The last sliver of hope I have remaining is that
1) What
@DaveB pointed out is indeed the problem
2) FDev had somehow not figured this out (hard to believe if it's such a rookie mistake but ho hum)
3) This thread pointed them in the right direction
4) It didn't make it into today's patch due to time constraints
So I would expect it to be in the next one whenever that is (next week perhaps?). If not then yeah, I'll leave my impotent rage free reign.
Cosmetics
- Emissive paintjobs have been re-balanced for ships, to bring them closer to how they looked before the Odyssey update.
- Emissive paintjobs have also been balanced for the SRV.
- Mining decals for ships (CG rewards) have been visually improved.
- Various inconsistencies have been fixed with some paintjobs for the Federal Corvette.
Let's pray to the paint job gods it looks better.
It doesn't (at least not for the paints I've checked).
I read those notes earlier and it looks to me like they're trying to address the symptoms rather than the root cause. But what do I know.
I fear that
@ObiW is correct. My fears are reinforced by the post-patch white emissive on all the pulse paintjobs.
This is not an unusual scenario in software development. A single unsuspected root cause results in a wide-ranging, almost random-seeming array of errors. Developers (and graphic artists in this case) are appalled and start pulling all-nighters fixing these errors
one by one. In each case they are twisting something that
wasn't broken out of all recognizable shape to work around an issue that shouldn't be there. These efforts are doomed to be ultimately unsatisfactory but there is an illusion of "progress" and so they continue. Then, some unspecified time down the line, the root cause is discovered and fixed.
And it's now broken even worse because of all the hacks and kludges introduced to work around the symptoms.
I cannot think of a single development project I've either been involved in directly or have supported from a systems level where this particular nuclear landmine has not detonated at least once.
It is a hideously difficult one to avoid and any developer that claims they've never been bitten by it is either a liar or a complete noob in the trade. The only way to try and avoid it is by taking the time to do massively holistic root-cause analyses before even starting to plan developing the fix. In an ideal world this would always happen. In a practical software world, particularly where somethings been released badly broken, the command is "Get on this and fix it NOW!" and that pause for analysis either isn't given sufficient time or just doesn't happen at all.
I am not pointing fingers at FD here. They are not alone. This happens everywhere. By trade I am primarily an analyst rather than a developer and if I had a penny for every time I've seen the development teams ordered into action
in spite of me yelling at the top of my lungs that the analysis wasn't complete yet and they shouldn't be making ANY design decisions until it was then my name would be Gates, Bezos or Musk. Heck, I've even been fired for it more than once (And I will confess to a level of wicked schadenfreude when
those projects stepped on the landmine and crashed and burned).
At this point, as my last word on the subject, I have a prediction. I believe it is possible for FD to avoid it coming true but it would take quite a radical move on the part of the management teams overseeing analysis, development and QA and so I remain mostly confident that it will unfortunately happen. Not because of any specific failing on FD's part but because of problems endemic in the industry.
FD will release patch after patch to fix Odyssey's rendering issues. Down the line somebody will find and fix the true root cause - whether it's the one I believe I may have identified or something different - and the moment that is fixed
everything will suddenly look radically worse. Not because the fix was wrong, but because once it's fixed all those patches to address the symptoms are now breaking everything. FD will then have to either roll back
all those patches in a mammoth refactoring effort or they will accept the kludges and roll back the fix to the root cause instead, leaving it in place and broken. I've seen too much of the software industry to give odds on which.