So then basically you are admitting that you don't do your job well, correct? Or are you saying that you can't because what you do doesn't allow it to be correct? Then maybe you can't hang with your chosen career.
And as far as your little experiment... what happened in high school/college during your English/Literature class? Did you write reports and turn them in to the teacher? If so, did you ever get an A? If you did, then your experiment has already been doomed to failure, since you couldn't have gotten an A with errors on your paper. Oh, and if you couldn't turn in a paper worthy of an A because it was riddled with errors, then once again, what on Earth are you doing writing code since you obviously can't grasp the concept of 'proofreading' for one thing, and the concept of caring about your job is lost on you as well if you openly admit that you write code with errors.
I love how you tech people use these lame excuses for bad code. In a nutshell you are saying to the world, yes, this is my job, but sometimes what I do doesn't work... but it's not my fault because I have so much to do... like write lines of code, which I get paid to do, but can't do well, because there are just SO MANY LINES... I mean, how can someone possibly write error free with so many lines involved... maybe I should have become a chef or something...

Well, I feel that I should step in an say a few good things about SD after I inadvertently started that flame war a few weeks ago about Vista...

Yes, SDC is technicallya form of copy-protection, but it is so passive that it is almost not worth mentioning. In fact, I wish it could do more. I have a crap-load of games on my computer, and I find myself wishing that SDC could work with all games - not just SD ones. I love being able to open it up, click "Update" and it goes down the list looking for updates to all of my SD games...I don't have to go to official sites and dig through their FTP and News sites to find if there is something new. Wouldn't it be great if I had something like SDC to cover everything else?

As for release time bugs...Come on. GalCiv is solid for 90% or more of the people that load it, and most of the bugs are annoyances rather thank show-stoppers. The types of bugs that we just live with in other games, but we bitch about them here because we got spoiled.

The rest of the issues that come up and get the biggest flames are unique issues for a particular user, which leads us to:



I think I can safely say that you won't be happy, no matter what anyone says. So be it. However, I actually liked his way of explaining errors in lines of code. You jumped down his throat, but I think that the gist of what he said was true: Basically, no matter how much QA and testing you do, there's always one more variable - The user. Users will be able to find bugs that you never, ever would have found. It's a law of the universe.

SD just has the good-grace to say, "Yep. We missed that. Here's a fix for it."


Finally, for the person discussing piracy in the East: I understand your pain, and yes that sucks...but I find your logic flawed. Basically, you're saying that companies should sell products priced so that everyone can buy them or else they're going to get stolen? So, since I can't afford a BMW, I should just go to the chop-shop and buy a boosted one?



Bottom line: SDC needed to find a happy medium between protecting their product/profit, and making an enjoyable experience for the majority of their customers - all the while sticking to their views on invasive copy-protection schemes. I think that they accomplished this, and have earned my loyalty towards their products.

I love how you non-tech people have these strange notions of how code works. Gee, I guess every error ever is solely down to spelling and grammar mistakes!


Eliminate the user? If only...

The real problem with stating SDC is copy protection is the fact that the game works fine out of the box. You don't *need* to update in order to play it, you update purely because you want the added content, AI tweaks and similar.

Wow....

I was temporarily blinded by your righteousness, thankfully I applied my anti-glare lotion and no permanent damage was done.

:hifive:

"The focus should be making sure it's more convenient to buy your product than to steal it. It can be a delicate balance."

So true. I would only add that a great product is an integral part of this balance. Take me for example. Most of the people in my country use pirated software exclusively, and that includes me. Piracy here is so bad you can hardly find original games even if you wanted to. I even pirated GalCiv 2, until I found the game so enjoyable and easy to pay for that it just seemed right to buy a copy. I eventually bought Dark Avatar as well, and that's no small investment, considering that both games combined are worth about 250 in local currency, and the average university graduate earns only 1300.

You don't have a clue about programming, so how can you say it's a lame excuse.
If you have a lot of lines of code(like the 2 million he said), there are bound to be bugs, no matter how good you are at programming. You can ofcourse test it untill you find all bugs, but that will take a lot of time and money.

