I wasn't going to jump in and say this, being a newbie and all...

[Immacolata]

Thats what Ive been saying for a long time now. Just in fewer words

Want complex games? Expect complexity in your bugs too. And your retail angle on things probably is a revealing read to many of the whinging little bilge rats that crawls out from the woodwork these days.

I hope that for every whiner thread there is with ignorants demanding lawsuits, that devs are castrated etc. there is also some who say the opposite.

I approve of SHIV. I am on my third patrol and am getting to like the game more and more.

[ryuzu]

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."

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).

<snip>

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.

[DragonRR1]

An excellent factual post Chiller.

I can only comment that games shouldn't be released with major bugs (excluding the odd compatibility issue). I know and understand the reasons why they do but this doesn't make it OK.

The industry as a whole needs to work out how to avoid this problem. The computer games industry is not the ONLY industry to have problems like this but it is one of the few industries to actually allow a products to hit the market knowing that they just aren't finished.

While ever the status quo continues people will complain and I personally can't really blame them.

[3Jane]

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

[Corsair]

Thks, it's always good to learn how it goes from people with inside knowledge. Although I have no intention of playing this game I am sure the people interested by the PTO will have a fine sim in 6 months / 1 year from now. Seems everyone forgot how long it took for SH3 to become the great sim it is today and should know that the thousands of man hours from the modding communities are only possible because they do it for free.
But still, if it is working as you describe as a general rule, how come some companies (and not the biggest and richest ones) do it right most of the time and other do it wrong and don't learn from past experiences.
In the end most potential customers who now know the drill will wait quite a few months for the game to be fully enjoyable and will probably by then buy a cheap re-edition and it will be a revenue loss for the publisher. There are a few companies from which I would buy a game on release or soon after (like Microprose in the old days) otherwise I will wait for reviews, comments on forums, and until patches are done.
I am lucky I don't always need new things to keep my interest in PC games since more than 20 years and when I really like a game it stays a long time on my drive...

[ComradeP]

I agree with most things you say, Chiller1064, but there are some things that you should take into consideration when judging all the whiners and complainers. I note all this backed by a fairly extensive experience as a beta tester for numerous games from all possible genres except sports and racing and from all major publishers. I've spend at least 5 years living with the forums for those games as my second home, so to speak, and at least 13 years playing them. I don't have any experience with game design, but I do have a lot of experience with the beta testing process and with customer reactions.

First of all, people like to whine. Napoleon once said that as long as his troops whined without end, he knew they were happy. Whining is also very human, from a psychological standpoint: people tend to complain more about what don't they have than state that they're happy with what they do have. Second place is also never good enough.

Whining, although it is a very poor way to state a possible issue, can involve legitimate complaints. Whining in the form of "OMG something is teh wrong" type Neal already mentioned is usually not productive, but you'll note that the Atari forums you might be used to contain a lot more of that than these forums, a thing that's mostly related to the target audience of the various game.

Which brings me to my second point: this is not meant as a bash of any kind, but your experience at Atari doesn't stand up to the comparison with Ubisoft Romania outside of a general level. Atari releases mainstream games, usually without a requirement for realism and more often than not license bound (I'll get back to that later). Atari calls Rollercoaster Tycoon a "simulation" ("economic simulation", to be precise), Ubisoft Romania calls Silent Hunter IV a "simulation". I'll leave it up to you to decide what is closer to the truth.

Simply put, Atari usually doesn't release realistic games based on real world events, the exceptions being sports and race games which cater a mainstream (and young) audience(I'll get back to that later too). Ubisoft Romania releases fairly "hard core" simulations that cater a mostly adult and semi-grognard to grognard audience, much like wargames.

"Why is that difference so important?", you might ask That leads me to my third point.

If there's one thing Atari can usually avoid, it's being bi'tched that something is not realistic. The vast majority of their games simply are not realistic, and their target audience knows it. The "realism" complaints for Atari start when that Ford Pinto you mentioned earlier is faster than a Lamborghini Diablo, if Ronaldo is the star player of FC Groningen OR if the license doesn't live up to expectations. Atari, EA and most other major publishers deal with license based games (various soccer, football, baseball, hockey and other sports related games, Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings just to name a few).

