Current Known Issues (Apr. 9)

[Yuri-G]

Because you can do it so much better?

Is he a professional programmer getting paid by a large company with an education in the field?

If so, then your comment is valid. Otherwise...

[Xno Kappa]

Because you can do it so much better?

Narrow-minded much?

[Day]

Is he a professional programmer getting paid by a large company with an education in the field?

If so, then your comment is valid. Otherwise...

If he's not then does his comment hold any kind of merit other than pointless bitching? Otherwise..

[Ghondi]

So no one else is having trouble seeing the ANNM npc in sandy? I'm standing right infront of the douche outside the tavern and there's no npc there for me and I've done file check a bunch of times. Finally just said fuck it and had friend log me in to buy the stupid shit.

I dont know if this is the npc or not that your talkin about but about 1 or 2hours after mait. yesterday they took a NPC out of the game cuz it was having problems. If im thinking right it was a NPC that had something to do with the expasion but could be wrong. I have 4got the NPC name so im sorry about that; But they did remove a NPC from the game yesterday cuz of problems they were having.

[Yuri-G]

I think it's fair to comment on the work of people who are supposedly professional programmers that end up writing bullshit spaghetti code, even if you're not a professional yourself. Maybe we disagree on that point.

[Xno Kappa]

Pointless bitching? Maybe. Still a fact? Yup. God forbid we question how anybody does anything if we're not a professional in said field.

[aznmajiktaru]

I dont know if this is the npc or not that your talkin about but about 1 or 2hours after mait. yesterday they took a NPC out of the game cuz it was having problems. If im thinking right it was a NPC that had something to do with the expasion but could be wrong. I have 4got the NPC name so im sorry about that; But they did remove a NPC from the game yesterday cuz of problems they were having.

nah that was the goblin thing, the npc infront of tavern in Ssandy [s] should be thirkell or some shit that sells you the key item needed for ANNM. Like I said friend bought it for me and could see it fine but when I log in, shit's gone.

[Yuri-G]

Pointless bitching? On my BG? It's more likely than you'd think.

fixed

[grozny]

What blu magic?

"- Amount of damage done by certain blue magic has decreased."

I didnt do much yesterday and at work right now, but what I did do yesterday I didnt notice a difference.

[Xno Kappa]

lol

[Day]

I think it's fair to comment on the work of people who are supposedly professional programmers that end up writing bullshit spaghetti code, even if you're not a professional yourself. Maybe we disagree on that point.

I do disagree. Until you are actually a professional programmer and/or work for a large gaming company and completely understand that they don't write "monkey code" or "spaghetti code", I think it's kind of silly to sit back and fire off pot shots at a company that you pay every month. Unless of course you can do a much better job yourself, then I would say you might have some kind of argument or point. I've seen very few large game patches ever, across all mmorpgs, that didn't have some kind of issue shortly after, if any at all.

SE is actually one of the best developers about this if you want to get right down to it. This is a very bug/glitch-less game relatively speaking.

[Sonomaa]

the problem with working for SE at the moment is simply this

it doesnt matter how GOOD you are at coding, you could be epic level awesome. You have to work with somebody elses shit code, and if that shit code is just too shitty to be able to properly function, you are just fucked, period.

I bet if you got the best coders in the world to look at ffxi code, they would call it absolute and utter shit, and if those best coders made a patch, shit would still break, because when it all comes down to it, you can only try to mask the smell of shit, but its always gonna leak out and stink.

[Kaylia]

the problem with working for SE at the moment is simply this

it doesnt matter how GOOD you are at coding, you could be epic level awesome. You have to work with somebody elses shit code, and if that shit code is just too shitty to be able to properly function, you are just fucked, period.

I bet if you got the best coders in the world to look at ffxi code, they would call it absolute and utter shit, and if those best coders made a patch, shit would still break, because when it all comes down to it, you can only try to mask the smell of shit, but its always gonna leak out and stink.

In their defense, it's pretty hard to do "clean" code when you're trying to program something to be cpu efficient. You got to take as many shortcut as you can, and it generally lead to unstable structure.

