimes needs to be rebaked to patch that hole, depending on the size and complexity of the level this can take several hours.

Whereas you could move an object or place some new collision/object to stop a player far more simply and quickly (possibly minutes).

Edit: rebaking a set has the potential to introduce problems as well. If you rebake the set and introduce a new bug (with collision, lighting, etc.) then you have just introduced another issue (or issues) which will take several hours to fix. Misplacing an object is, again, a trivial fix (even if it's screwed up) in comparison.

If you're in a crunch to meet deadlines, waiting hours for a fix or minutes to place an object is not even a decision to make.

twesterm

Just because it's the lazy solution doesn't mean it's the bad solution. If I can get something done in five minutes that's just as good as the four hour fix but introduces less bugs that seems a win.

Bremen

I remember (somehow) a bit from some old Asheron's Call patch notes. It went something like this:

*A few locations have invisible trees. Dereth is full of wonders. Please walk around them.

Hardtarget

"the Future" is they all get fired
just like in real game testing!

nascgi

Whatever it is, I'm sure it involves Marley.