Amaroq
Posts: 1100
Joined: 8/3/2005 From: San Diego, California Status: offline
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quote:
I often wonder what planet you are on when you post stuff like this. The planet of "an insider's perspective" - I'm also a game developer, and in my experience, it isn't possible to be both focused on patch/support for past projects and development on a new projects: on any given day, I'm only productive at one, and there's a lot of 'context switching' time ramping up your thought process when you shift from one to another. Understanding how different 2006 is from 6.0/6.5 - literally written in different languages, plus all of the differences between using the OOTP core engine and the 2006 core engine - I have a very good idea of just how challenging a task Markus is undertaking. So, I expect the initial 2006 release to be very challenging for the developer - and if he's splitting time to provide a 6.5 update for the community, I expect that that is distracting his effort from a challenging project. He may prove me wrong - but I think there's a danger of 'crushing weight of expectations', burnout, etc, with such a large project: you can get to a point where the bug count is so high that it is daunting, where you feel like you either have to miss a ship date or ship a buggy project, and worse where you can't add people to the project because it'll take them 3-6 months to stop being a drain on your existing engineers and 6-12 months to make your initial investment (training) worthwhile. Eventually, it will launch, and it will launch with bugs in it, because it would cost SI (and Markus) more to fix the bugs (in terms of time and lost sales) than the bugs are worth economically (in terms of lost sales). If you'd like to read some more on these topics - and not from me - I'd recommend Joel On Software, as its a very good software engineer writing from the engineer's perspective: Things You Should Never Do, Part I Human Task Switches Considered Harmful Good Software Takes Ten Years: Get Used To It Hard-assed Bug Fixing Anyways, that's the perspective I have on it, and 'what planet I'm coming from'. I think the SI/OOTP partnership has exceptional promise for the long term... but that both the 2005 release and 2006 release will suffer for it. Is 6.5 as big a step forward as Markus would have made had he remained 100% focused on it? And for 2006, is he focusing his effort on 'getting all the features which worked in 6.x working again' or 'implementing new features into a working code base'?
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