Gunner
Join Date: Oct 2004
Posts: 97
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Chiller1064
I've been on the publishing and development side of this (8+ years in the industry, primarily at Atari and currentlly teaching Game Design at the college level) and know what it is like to spend 14+ hour days working on something for 10+ months only to see people who have never, ever worked in the industry or have ever designed, developed and published a single interactive title flame the hard work other and myself put in to the project.
In my development experience I found this attitude most amusing - like working long days and doing lots of overtime is a badge of honour. It's in fact a sign of poor skills - either the project manager(s) under estimated the time and complexity of the task, or the developers are not able to do the job efficiently.
Personally, I never worked regular overtime (in fact the only time I did was as part of the integration team due to the slow delivery of code) and my parts of the project were generally on time, and worked first time.
My reward for doing the job properly? Usually ended up with the buggy code from someone else being dumped on me to knock it into shape.
Software development doesn't have to be a continual race against time requiring heroic efforts - if the team decides to approach it that way, that is up to them.
As for not commenting on things you haven't experienced - that is a very poor argument. The product has to be suitable for the audience - it is for the audience to decide if the product is acceptable. This can apply to anything - I don't make films but I can decide whether I think a film is good or not. I don't build cars, but I can decide if a car is fit for purpose or not.
The people who play SH4 may never have written a line of code in their lives - that doesn't matter, they can still say whether it is acceptable to them or not - they don't deserve to be told they don't "know what it is like to spend 14+ hour days working on something for 10+ months only to see people who have never, ever worked in the industry or have ever designed, developed and published a single interactive title flame the hard work other and myself put in to the project."
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Chiller1064
PC game development is VERY complex. It's not like developing titles for consoles (which is a whole different can of worms) for the simple reason that it is impossible to squash every bug you find and to test the software on every concieveable combination of CPU, Motherboard, Sound Card, Video Card, etc. that are currently floating around in people's homes (not to mention hardware driver versions).
Incompatibility between hardware and software I can understand. If those were the only issues, I don't think there would have been nearly so much noise since those things are beyond the control of the development team in many cases.
However, the bugs evident in V1 of SH4 are not about hardware incompatibilities - they are broken features of the simulation engine. Features which even a minimal amount of user testing would highlight, and features which in the original code base (SH3) were working.
If, with all that extra work and effort, those central feature bugs are still present in the quantity they are, there is no defence and those people picking out those bugs, highlighting them and complaining about them are well within their rights.
r.
Well said
