wdolson
Posts: 10398
Joined: 6/28/2006 From: Near Portland, OR Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: DD696 Please don't thank me....I didn't find this problem. However, as one who wrote his first computer program in 1965 and was a senior systems analyst, I do feel that I can state that this is a bug. Just one more bug in a program (this game) that was released with too many of them which are still being found three years (short a few days) after release and which will never be resolved to the paying customers satisfaction. Happens way too often nowadays. I know you guys are trying to iron out some of them and it is appreciated, but I don't think that you can dictate that a bug is not a bug and only a "minor annoyance". If you are going to be "mo' better help" that you need to take the paying customers a bit more seriously and not sluff off their efforts to also improve this game. I started programming some time after you, in the early 1980s, though I started very old school (machine language) and eventually got into Windows programming. I'm also an Electronic Engineer by training, so I've spent years down on the hardware level. Old operating systems were fairly simple beasts and the programmer had pretty much complete control over the whole system. The pre-GUI OSs like Unix, DOS, etc. took some direct control away, but you still had a lot of direct control. GUIs abstract the system more and you spend a lot of time as a programmer making system calls to do what you want. That introduces lots of vectors for errors. Program size also opens you up to bugs too. The bigger the program, the more chances there are of bugs creeping in. Management pressures such as time to market usually force programmers to do a less than optimal job. Last year I started a company selling a software product I wrote. We had one of the dullest beta tests in software history. We had quite a few users pounding away on it and only had one minor bug that was issolated to Windows 98, that I already knew about. I put a lot of extra time into ensuring there were no bugs. I fixed all known bugs before going to beta test. We ended up with a rock solid product that is, in our opinion, better than any other on the market in our niche. However, we essentially missed our market window. When we started this project, the market was poorly served, but many others moved in while we were developing. Part of the delays were due to other factors than just my perfectionism with the software development. Since I needed to make another living while developing this product, I had stretches of time when I couldn't get time to work on it. There is the old engineer's maxim: Good - Fast - Cheap: Pick Two. Comparing WitP to other games of the same size and complexity, it has a typical number of bugs. The big difference between this game and other games is that Matrix continues to support it with people actually doing bug fixes three years after it's initial release. Go pick up some of the classic games like Great Naval Battles. Even the last released version of that game has many serious quirks. The game market is very different from the commercial software market. Different forces drive it. Technically, the challenges are similar, but the products follow different market rules. Matrix is unusual in their support of WitP. Go research other games released three years ago. Most have either only been updated with another game based on the same engine was released, or they are now available for $10 in a bin at Office Depot and the company that developed it has either gone out of business or is off on other projects and can't be bothered with fossil-ware from way back in 2004. Yes WitP has bugs and I've kevetched about my share of irritating bugs/features that got under my skin. As a consumer, the pace of bug fixes is agaonizingly slow, and I'd love to see my pet bug get fixed. However, as a programmer who has done everything from embedded programming on custom circuits, to working with primitive operatins systems, to programming Windows, I realize that these things take a while and I appreciate that Matrix is continuing to support this game. Bill
_____________________________
WitP AE - Test team lead, programmer 
|