Wrong use of licenses can kill companies, something you're probably aware of due to your experience at Atari (with that I mean that you heard from other companies being ruined by wrong use of license, not that Atari is or was ruined due to that). Neal said that nobody cares if an Orc has 8 toes. Well, I can give you a good example that the customers will have the developers soul if that happens: at the release of Star Wars Galaxies (which I also beta'ed for), a MMORPG which had a huge and anticipating audience and very active forums
, there were problems with some character models not looking exactly like the ones from the movie. Within days, there were hundreds of threads and thousands of posts about it on the forums. Young audiences tend to be very, very loyal to upholding licenses and will immediately scream "Bloody murder!" when something is wrong - in their opinion.

Why all the talk about people sticking to licenses? The reaction people have to wrong use of license is almost exactly the same reaction grognards and the like have as far as realism based games are concerned. When a Panther G has a 88mm gun and the game is supposed to be realistic, hundreds of people will troll the forums for that game for weeks complaining about the problem. If an American submarine uses the metric instead of the imperial system . . .

Historical games still have a tendency to include mistakes. One of the most grognard wargaming companies, Matrix Games, usually releases great wargames that contain a couple of Order Of Battle mistakes, something they probably should've solved during the development process. Oddly enough, the majority of the grognards doesn't complain about it even though it took me only 1 hour of book reading to be able to mod the games to be correct. Some mistakes are simply never found. The more complex the game and the more obscure the subject matter, the higher the chance is that a mistake won't be found. Regardless of the fact that thousands of grognards are looking over your shoulder when the game is released.

That brings me to my fourth point: I agree completely with all the points you make on pressure from the outside on game companies, and as a beta tester I've seen some of the results you mention first hand. There's also some pressure on beta testers, even though they're doing the testing for free and, except for the obligatory Non Disclosure Agreement, are not bound in any way to the developers. Most of the games I beta tested for were commercial successes, partially due to the solid co-operation between developers and beta testers. I've also seen games fail miserably, commercially, because the game was bugged as hell as the developers couldn't be bothered to listen to beta testers.

If beta testers do their job and if the developers give them proper game versions, a lot of bugs will be ironed out during the development process. That being said, I would like to suggest to Ubisoft Romania that they try to have a nice little chat with their beta testers, as clearly there are mistakes in the game that they should've caught. If all the dials you use show meters, you should report that. If "A" makes you see your nice desktop, you should report that.

One thing people usually also don't understand, is that developers usually don't test their own games extensively. The primary task for dev teams is to code, not to test.
Testing is usually done by others, as Chiller1064 also mentioned. As such, I don't think it's fair at all to blame the developers for some of the obvious mistakes in SH IV.

My best guess is that the developers found out about the mistakes themselves when the game went gold and immediately started working on a patch to solve the most obvious ones. All evidence we have at this point seems to support that. I also think that they simply copied and pasted some things from SH III for later recoding, but forgot. A claim that seems to be reported by the amount of SH III sounds and other SH III things in the game. I really, really would like to know how the testers missed some of the obvious flaws.

Imagine being a developer and putting trust in the testers to test your game, as you're busy with coding. Imagine the happiness when your game went gold and ships to the presses and you can finally enjoy a things people call "sleep", "a decent meal" and "a hot shower". Imagine noting that, when you take a look at your game, that there are some obvious flaws. Imagine spending entire days in the office again to create a patch. Imagine taking more flak than a bomber formation over Germany in 1943 from your customers, for a mistake that is not necessarily your fault.

I value the efforts of the developers, and think SH IV is a great game with hard coded potential. I value the bug reports made by various Subsim members, as that will surely improve the game. What I don't value is the lackluster testing that leads to all the reports of "oh my God, I got involved in a car accident because pressing A made my PC CTD".

Remember folks: Ubisoft Romania is definately on our side.

[Corsair]

Also think that we, the hardcore sim players are very privileged... We are the ones reading forums like this one and we all know what's going on around our favourite games. We always get the last patches, learn how to edit some cfg files to get rid of something or to tweak things to our taste, then eagerly download mods when they are released.
On the other end, probably 90% of the people buying this game don't do all this and will soon shelf "another buggy game", although it is thanks to the money they gave to buy it that we will get the devs to hopefully work long enough on the necessary patches.

