[TRENCHES] Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - Discourtesy
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Discourtesy
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/discourtesy
Painful Testing
AnonymousThe first game development I did for public consumption was an add-on for Quake II. We were a team of about ten people, and I was the only software developer; everyone else was graphic artists, map designers, modelers, sound engineers, etc… all spread across the United States.
As we neared our planned launch date, I began to get moderately concerned about the fact that during the last year of development, even though every one was able to play the game on their own systems, not once did we have an actual deathmatch in which we actually played each other.
As a programmer, this was unthinkable: releasing a product specifically made for deathmatch without actually testing it for deathmatch was unimaginable, but I was outvoted by the rest of the group. They simply wanted to get the game out there so they can scream “Look! I made that!”
We released it on a Saturday morning, and less than half an hour passed before we were notified of the first “showstopper.” The bug: if two rockets collided in mid air, the game crashed instantly… and violently. It was an issue that was impossible to detect in an environment outside of deathmatch, or even in a controlled testing environment, but in the real world it happened all the time, especially in Quake II where the hit boxes of rockets were cubes two feet across.
So we pulled the release and we (or I, as the case may be) immediately went in to repair mode to release a patched version. The rest of the team finally listened to me and decided to create a test environment, but rather than do a closed alpha test they decided to invite players from the outside world to test it along with the developers.
So after I fixed all the bugs I knew of (and there were still several I didn’t know about), we hosted a deathmatch server with the “alpha” build. All eight members of the team joined in and waited until other players showed up.
Two players, anonymous denizens of the Internet that responded to our call, showed up, and through in game chat we asked them to test this by trying to take on the developers. Just for kicks, we decided to make the teams exactly as they stood: one team had all eight of us, the people that actually created the game, and the other team were these two unknowns that didn’t even know the game existed until an hour earlier.
No other “showstoppers” were found, but the two anonymous players literally decimated us. It was a rout unlike anything ever seen in the world of deathmatch. I think our death-to-kill ratio was 40:1 by the end of the match.
After a few weeks, we finally released the product… and I went my own way to work with groups that understood the concept of game testing.
On a semi-related note: one of the bugs reported was that if you uninstalled the add-on, it would also uninstall the entire Quake II directory. We had several emails from players complaining “Damn it!!! Now I have to buy Quake II and return it again!!!”
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congrats on breasting the tape in front of buckley and sohmer in the race to be the worst fucking webcomic ever produced
p.s. "q" stands for "queef"
At the risk of responding to a troll, I would say that none of the characters in this comic match Scott Kurtz's personality at all. Apparently blurfman thinks that Q is Mary Sue for Kurtz, but I can't really see it. I think maybe blurfman doesn't understand the concept of Mary Sue or self insertion (painfully self censoring anal self insertion joke here) because Q isn't actually a heroic or even pleasant character at all. None of the characters are the kind of people that you'd want to know in real life at all, let alone idolize.
Q has a pair of what appear to be chopsticks next to his cup. From this we can deduce that pan-asian fusion may, may have been involved.
Our analysis of this comic is granular.
Yes.
Pie brownie sounds good, but pie steak and steak brownie and pie steak brownie are all foods I think I would prefer not to try.
I assume that "pie steak" would be like a meat pie, which, if you've never had one, is delicious. For serious. Hit up the next Irish festival you can, and get in on some of that meat pie action.
I know you can have tuna steaks, because getting a steak is, as I understand it, the result of a specific cutting process. Therefore one could infer that that a pie might be cut in a similar way, producing pie steak.
Since there were only eight on the team, does that mean no one was harmed?
You've just opened up a whole new culinary world for us.
Really old people. Like, Depression era folk. My grandpa will order black coffee with anything because "washing it down" is not a concept he cares anything for. Other works cited: the ancients I would serve when I waited tables.
Well gosh, I suppose I might as well settle in for a nice cuppa ...... this is gonna be good!
Right, decimation was the execution of one out of every ten men. So if we go by the definition of "reduce by a tenth" they lost 0.8 people out of their group of 8.