No, what he's 'admitting' is that he's human. Human's make mistakes on complex tasks.
Honestly I think you're just trolling these days, but I'll explain anyway:

Let's continue his story example. In a long paper you can, despite what you said, get an A without the paper being totallty perfert in every sense. If, for example, you use an american spelling of a word rather than a UK version, or perhaps a comma where you need a semi colon. Maybe you held shift too long and capitalised the first 2 letters of a sentance. In an otherwise perfect paper small mistakes like that would be overlooked and you'd still get an A. There's also different, but still correct, ways to type the same thing, e.g. "There I saw a cat" vs "I saw a cat there".

Depending on what you're coding, minor things like that could cause a bug or it might be fine. Or maybe it only causes a problem on windows 2000/the French version of the game/on huge maps, but is fine on any other version. Maybe it works ok as long as you have the latest drivers for something, but causes a bug on older versions. Maybe your code works fine, but someone else, say NVIDA, need to you only use american spellings to work with their new vista 64 bit drivers (Amusingly enough you might fix this bug only to find something else you use only accepts UK spellings. Joy.).

You can't just say "write code without bugs", it's impossible and you sound like the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert when you say it. You'll try not to make any bugs, of course, but some always slip through, that's what testing is for. I've beta tested a number of games, and the amount of bugs found and fixed in most betas is immense, and this is after programmers have done their own checks as they code and they've tested alpha verions themselves/with internal testing teams.

After a good beta test the obvious bugs should be gone and the game should be pretty much balanced and stable on a wide range of test machines, but even then there will be bugs found when you release the game simply because no beta test can cover every possible situation that 100,000 or more end users will encounter.

There'll be weird stuff like bugs that only occur on small maps with 3 races while playing on a German version of windows ME with the system time set to the wrong year using a radeon gfx card.
There may be obvious things which somehow every tester has overlooked. It happens. I'm sure everyone has been in a situation where a group of people have been looking for a solution for some problem for some time and have either concluded it's impossible or have devised a hugely complex solution only for a newcomer to glance at it and suggest an obvious fix and cause much forehead slapping.
There will often also be a host of complaints about problems wich are not caused by your code, like user's drivers being out of date or their using unsupported stuff which mades your code appear buggy when it isn't.

Sure, good coding and more testing = less bugs, but you'll never make something bug free without testing it on every possible computer in the world in every possible situation. In the end there will be bugs, but with a good developer they should only be the situational ones, and that's what patches are for.

And there we have the bottom line... time and MONEY. It is all well and good to make money but there is the problem. A customer pays for something... they should get the best product there is. So you say it takes money to test for all the bugs, therefore it is a possibility according to you, since I am considered to be illiterate when it comes to programming ( I may not know how to do it, but the concept of doing a job well shouldn't be lost just because the job is programming).
This isn't a personal attack against Stardock, merely a response to the direction all of this has taken. The original topic was Piracy. Nothing anyone does will stop it from happening. All these measures do is delay or inhibit a 'Pirate' for so long, until they figure out how to circumvent the system. Piracy takes on all sorts of reasons pending on who you talk to and there seem to be quite a lot of reasons.
All of this is ENTERTAINMENT. To me, we have become too serious about something that is supposed to pass some idle time. Whether it's music, games, or movies... it should be for the creativity and enjoyment factor that we indulge in these things, not the money. Ahhh, but now I ramble...

It will take too much time and money, since you will have to test something on every possible PC configuration, to be absolutely sure that there are no bugs.
Would you like to wait an extra few years for a game?

Also read the post above yours, it explains it better.

I agree with what Brad mentions and SD's way of thinking regarding piracy. One thing I can add, me and a friend have thought about a good way to prevent at least some piracy. As very long time gamers, we both feel if a game comes with a little extras, a would be pirate is more likely to buy it. Extras such as a tech tree, nice manual, unit card, things like that. Of course this would increase cost in producing a game but I feel it will increase sales and reduce piracy, so in the end, a company is ahead.

Remember the days of huge spiral bound manuals that came with the Jane's games? A fan is more likely to buy just to get that nice manual and keycard reference. It makes a difference. A good example of extras is a game I just bought Silent Hunter 4. It has a nice manual, map, key card, and recognition chart with ships. So if my friend bought it, then I seen all of that in the box, I would buy it rather then try and copy it so I can get those extra goodies. Another thing, there is just that something about having an original instead of a copy. In the end, I prefer buying my games, having to box, the manual and the goodies.