I don't know if they did a good job or not, but not knowing what kind of ressource they had when they initially started the game, it's kind of hard to blame them. If most of the lead programmer left, I can only imagine how terrible it would be to continue their work not knowing exactly what they did.

[Yuri-G]

the problem with working for SE at the moment is simply this

it doesnt matter how GOOD you are at coding, you could be epic level awesome. You have to work with somebody elses shit code, and if that shit code is just too shitty to be able to properly function, you are just fucked, period.

I bet if you got the best coders in the world to look at ffxi code, they would call it absolute and utter shit, and if those best coders made a patch, shit would still break, because when it all comes down to it, you can only try to mask the smell of shit, but its always gonna leak out and stink.

I think this about sums it up.

[Zosi]

I do disagree. Until you are actually a professional programmer and/or work for a large gaming company and completely understand that they don't write "monkey code" or "spaghetti code", I think it's kind of silly to sit back and fire off pot shots at a company that you pay every month. Unless of course you can do a much better job yourself, then I would say you might have some kind of argument or point. I've seen very few large game patches ever, across all mmorpgs, that didn't have some kind of issue shortly after, if any at all.

SE is actually one of the best developers about this if you want to get right down to it. This is a very bug/glitch-less game relatively speaking.

Hi, I'm a professional programmer. I write a mixture of Python and C++ at my current job (writing programs that interact with QuickBooks via their qbxml API /wrists), and my last job was writing Dynamic C for embedded devices in my employer's hydroelectric dams. I also program in my spare time, or used to before I got hooked on FFXI.

Based on the randomness of bugs experienced, it's possible that they literally have "spaghetti code" where changing minor things could have a ripple effect that changes completely different things. However, I'd say that it's more likely that their major problem is that they have shitty source code control. I'm sure that they have one hell of a messy code base, but simply messy code can't really account for the kind of bugs we see.

When you have a large code base, it's standard practice to use a source code control system (CVS, Subversion, SourceSafe, Perforce, git, Mercurial, many others) to keep track of code changes. When an individual programmer wants to work on the code base, they check out code (to a folder on their local PC) and work on it, then sync it back in when they're done. This avoids developers working on the "live" copy - if they want to experiment on something, they can check it out and work on it, and it affects nobody else. It also provides accountability, because you can track the individual person who made any given change. This is completely standard for those reasons, and no sane programmer works on a code base larger than a few files without a SCM of some kind. It's a little more complicated with a large client-server system like this, but that's PRECISELY why they have test servers. It's not a complicated concept, and every large project deals with stuff like this routinely WITHOUT the kind of problems SE has.

Without source control of some kind, you have something like a shared folder with the source code, and only one developer can work on a file at a time. When people want to experiment, they change stuff directly in the live code and make sure to revert it later if it doesn't work. Of course, they don't always remember to, which means that experimental stuff sometimes slips into releases without being noticed. This fits nearly perfectly with the bugs we experience most updates. It feels like someone was experimenting with code to change how things are done, and forgot to revert to the known-working version before the release version was compiled and made into a patch.

Either way (messy spaghetti code or lack of version-control) reflects badly on SE's programming as a whole, although as Sono said, not necessarily on individual programmers. Sometimes you get shitty code and bad organization and you just can't get the OK to spend time fixing it. It happens, I'm not going to crucify their devs because they couldn't fix up the shitty code base they inherited.

[Uubu]

the fault is only 10% the dev/programmers... its the beta testers who are idiots for not testing accession en spells especially when they are specifically implement enspell changes amongst other things. (This is assuming they beta test the patches on the test server)

[Pikarya]

(This is assuming they beta test the patches on the test server)

We ARE the beta testers. Atomos is just for show.

[Shenrien]

We ARE the beta testers. Atomos is just for show.

This

[The Blackrose]

the fault is only 10% the dev/programmers... its the beta testers who are idiots for not testing accession en spells especially when they are specifically implement enspell changes amongst other things. (This is assuming they beta test the patches on the test server)

SE has some form of QA? Since when?

[Shassira]

Could someone be kind enough to explain with detail what happened to charm? I didn't get the chance to try out all the neat goodies BST got this patch, so I never saw this problem. (Yes, sarcasm, but I do want to know what happened to it).

Thanks!