Sloppy Coders...

[BEANFro Elite]

Okay, not quite general discussion as such...

But, of recently, it seems that the quality of games developers is in decline as more and more games are blighted by bugs or problems introduced by patches...

For example, FEAR has a VERY irritating problem where it refuses to load up when you are connected to the Internet, this was introduced in patch 1.2.

Valve have introduced a glitch via an update that has made all the shaders over-zealously bright, this has effected EVERY game / mod that is powered by Source...

Battlefield 2, my my my, where do I begin... Patch installers that don't install for everyone even if you have met all requirements (adequate hdd space, default install locations etc.), invalid CD key errors, the notorious out of date punkbuster and modified content errors etc.

Battlefield 2 is THE buggiest and most awfuly coded game I've ever come into contact
with in my whole career of gaming EVER; Kreed may be the worst game ever but at least that just worked...I've spent way more time trying to get Battlefield 2 to work than I've spent playing it...


I'm sure there are many other games out there worthy of mention, but why has all of a sudden so many different games have had patches that introduce more problems...

[divinemadness]

Valve have introduced a glitch via an update that has made all the shaders over-zealously bright, this has effected EVERY game / mod that is powered by Source...

Tbh I thought that was intentional.

[javalord]

As complexity increases bugs naturally increase, so its not necessarily sloppy coding. In an day and age where getting the product to market is more important than pissing off your customer base in the name of profit... what else to expect.

[BEANFro Elite]

All I'm saying is what has happened to quality control, surely at least they can take their time on making sure that patches are as bug free as possible considering that patches are there to releive games from bugs.

[unreal]

Battlefield 2, my my my, where do I begin... Patch installers that don't install for everyone even if you have met all requirements (adequate hdd space, default install locations etc.), invalid CD key errors, the notorious out of date punkbuster and modified content errors etc.

Battlefield 2 is THE buggiest and most awfuly coded game I've ever come into contact
with in my whole career of gaming EVER; Kreed may be the worst game ever but at least that just worked...I've spent way more time trying to get Battlefield 2 to work than I've spent playing it...

QFT, Battlefield 2 is the most wind-up game I own. I could write a huge essay on all the bad things about that game, but because EA and Dice own such a great core franchise, we have no other game like it we can turn to That's why I've been playing CSS lately, because I can simply fire up the Steam server browser and join a game just like that - Battlefield 2 ponces about with the notoriously laggy ingame browser and sometimes the game crashes to your desktop once you have finally found one of the few non laggy rooms.

I was recently in a discussion with the BF2 developers thanks to an xfire compo thing, but they ignored all my questions about the faults of the game (I asked sensible questions, I wasn't like 'OMGZ UR GAEM IS TEH SUCKR I GET A TANK AND I RUN OVER I ARE PUNISHED AND BANNED I HATE YOU' sort of thing, I asked fair questions, but they just answered questions from a few others like 'What is your favourite level' and 'how long did the game take to develop'.

[poolking]

QFT, Battlefield 2 is the most wind-up game I own. I could write a huge essay on all the bad things about that game, but because EA and Dice own such a great core franchise, we have no other game like it we can turn to That's why I've been playing CSS lately, because I can simply fire up the Steam server browser and join a game just like that - Battlefield 2 ponces about with the notoriously laggy ingame browser and sometimes the game crashes to your desktop once you have finally found one of the few non laggy rooms.

I was recently in a discussion with the BF2 developers thanks to an xfire compo thing, but they ignored all my questions about the faults of the game (I asked sensible questions, I wasn't like 'OMGZ UR GAEM IS TEH SUCKR I GET A TANK AND I RUN OVER I ARE PUNISHED AND BANNED I HATE YOU' sort of thing, I asked fair questions, but they just answered questions from a few others like 'What is your favourite level' and 'how long did the game take to develop'.

You will find that with most companies, they like to answer the nice "fluffy" questions that do not bash their products, also I think most of them wouldn't know the answer to your question anyway.

[BEANFro Elite]

Tbh I thought that was intentional.

Well no, because the water for example, reflects the sky brighter than the sky actually is, which defies nature and the Source engine's own logic.

The bit in HL2 where you're in the air boat and you have to travel through all those lakes of radioactive waste, I know its radioactive but sears the eyes to look at, its rediculous...


It's actually quite funny really, I remember watching a demonstration of the beat code at some LAN party in Germany...

The game seemed quite stable, but crashed to the desktop quite regularly, must have been quite embarrassing...

As for EA, I hear they are very harsh on their employees, so how they managed to cough up this sorry excuse of a "finished" title is beyond me...

How are companies going to solve problems with their games if they are unwilling to take onboard their customers views, gripes and complaints...

Having thought about all the EA games I've owned in the past have been quite buggy; even the console games!!

[nvening]

I thought CSS looked all shiny now lol, i like it like that

[BEANFro Elite]

I thought CSS looked all shiny now lol, i like it like that

At first I also liked it, then I played aztec and I thought the mud was snow... in office however, its generally bareable but it does look like someone went crazy with a floor buffer!!

