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

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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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.

Dude that would be oil pressure or temp. Coding isn't an issue there your car is done or your sensor is bad lol. You can disable your car alarm now though, they won't get anywhere : )
 
I'm less concerned with the time it takes, and more with how many brick walls I run into while playing after updates post release. Every now and then a hotfix is necessary but if it's a habit it's wasting my time. I can do other things and get back to the game after a wait for a feature but coming in and playing when something is broken makes me unnecessarily frustrated with the devs.

Edit: actually it's probably wrong to point fingers at the devs here, it is far more likely this is a management problem.
 
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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.

Yes, but it's amazing how some managers (not all) don't 'get it'. :D
 
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.

Loskene.

Perhaps you could offer your services to FD, or
CD project for the witcher 3, or
Rockstar for GTA 5 or
Obsidian for Pillars of Eternity, or
Ubisoft for Assassins creed unity:-
I could go on producing examples or evidence as I like to think of it.
 
This thread is a wonderful example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority mistakenly assessing their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacofnitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, people to whom an aptitude comes naturally tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.
As David Dunning and Justin Kruger conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others"

Sounds like bull crap to me.
 
And to think how Elite used to fit on a 5 1/4th inch 360KB floppydisk.
Frontier Elite fit on a 3 1/2 inch 720 KB floppydisk.
Elite Dangerous takes about 3,000 times as much space as Frontier Elite at 2.5 GB, which is still relatively little compared to modern games, but can for a large part be explained with Procedural Generation.
 
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.
If you're talking about a pragmatic approach to automated unit testing in which a limited number of genuinely comprehensive tests are used to valid systems then, yes, I agree. If you're talking about dogmatic TDD then, in my experience at least, it's just flushing an ungodly amount of money down the loo and results in vast numbers of pointless, rushed, cursory tests.
 
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.

This.
Just a side note on ED and it's early release - and I'm not talking about the unfairness of it but only mentioning one example of the weird functionality.

There have been ranks with factions since release. By now I guess a lot of players have pretty high ranks with most of them but have seen no real difference in gameplay. Filling these up with contents later? Great idea but I guess when they arrive (if ever), I'll have missed the whole game between the lowest rank and the rank I have now. I couldn't play with the scaling, I couldn't enjoy how to get up and up and how it made my game better. No matter which rank I have the difference is only how it's called but no gameplay difference between a whatever officer and a whatever else officer.
Same with the elite ranking. No differences between mostly harmless or competent. Or dealer and broker. It doesn't mean different possibilities, they have no different requirements in quality, the only difference is the quantity. Like in ageing. A commander can be very old in ED, an elite even but it doesn't mean quality gameplay, it means only the hours spent sitting in front of the game.

Introduce content later after an empty release?
Possible. But it means that the players have been here since launch will loose the experience of scaling and all the gameplay related to it. Now that's why an early release is not just not fair but a huge mistake.
I wanted to see what it does mean to reach a rank. How the universe reacts on that. What possibilities it does open for me which was not there before. I wanted to make choices of what to do first and second to reach what I wanted optimally. I would have been happy to meet requirements for accessing other elements of the game which was permitted before but gives a leap forward when I have it. As a lonely pilot I wanted to use my ship as a tool for that and not the only thing I can advance into. I would have been happy to blaze my trail meaningfully.

Now these are all lost - except if I clear my save. Which I will do happily if the contents arrive. Hopefully there are commanders out there patient enough to elegantly overlook the very poor release state of ED and staying until some miracle happens.
 
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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

Plenty of other games release in a far better state than Elite and the games mentioned above. (Witcher might be good, delays show they know what they have unlike here).

You are suggesting competence is impossible and that is absurd. Elite is simply unfinished and insanely shallow by any reasonable measure. Seems pointless to make intentionally obtuse excuses imo.
 
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I didn't have a problem with the game having a few bugs, what annoyed me most, was playing a game where the goalposts were being constantly moved.
Devs spending time changing stuff that worked fine instead of stuff that was truly broken.

The sound was out last time a checked, one of the best parts of the game now up n down like a damn yoyo, why mess with it?
The Python, as unbalanced as it was, got turned into a white elephant. It worked as it was, don't screw with it.

Fix the in game comms, so we can at least talk to our friends we haven't been able to contact since adding them from week one.
Put in "wings" so we can "play" together.
Don't take out stuff that attracts large amounts of players ----> Seeking Luxuries.
Yes they are boring in themselves, but the amount of good multi-player battles they attracted was top fun.

Agreed, some aspects of the game have been improved, such as long distance routing, but some of the more important stuff has gone backwards.

I'll stick my head back in, at the next update.
 
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority mistakenly assessing their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacofnitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, people to whom an aptitude comes naturally tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.
As David Dunning and Justin Kruger conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others"

Sounds like bull crap to me.

It's actually a piece of well-established cognitive science, and unless you're being deliberately ironic you've just demonstrated the effect. You're not an expert on cognitive science but somehow you think you know more than experts in that field.
I mentioned Dunning-Kruger because this is one of those threads in which non-programmers divulge their "expertise" on programming without recognizing that they don't have any programming expertise.
 

Mu77ley

Volunteer Moderator
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.

While OOP is a powerful tool (if used correctly), it's by no means a panacea and a lot of video games are generally more suited to an entity/component based design pattern: http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy
 
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.

No the main reason for OOP is that is projecting the well known real world object and hierarchy to programmer mind set. It easier to comprehend by humans. Which means easier to step in and be productive.
It came because Software engineering got big so it also way to be productive with large teams with variety of skill levels. And manage a large code base. Also isolating one programmer influence within a module.

XML and JSON is some of the way to make software more data driven. And standard way to communicate between different platforms. The reason is when you hardcode something to change a value you need a recompile. So even better change or add under runtime by feeding it data or scripts.

How ever OOP has also it cons. The reason functional programming and Data oriented are there.


Back in those old days. The teams are very small the skill is to do your game magic whit very limited CPU power and very limited memory. with Assembler which is very non human readable syntax.
Now it large scale software engineering and software architecture is much more important. Also the keep the large art teams productive with highly data driven game engines.
With the more important time to market there is often a sacrifice of performance to be much more productive to reach reasonable deliver dates. So the reason for Java and C#

The game industry most used programming language is C++ a multi paradigm tool which has OOP capabilities with a huge minefield to blow yourself up. But with the huge legacy codebase they stick to it and add to it.
That why there is the fresh D language.

The reason for buggy code is unreasonable deadline. It is know that crunch time yield for short periods more productivity but the longer it doesn't. This is from all ages of game production.
 
Plenty of other games release in a far better state than Elite and the games mentioned above. (Witcher might be good, delays show they know what they have unlike here).

You are suggesting competence is impossible and that is absurd. Elite is simply unfinished and insanely shallow by any reasonable measure. Seems pointless to make intentionally obtuse excuses imo.

I am a huge fan of CDProject. But to be honest, The Witcher 1 was one of the worst releases of all time. It only became playable with the enhanced edition. Guess what? I don't care. CDProject did a great job in fixing the game, but it took them 1 year to deliver the enhanced edition and I am happy that they took their time. It would be just fair to give FDEV the same time before suggesting they are incompetent.
 
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