This is the future for games. Here is why, you won't like it

[Almighty Bob]

20 years ago computers were not very powerful so programmers had to write short simple code and it was easy to validate.


These days computers are so powerful that programmers can write huge amounts of code and they do. Testing has become so time consuming and expensive that they have to ask for our help, its the same in business.

From the start this was a 'pay to play and help develop game'. It was never and never will be a finished product. On the good side we all get to moan a lot.

We need to change our outlook on this.

 

[Yokai]

20 years ago computers were not very powerful so programmers had to write short simple code and it was easy to validate.


These days computers are so powerful that programmers can write huge amounts of code and they do. Testing has become so time consuming and expensive that they have to ask for our help, its the same in business.

From the start this was a 'pay to play and help develop game'. It was never and never will be a finished product. On the good side we all get to moan a lot.

We need to change our outlook on this.

I've been doing this for nearly 30 years and.... um.... not exactly (re: being simple and easy to validate 20 years ago). But the sentiment's nice! We _do_ have to be patient. Changes that the dev team knows they need to get to can be bumped by other priorities and still take quite a while to roll out to production environments due to a whole slew of reasons.

 

[Vidicus]

Games are a bigger industry than any other entertainment media. When you make a game that can gross hundreds of millions, or even a billion or more as in the case of GTA5, you can afford to pay testers. Many gamers, myself included, are happy to beta test games free for companies. If anything, companies should be held to more strict regulations on releasing buggy products that were not properly tested. Companies should also be honest about the product they release and not mislead the consumer. An example of this is the trailer for Elite Dangerous. For some reason software development companies get away with this type of fraud while other industries do not. Developers now seem to think they can sell a product to consumers before it is ready. Look at Steam, it is plagued with early access games, many of which you pay full price for and never get a final version.

I think we do need to change our outlook on this as you said. In the case of Elite Dangerous, the changes and balancing should have been addressed earlier. And if any drastic changes are done it should be fine tuned over time on a test server before being implemented on the live server. Twenty years ago a few people could make a game, now it is from small teams to massive teams consisting of over a hundred people. The issue is companies expect the consumer to test their finished and released products for free.

 

[Skip Intro]

As an illustration: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/

 

[Almighty Bob]

I've been doing this for nearly 30 years and.... um.... not exactly (re: being simple and easy to validate 20 years ago). But the sentiment's nice! We _do_ have to be patient. Changes that the dev team knows they need to get to can be bumped by other priorities and still take quite a while to roll out to production environments due to a whole slew of reasons.

I did not intend to insult the hard work of the guys from the 80's and 90's.

I have evidence;-

1.Look at the recent apology about Assassins Creed being released full of bug.

2. The Witcher delayed again and again and again. same reason

 

[WoeHorn]

Object Oriented Programming can help, but few that claim to know how to do it can do it well. Sadly we're moving in the opposite direction these days. Everything is in an XML or JSON file, copy/paste solutions are rampant, its the end of days for sure.

 

[NewYears1978]

I think I would have been happy with a direct Wing Commander remake...

 

[Almighty Bob]

Games are a bigger industry than any other entertainment media. When you make a game that can gross hundreds of millions, or even a billion or more as in the case of GTA5, you can afford to pay testers. Many gamers, myself included, are happy to beta test games free for companies. If anything, companies should be held to more strict regulations on releasing buggy products that were not properly tested. Companies should also be honest about the product they release and not mislead the consumer. An example of this is the trailer for Elite Dangerous. For some reason software development companies get away with this type of fraud while other industries do not. Developers now seem to think they can sell a product to consumers before it is ready. Look at Steam, it is plagued with early access games, many of which you pay full price for and never get a final version.

I think we do need to change our outlook on this as you said. In the case of Elite Dangerous, the changes and balancing should have been addressed earlier. And if any drastic changes are done it should be fine tuned over time on a test server before being implemented on the live server. Twenty years ago a few people could make a game, now it is from small teams to massive teams consisting of over a hundred people. The issue is companies expect the consumer to test their finished and released products for free.

Over a hundred testers is clearly not enough they need all of us.
Having said that auto testing may help. But that will take more code

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As an illustration: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/

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That explains why my car alarm goes off at 2am. And why on the dash the red Aladdin's lamp comes on for no reason.

