Moraelin
Posts: 5
Joined: 8/18/2002
Status: offline
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Oh, when comms come in, it tends to work more or less ok. I invariably hit the loop when _I_ start the conversation.
Many thanks for telling me about hitting ACK again, instead of "Close". It looks like I might just be able to (finally) actually finish a SUDG game.
Other than that, amen. At the old company it was like this too. When I whined at the boss that we need more testing, the answer was, "well, test it yourselves." So I explain that noone finds too many bugs in their own programs, because the problems I could think about, already have "if" blocks in my code, to avoid or gracefully report the problem. So what's needed is someone who does things in the wrong order, and whatnot. The answer? "Uhh, well, then find someone who's between projects and ask them to test your program."
And if you want a really bad case of paperwork, there's this project for a big corporation that my brother is working on. They had to spend one _year_ doing paperwork about how they'll go about doing the project, when they're eventually allowed to start programming. Endless pages after pages of exactly what must happen when you click on each button, and when you right click it, and when you just hover the mouse over it, the exact number of pixels between each side and the text inside, and so on. (Incidentally, good luck with the internationalization, if they want the exact extents in pixels specified in advance.) And it's a big project, so lots and lots of buttons and text fields and icons and whatnot, to describe like that.
About consoles, though, hmm... I must have missed the buggy games, then. I've had a Dreamcast, a Playstation, a Nintendo 64, a GBA, and a Playstation 2 so far. There are only two buggy games I can think of, and own. The first, which needed a patch, is PSO. And even then, it was an obscure exploit which allowed team-killing in multi-player, not the kind of PC game bugs. Then there's Tokyo Extreme Racer on the Dreamcast, where I've seen two cars get stuck (deep) into each other once, and which had frame rate problems when played on a VGA monitor instead of a TV. Again, I'd say it's rather mild compared to the crap that gets released on PCs.
I'm also told that Gran Turismo 2 used to be buggy, but the version I own is a later one, with the bugs fixed. But ok, that would be the third game.
To put it into perspective: That's 3 (mildly) buggy games out of a whole bookcase full of console games.
By comparison, out of a bookcase full of PC games, I can't think of 3 which just worked as intended from the start. Well, there's Diablo and Diablo 2 (though even Diablo had the worse multiplayer exploits than PSO.) But I really can't think of a third.
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