[Faamecanic]

For the most part I agree with the thread starter.

BUT... I totally disagree with the way SH3 (which if not for the modders) STILL has blatant bugs that were never fixed even after 4 patches (ie IX-D2 range being way wrong, battery charge on XXI), and these bugs are so readlily apparent that all you had to do is play the game for a few hours to see them.

SH4 suffers from this also (ie using the "a" button to maintain depth causes a CTD for most people if not all).

These are bugs that if UBI would allow the devs to have a open beta with the community, it would be found and fixed. And the cost for having the community beta sign a NDA and download the beta would be minimal.

Releasing games with bugs that are hardware/software interaction generated or bugs that are deeper in the code (only happen when circumstances are just right) happens. Its the nature of software. But bugs that pop out at the user after only a hour of play (or as soon as you boot up the game...ie the horrible jaggies for almost all LCD/high res users) is unexcusable from UBISOFTs side.

[Grothesj2]

I'm so eager to play, bugs and all, that I just spent over $300 to bring my system up to speed. All these naysayers and people that complain (even with some justification) should be happy that they are even getting a chance to play. How many other sub games are on the market let alone WW2 Pacific theater? If this sort of game has any interest to you, you'll be patient. SHIII was launched with about as many bugs as I recall and how many of these ranting folks got hundreds of hours of enjoyment from that game when things were sorted out?

[JackChen]

let's just say that if I didn't support the game it is, I wouldn't have bother to get the Deluxe edition and having it shipped to my place.

Anyway, visually, SH4 is better than previous editions, but previous editions were great in terms of game performance. Of course no PC game don't require improvement, and I feel that the SH4 team is trying to address many things in their patch.

To a better and better game!

[OneTinSoldier]

Well ComradeP,

I think it'd be interesting to see what beta testers such as ACSoft have to say about your post if they read it. I think you should do a search for posts with his username and read a few of them. He would not say what he thought of SHIV prior to it's release due to being under an NDA. But after it was released it seemed to me he was being honest with his opinion concerning the 'state of SHIV as released' and it wasn't good. I'll leave you to figure out why that might be.

[DaMaGe007]

"State of the forum addresses" concerning other users opinions are technically of topic and belong in the general forum. Not refering just to this thread in particular.

Posts complaining about the game are at least on topic and have a place here even if some people dont like it, due to thier percieved *hurting the sales* viewpoint which is a bit arroagnt imo.

I dont think this or anyother forum contribute to sales greatly in either a positive or negative respect.

[OneTinSoldier]

Originally Posted by DaMaGe007

I dont think this or any other forum contribute to sales greatly in either a positive or negative respect.

Sorry, but I disgree with that. I think a lot of people read through forums in order to form an opinion on whether or not they should purchase a piece of software. I think you get quite a bit more informed from reading forums than from even reading reviews.

I think you could say I'm a case in point. I was very close to deciding to not buy SHIV because it has a 3D Rendered World that is 'upscaled from 1024x768' and not the true resolutions that are advertised in the game(selectable in the graphics options), and no Anti-Aliasing. Then the Dev's made a post on here announcing they were aware of the issue and that they hope to fix it. Even though it was hard for me to believe they would pull such a stunt to begin with, the admission/acknowledgement made me feel a whole lot better about the matter and I bought the game.

Regards

[yankee-V]

Originally Posted by Aimbot

Great post, but the people who need to listen to you will ignore you.

Agreed, great post from Chiller. A level of insider information that provides some real perspective.

One question or comment for Chiller, have you ever known a game producer to roll their patches into later releases? That is ship them in the next round of the finished product. It seems to me that a large part of the audience for a given game is not the "hard core", or a least not yet, and may miss the patches/updates altogether.

Anyway, a bit off topic, but just curious.

[codmander]

YOU KNOW whats really wierd is they probly could of done a lot better just changing((adjust)) models and maps and turn sh3 into sh4 instead I think they tryed to outdo themselves and it didn't work I think the game problems lies with all the video and sound options((gamma)) etc etc... and the higher config. than again I don't own sh4 so i am totally guessin......... ...........................................and I don't see it in the near future