[unreal]

I think it might have been implemented to help people appreciate and notice the bump mapping more - I know me and Tobe kept getting distracted by the bumpmapping in the car park of office ;_;

Yeah EA were/are harsh on their employees with deadlines and such, and apparently there was a big lawsuit against them from some of their employees that was successful - can't quite remeber what it was on about though

[Flibb]

You would never get away with so many bugs in software written for a non gaming use, if some of the software I wrote was so buggy the company I used to work for would incur crippling financial penaltys for however long it didnt work up to standard over the time in the contract it said it would be done.

Gamers are treated like second rate customers.

Actually some of the business software we use is pretty buggy, our stock control system is particularly bad (Honeywell POMS), then again I think a lot of the problems are down to the useless support we get. Its cost severall £million to install at six of our sites and looks liked its going to be dumped after 2 years, was going to cost £500,000+ to upgrade it to XP form windows NT4. Some of the scientific apps we use are terrible as well, patch testing is worse than in most games. Considering its all ment to work to FDA / GMP standards its pretty bad, luckilly non of the audits have picked up on it.

[smtkr]

The problem is, as I have mentioned many times, that the gaming industry is now big business. We are talking about corporations that have to answer to shareholders. They have to show growth. They are under immense pressure to release games on tight deadlines. Quality control will always take a distant second to the greenback.

[BEANFro Elite]

Pah, excuses excuses all we get is excuses...

[herulach]

You want sloppy coding you try using maple for anything more sophisticated than basic algebra, theyve had 10 versions to get it right and its still a heap of crap

[RedPutty]

Actually some of the business software we use is pretty buggy, our stock control system is particularly bad (Honeywell POMS), then again I think a lot of the problems are down to the useless support we get. Its cost severall £million to install at six of our sites and looks liked its going to be dumped after 2 years, was going to cost £500,000+ to upgrade it to XP form windows NT4. Some of the scientific apps we use are terrible as well, patch testing is worse than in most games. Considering its all ment to work to FDA / GMP standards its pretty bad, luckilly non of the audits have picked up on it.

Yeah badly written software isnt restricted to games, I have been on the development/inside of really badly written software that continues to sell. The reason a lot of non gaming software continues to sell even though it is buggy and crap is that the people buying it (PHBs etc) don't end up using it or even know enough to make an informed purchase.

Look at EDS, they have gone from disaster to disaster on public sector projects but they still get contracts. Whilst one dept of the government is sueing them another is hiring them!

[Spud1]

I'm gonna speak out on the developers side here..probably a bad idea after reading these posts but here goes

Look at it from their point of view, as a games developer. You are writing software that is a) going to be run on a number of different operating systems, all which could interepret certain commands differently.
b) going to be run on a number of different hardware configurations
c) going to be run on systems with totally different driver configurations.

etc etc

Basically, it is simply impracticle to plan for, and test for every single problem on every different configuration of windows/hardware/software. Hence why you get issues like with BF2 - for some, like me, it works flawlessly (i'm talking about the massive CTD problems people had here, not the badly designed server browser, totally different issues).
While for others, it would crash constantly. Now of course they will have tested it on as many configurations as they could realistically do, but that would still only be roughly 10% (if that) of possible configurations...you could spend a year or so testing, and cover alot more than that, possibly 90% or so ..but by then your product is so out of date that people will not buy it, and a proportion of your testing has been pointless as some of your test cases will be obsolete by now. This problem is compounded by hard-nosed publishers (as pointed out, EA are a good example here) who want their software released ASAP, and as such impose tight deadlines that do not allow for full testing..

As games get more complex I think we will see this problem more and more, as more code = more possible problems. Especially when a piece of code might execute fine on one machine and then crash for no apparent reason on another.

It might not even be a true game bug so to speak - other applications can mess things up. A real world example? We have a piece of software where I work that we take as a 'base' and fully customise it for our business needs. We had been using this particular version for a few months with no issues, and then our helpdesk decided to upgrade all the PCs to XPSP2. Great, plugs a load of holes etc..but upon installing that some aspects of out core 'base' software stopped working. We have identified the problem as being with a change microsoft made to explorer.exe in SP2.

So here we have a case where some software appears to work fine, we upgrade windows and it breaks it...not the developers fault, microsofts fault. The same thing can happen with any game.

The best way round it that I can see is to do what some developers (eg ubisoft) are doing, which is have LARGE beta tests of some aspects of the game, to find all these bugs. eg with far cry, they had that big multiplayer test that allowed them to find and fix bugs with thousands of different configurations - many more than would have been possible in the lab. The gameplay testing can be done in-house, but a large number of bugs can be removed prior to release for very little money by testing with real world consumers. It's a shame that more developers don't do this

The next point that people normally raise is that 'console games work, so why should PC owners suffer just because we can apply patches?' Well, not all console games DO work flawlessly, there are plenty of games out there for multiple consoles with bugs in them, albeit most of them not major ones; and the number of PS2 games that have slowdown in them, its almost unbelievable ( On a fixed hardware device you would think the developers would scale it to run at a constant fps right....) However, the majority of console games do work fine out-of-the-box, but remember there is only one possible configuration (excluding peripherals) that they have to work with, so the code can be totally customised for that specific CPU, gfx/sound card - it is alot easier to develop something bug free when you know the exact (or near as dammit) environment your code will be run in.

just my 2c