The Crystal Ball 2

[ATAG_Doc]

Posted by the redundant man of redundancy.

[mxmadman]

I don't know how much the severity of the current list of bugs really matters. 1C has displayed their incompetence many times, and if history tells us anything it is that once these bugs are resolved, they will just be replaced by a new crop.

[David Hayward]

Originally Posted by mxmadman

I don't know how much the severity of the current list of bugs really matters. 1C has displayed their incompetence many times, and if history tells us anything it is that once these bugs are resolved, they will just be replaced by a new crop.

That is true for any complicated software. As you make changes you introduce bugs. You often also add new bugs when you fix old bugs. All of which is great for job security...

[Jaws2002]

Originally Posted by David Hayward

That is true for any complicated software. As you make changes you introduce bugs. You often also add new bugs when you fix old bugs. All of which is great for job security...

They should have known this by now. Instead of fixing the bugs in the new engine they had, they scraped it a d built a new one, with a fresh set of bugs.

[Stublerone]

I think, that at least the posting of the last few weeks really were honest and that they were also thinking to solve the issues in a short time. And it also is honest, that they are even more unhappy about the situation , than we are. So, the last weeks have this honest behaviour as a positive result.

Concerning your mad words about past program skills: It is not okay to evaluate that, as a sim is always something different and in my opinion not as easy as programming a casual game like bf3. All they did is a new evolution stage of their engine and than copy and paste bf:bad company 2 with some new weapons, maps, interfaces and a slightly different system. It is a n1 game, but in its heart it is nothing new. They haven't solved hitbox problems now for decades and if you have a closer look, it simply offer no deeply programmed feature. Some libraries, some physx effects (which are very wrong in important cases) and newest directx effects and they are done for the gaming part. Building ne scenarios perhaps took most of the time. There is no revolution, although I see a talented multiplayer developer in dice!

Think about cod black ops: They ran into time issues for their introduction. So they simply got the multiplayer frome dice (different graphics style between single and multiplayer). I just shoot in the dark with the following, but they just took several weeks to setup the whole multiplayer for cod. But it is poor for cod, that this happened.

You can see, that it is easy to produce ego shooter over ego shooter and just change appearance, story and some features, but it is not easy to program completely new games with such a small studio in an acceptable time frame. U see this in every sim, which tries to do something completely new or in a new detail level.

So, to compare the grade of detail behind the scenes of a sim and a casual game is not possible. They have different priorities!

[David Hayward]

Originally Posted by Jaws2002

They should have known this by now. Instead of fixing the bugs in the new engine they had, they scraped it a d built a new one, with a fresh set of bugs.

There are going to be bugs no matter what they do. That is the nature of complex software.

[kendo65]

Originally Posted by Jaws2002

They should have known this by now. Instead of fixing the bugs in the new engine they had, they scraped it a d built a new one, with a fresh set of bugs.

I think they felt that to get more streamlined, efficient code they had to do something more drastic than a 'sticking plaster' approach. I'm sure it wasn't a decision they took lightly - in fact probably with something close to horror when they realised that it was going to be necessary.

They also had to rewrite the sound engine too.

Plus there is ongoing work on the AI code. The GUI is to be replaced.

Does raise a few questions about the state of the game on release. May be the case that what we got at release was a bit of a 'belt and braces', stitched-together-in-a-hurry job after they got a 'release now or else' ultimatum. So now there is reworking of different areas of code to bring it to a final, polished level.

[Walrus1]

Originally Posted by Jaws2002

They should have known this by now. Instead of fixing the bugs in the new engine they had, they scraped it a d built a new one, with a fresh set of bugs.

Do you think the 'old code' was workable? Better, somehow?

From my understanding, which is only from what Luthier wrote, it was not suitable as the basis for a smooth running game, especially if more features are added (ie tree collisions, dynamic weather, etc.)

I am not a programmer, this is just my impression.

[svanen]

How can the same bugs exists in the new code, if it is rebuilt from scratch? Whats the odds of that...

[bongodriver]

But they aren't the same bugs....