 

[Logios]

Many people aren't in a patient mood right now because a nearly game breaking bug (the slightest collisions destroy ships) was reported by players on the first day of beta and they did nothing about it and still released a broken patch. That's just incompetence.

I don't mind delays, delays are better than releasing broken garbage, just ask Ubisoft.

 

[Cevap]

The Witcher delays are a good thing, many devs/publishers should learn from those guys in general not just the "dont release before finished" part. They expanded both of their games free of charge as well...

 

[Almighty Bob]

The Witcher delays are a good thing, many devs/publishers should learn from those guys in general not just the "dont release before finished" part. They expanded both of their games free of charge as well...

Cevap I would rep you but you deserve a reply. You are spot on, but is it achievable with 1000+ staff testers. Just because something is possible does not make it practicable or acceptable. Hence the title 'Here is why, you won't like it'

 

[Emanon]

I don't think today's beta release is a matter of patients. I work in the tech industry and a QA Manager and know how much work goes into various builds and what leads up to your typical production release. No matter how big/skilled/organized your team is there are always going to be issues you find after implementation. And I get that this is a hard thing for developers/publishers to juggle in such big games.

My issue is that such a big release, even though they are only treating it as a point release (look at the laundry list of GREAT changes), such a big release could have used MUCH more time in beta and internal unit and functional testing. Heck, you can say that about a lot of games released in the past couple of years, but sometimes it just comes down to schedules and money. Release it and fix it later.

 

[Crash1099]

Many people aren't in a patient mood right now because a nearly game breaking bug (the slightest collisions destroy ships) was reported by players on the first day of beta and they did nothing about it and still released a broken patch. That's just incompetence.

I don't mind delays, delays are better than releasing broken garbage, just ask Ubisoft.

This bug ruins the game. They need to fix it. Revert the patch and let people beta test it more.

 

[Almighty Bob]

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[Loskene]

Yes, there can be more raw lines of code in a program now that hard disks can store more than a handful of bytes. What's your point?
You act like you've had some amazing revelation about the nature of games development or something, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly.

 

[Almighty Bob]

Yes, there can be more raw lines of code in a program now that hard disks can store more than a handful of bytes. What's your point?
You act like you've had some amazing revelation about the nature of games development or something, but I'm not seeing what it is exactly.

The very simple point is;

Games are so complex in 2015. that testing them is a really big problem!

Feel free to disagree if you understand my simple point

Thanks for calling me amazing but I feel it is undeserved.

 

[NeoRacer_XOX]

Another thing to consider is on a game the scale of ED..they have to go with procedural generation esp when it comes to making content for Planets/citys ect

 

[Roadblock]

We find that having very good unit tests, and doing test driven development when possible helps a lot in these cases. We still use human testers of course, but there are an awful lot of problems that can be found by having good unit tests. The problem is that often times it takes longer to write a unit test for code that you've written than it did to write the code itself.

Edit: I would imagine that large potions of the back-end of many of these games should be unit test-able. Not all companies see the value in taking the time to do it though.

 

[Loskene]

The very simple point is;

Games are so complex in 2015. that testing them is a really big problem!

Feel free to disagree if you understand my simple point

Thanks for calling me amazing but I feel it is undeserved.

I'll go ahead and disagree because you don't have a clue what you're on about and I like to think that I do. Nobody called you amazing.
Testing's only ever a problem in a game if the developer doesn't know how to run a proper test environment. Game development is complex but that complexity doesn't scale linearly to the processing power of the machines it's being developed for. You do know that development tools and automation systems have also gotten more complex in that time, and it's actually easier to make a game now than it ever was before.
Making the right decisions to ensure that game is good, however, will never get more or less easy.

 

[iain666]

We find that having very good unit tests, and doing test driven development when possible helps a lot in these cases. We still use human testers of course, but there are an awful lot of problems that can be found by having good unit tests. The problem is that often times it takes longer to write a unit test for code that you've written than it did to write the code itself.

Edit: I would imagine that large potions of the back-end of many of these games should be unit test-able. Not all companies see the value in taking the time to do it though.

You get all that time writing tests back in the long run though because you know pretty much straight away if that change you just made inadvertently broke something rather than finding out from a tester (or worse, a customer) months after the fact when you then have to spend ages tracking down the bug.