On Monday, 29 September 2014 at 13:01:19 UTC, Bruno Medeiros
wrote:
On 23/09/2014 19:35, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>it game will crash on ANY bug, it will contain alot less
>bugs. 'cause
>even the dumbiest QA full of monkeys will not let the game
>which
>crashes once in a ten seconds to go out of the door.
When doing QA, that's a whole different thing than when playing
normally.
+1. When the game blatantly crashes on every little thing,
there is
pressure on the coders to actually fix the problem. Ignored
errors ==
convenient excuse for coders to evade work ("it's*only* a
minor display
glitch!", "the deadline's tomorrow, we don't have time to fix
this",
"it's 5pm, I need to go home and feed my goldfish", "besides,
it still
works anyway, more or less", etc.).
I would invite you to buy a *retail copy* of Elder Scrolls 3 :
Morrowind for PC and try playing that. The game did exactly
what Walter and you guys suggested: when an assertion tripped,
it would crash straight away to the desktop, with only a
message dialog saying that an assertion had failed (with info
on the source and line of the assertion, and an extra message).
I couldn't play that game, it would crash too often. And saving
wasn't quick enough that I could in practice be manually saving
every 15 min. or so.
Only when several iterations of patches game out, several
months after release, did the game become stable enough to be
played enjoyably.
(in fairness, if the assertions where about core game logic, I
too would prefer a crash rather then possible corruption of
game state. But IIRC there was a few assertions crashes that
seemed related to textures, directx, or shader stuff - for that
I could have lived without a game crash)
Sometimes even with known bugs the game is shipped, because of
management pressure and/or huge delays already. (especially
with pressures to do multi-platform releases).
And the right attitude as consumer is to ask for the money back,
not to wait patiently for the day those bugs eventually get fixed.
If everyone did that, the quality in IT would be much better.
--
Paulo
