[Trenches] Thursday, January 2, 2014 - Rejecting The Call

Dog

RMS Oceanic

I didn't even notice the state of his "office" until now. Tee hee.

Wingedillidan

That desk has a lot of structural support... I want to build a box fort now...

marsilies

Link to the comic:
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/rejecting-the-call


Today's Tale:
http://trenchescomic.com/tales/post/why-dont-you-go-work-out-over-there.-waaaaaaaaay-over-there

Why don’t you go work out over there. Waaaaaaaaay over there…
01/07/2014 - Anonymous

We were testing games in what was essentially a basement while the developers were up on the second floor. Between us and them sat an entire floor of offices filled with people related to, but not directly involved in, the development process to, I guess, act as a buffer between QA and Development.

Well, down in QA there is only five of us including me, and no two of us are alike. It’s like a floor full of sitcom stereotype personalities if said show was about misery and suffering broken by the occasional interesting conversation…

So I guess you could say working in QA was kind of like a sitcom.

Anyway, one of our testers had earned himself the name “Crazy-fingers” due to his inability to avoid pressing buttons as fast as humanly possible, despite the developers’, and occasional management insistence that our rates of rapid button mashing was completely, and totally out of the realm of realism. Basically, “No-one will ever actually jam on those buttons like that in the field, so stop doing it.”

As you can well imagine, the moment said individual turned his/her back, Crazy-fingers would immediately begin to do what he did best to a set of canned laughter. This would usually illicit a well-timed roll-of-the-eyes from our QA manager, and result in a hilarious crash-bug of some sort less than a minute later.

These bugs would usually make our lead programmer stomp down the stairs to confront Crazy-fingers about the legitimacy of said bug report as the developers on the second floor usually couldn’t reproduce the issue, and he would challenge Crazy-fingers to reproduce it for him while he watched.

Insert canned Oooohs.

After successfully reproducing the bug for our lead dev we would treat Crazy-fingers to a round of high-fives (not really) before the true punch-line of the episode hit: Our lead developer would go into the workout room, and start working on the punching bag.

We could regularly hear him working off the stress through two closed fire doors, and three walls.

If he worked out five days a week, we knew we were doing our jobs.

Still scary as hell to listen to him go though…

JackdawGin

RMS Oceanic wrote: »

I didn't even notice the state of his "office" until now. Tee hee.

Me neither, really funny silent joke, and going back over the other strips I can see the evidence of it that I missed.

RoyceSraphim

JackdawGin wrote: »

RMS Oceanic wrote: »

I didn't even notice the state of his "office" until now. Tee hee.

Me neither, really funny silent joke, and going back over the other strips I can see the evidence of it that I missed.

Seriously, I just noticed today as well.

klemming

Today's Tale:
http://trenchescomic.com/tales/post/the-legend-of-el-pistolero

The Legend of “El Pistolero”
01/09/2014 - Anonymous
I worked on an FPS that was a console launch release for a major software group that has since gone on to produce a very successful franchise based on that original title.

One of my co-workers (and good friends) had the exact kind of analytical mind that seemed to be able to discern ill-thought-out design features that could be exploited—not exactly “bugs” in the traditional sense, but just playability problems. He had been assigned to QA another launch release this company was working on, but that one having been completed, he was drafted to help with our crunch time.

He discovered that the same weapon damage values that were being used for the single-player campaign were also being used for the multiplayer. The problem was that in order to make the initial levels where you were only armed with a pistol playable, the damage and rate of fire for it had to be set a certain way. These settings meant that if you had a quick enough trigger finger, in multiplayer the starting pistol was the most powerful weapon in the game.

His submission of this fact was met with disbelief by the programming team, who proceeded to challenge him to a series of multiplayer matches in all battle modes, to prove him wrong. One by one, they stepped up—and one by one, “El Pistolero” gunned them down. Again, and again.

In the end, the programmers were forced to choose between either retooling the entire level balance of the single player campaign mere weeks before release, or…well..shipping it.

To their credit, they at least adjusted the fire animations of all the other weapons, and re-engineered the sounds for them, so it was more satisfying to use those instead—the average gamer would be so impressed by the light show on the advanced weapons, they’d never stop to consider just sticking with the pistol.

But to this day I can’t pick up another FPS without recalling the legend of “El Pistolero”—and at least once promising myself to play a round without picking up or using any other weapons.

Huh. I wonder what game that was. I doubt we'll ever crack that code.

Neuroskeptic

Why not create a new weapon, an exact copy of the single player pistol, but with half the damage, and make that the MP starting gun?

klemming

Making changes like that aren't nearly as easy as they sound. Even if it's a carbon copy except for damage, it's still effectively a new weapon, and has to be tested to make sure it doesn't break anything.
When you're weeks from a release you can't afford to miss, you don't want to risk anything that might cause a delay.

I'm actually impressed that they tweaked the other weapons to seem more impressive. I wonder what they used to be like.

zepherin

Reminds me of that pistol from Halo 1. Good god.

Nobody

zepherin wrote: »

Reminds me of that pistol from Halo 1. Good god.

I figured it was Halo.

Darkewolfe

Isaac is supposed to have been a successful bigshot before. How is he completely unfamiliar with the concept of turning candidates down?

klemming

Darkewolfe wrote: »

Isaac is supposed to have been a successful bigshot before. How is he completely unfamiliar with the concept of turning candidates down?

He wasn't a manager.
I got the impression he was one of the 'darling' coders who let their ego get to them, and figured that everything good he worked on was entirely down to his genius. (all the bad games he worked clearly weren't his fault, of course)
Human interaction probably wasn't a big part of that.

Gaslight

Isaac was a developer. His thing was concepts and code. It's safe to say he had very little if any involvement in day-to-day management or hiring/firing decisions.

sonofskywalker3

It's gotta be Halo. My brother has always dominated with just the pistol. I never had good enough aim, better with a spray and pray weapon.

Hardtarget

zepherin wrote: »

Reminds me of that pistol from Halo 1. Good god.

I hope this was intentional

YoungFrey

I know it's not the game under discussion here, but I believe Bionic Commando was known for having a broken pistol too. I wonder if that is a common multiplayer mistake.

UNHchabo

YoungFrey wrote: »

I know it's not the game under discussion here, but I believe Bionic Commando was known for having a broken pistol too. I wonder if that is a common multiplayer mistake.

Half-Life 2 had a bug where if you held down the right mouse button, then held down the left mouse button, it would "charge up" the pistol, at a rate of about one shot per second. You could then fire all charged shots by releasing the left button, then the right. You can see this technique demonstrated here (at about 20:05, if my timestamp URL doesn't work for you):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B83zyts5q88&t=20m5s

The speedrunner needs a couple seconds to line up his shot correctly, and uses that time to charge up. When he releases, three shots hit the same explosive barrel.

This exploit was patched out of Half-Life 2:Deathmatch soon after it was discovered (I got it used against me several times), but it remained in the singleplayer game until 2010, when Valve updated it to the Orange Box engine.




Another fun one: when the pistols in Counterstrike got changed over to be semi-auto at the mouse, instead of auto-firing if you held the button down, all of them had rate limits. When they added the Dualies, it had no such limit, so you could fire as fast as you click the mouse... or if you rebind the keys, as fast as you can spin the mousewheel.