Comment by ryandrake
5 years ago
This kind of excuse making is one of the reasons I got out of software development. It’s not just gamedev. Priorities are way out of wack when you have time to put in binary obfuscation, but no time to fix such a huge performance bottleneck. The idea that “it’s a miracle software works at all” demonstrates the chronic prioritization and project management competence problem in the industry.
It’s ok to recognize a thing as a business success but a technical failure. In fact many software projects are business successes despite awful and unforgivable quality compromises. You don’t get to whitewash it just because the thing prints money.
How do we then address chronic incompetence? Never complain about it?
This is not small. This kind of incompetency if employed in a different sector such as security would lead to losing personal data of millions.
> “it’s a miracle software works at all”
This is not the case here. Please re-evaluate your calibration on this topic.
1. you replied to the wrong person.
2. this kind of incompetence exists in all other sectors. That's why pentests are so crucial, and why they guard the security of millions.
3. we'll have to agree to disagree that it's a minor miracle. Having seen the complexity firsthand, it's quite amazing.
Agree that this kind of incompetence exists in all sectors and I think we don't talk about it, it becomes acceptable. We're not trying to blame a single developer, that'd be inappropriate. But, the management and QA culture in a AAA game studio that rakes billions ought to be better.
The complexity is in reverse engineering the binary. The developer has access to the full source code and the profiling tools I presume.
Another one is in Microsoft Flight Simulator, instead of downloading multiple archives, it downloads one, unzips it using a single CPU core and then downloads another one. MSFS 2020 takes a few hours to install and that's not just because of the internet connection, but this shitty installation code.
If loading times were prioritized, features would be cut. Which features would you cut out of the game in order to have fast loading times?
This is what you'd need to decide. And then afterwards, it might not print as much money as you think it will.
It's easy looking at it from the outside. Not so easy from the inside.
Did you read the article? Zero features needed to be cut, this is a 30 minute fix.
Building the engine alone takes 30 minutes after each change. You're not going to get anything done in 30 minutes. And the more you work on this, the less you're working on shippable features that make money.
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> Which features would you cut out of the game in order to have fast loading times?
If this is a serious question, I'd say cut any of the new vehicles introduced in the last 2 years. None of them are nearly as impactful as this optimization. In fact, I am having issues imagine any individual feature at all that's as important as this fix.
I’d have to have been there, seen the list of features with eng estimates and trade offs, but yes I would have happily made the call to chuck one of them if it meant a measurably higher quality product, like this massive load time improvement. Hell, that zoom-out-zoom-in animation when you switch characters probably took as much time to code as it would have to fix this bug. I think anyone with good product sense and the balls to make a priority call that might get someone upset could make the right call here.
But after it's already made record-breaking profits and is a huge cash cow with recurring revenue. You could just say "hey, I'll hire one single contract developer to do these kinds of quality of life things" and make a fraction less profit.
> make a fraction less profit
Unfortunately this part often kills quality initiatives. Why fix bugs for your existing customers when you can deploy the engineering resources on a DLC or a sequel which will milk those customers for more? There is no more craftsmanship or pride in good work left in software.
"When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." -Steve Jobs