So true.




I am ocationally misunderstood.

Nope, I am actually very good at my job. Darkrenown explained it much better than I did, he must have got that A in English

As to the time versus money argument, that's all very true and there is also the law of diminishing returns to consider. There comes a point when the amount of effort (read money) required to fix a bug far out-weighs its severity and/or obscurity.

Incidentally, software engineers are generally perfectionists - if we had our way our software would never see the light of day. Eventually the decision makers wont wait any longer for you to fix those last few bugs.

One final point before I go off to insert a few more well chosen bugs. The definition of what constitutes a bug differs significantly between developers and users. A significant number of what a user will call a bug will actually have been a designed-in feature that they simply do not like. The best ones are where they see-saw back and forth between versions.

Users eh! Who'd have 'em?

I guess you and all the others who are in the same profession as you... for how would you pay your bills if us 'users' didn't pay for your products? Hmmm, I think it should have been the other way around, since in all reality, we really don't need to spend our hard earned cash on the items you produce. Want and need are two different things.
Believe me, I can understand where you are coming from, but if everyone else had the 'excuse' that you give regarding doing their job, then I think there would be quite a lot of pissed off consumers who would in essence purchase CRAP.
Here's your new TV... but some of the channels won't tune due to faulty circuit boards, but you should be okay if you only watch these channels.
Here's your new car... not all the quirks are worked out of it yet, but give me your 30 grand. If we figure out why the ABS doesn't always work, we'll be sure to call you!
Here's that new refrigerator you wanted... we put the ice dispenser in the door but can't figure out why it doesn't hook up to your particular water line, so if you know how to fix it, give us a call and we'll be right out.
Here's that new pair of jeans... one leg might be a little longer than the other but that's okay, just lean to one side and no one will notice. Sorry, but QC wouldn't work without overtime pay so we just let this batch fly to make the deadline.
Do I really need to continue? Of course, you will win this argument because of the deadbeat/mediocrity mentality that has been drummed into all of us over the past twenty years... I swear I can't believe that there are this many excuses from EVERYONE, regardless of their profession, regarding doing a shitty job. What the hell ever happened to taking pride in what one does? Or how about customer satisfaction? Can anyone in the 'service' industry ever remember when they were told that despite the reasoning, the customer is always right? Hell, this rant makes me sound like my grandfather and I'm only 36!

So microsoft is doing a shitty job, when there are bugs in Windows?
According to your reasoning, every software developer does a shitty job.
Which is ofcourse not true, it's just that some bugs won't be found before release.
Most bugs will ofourse be patched when they have been found.

Just so I can knock Stormbringer on the head once and for all.

Your analogy is seriously flawed with an English paper. If you write the paper correct the first time it is done for good. There are no changes, and no other outside variables to consider at all.

As a programmer if I write the perfect piece of code, even if it’s flawless in every conceivable way. It could still be flawed as soon as outside elements of different computer configurations come into effect. Despite that even if and this in itself is impossible but lets just say if whatever code I so happen to be writing now I write that was still perfect code on:

The millions of different combinations of hardware known to man
As well as working with all the millions of different driver configurations for said hardware
As well as working with all the billions of differing software configurations any given user could also install


Even if I managed to write that magical flawless piece of code, tomorrow when a new piece of software, hardware or driver comes out it could still render my perfect code bloody useless. Yeah I can see how this task you placate as trivial is so easy to do.

The only way your analogy would even be remotely comparable is if you managed to write an English paper On a topic that was constantly in flux yet still managed to be right at any given moment, but not only that was being marked by millions of differing administrators with differing values of success yet still be achieving an A grade by them all, not only now, but every single day in future until the end of time. Big feat you got there. When you can do that, come back again and tell me how its 'easy to do' or state that 'developers who can't are lazy'.

I've yet to see a perfect peice of code, well one that isn't insulated in some way from outside interferance or put on a standardised format.

I'll happily admit that I'm one of the biggest pirates of all. I didn't used to be but false promises, companies releasing buggy and unfinished games, suspiciously over generous reviews and downright lying about minimum requirements have meant that it's just too much of a risk to buy software without playing it first any more.

Generally I'll download a game, and if it keeps my interest for more than a couple of weeks and runs smoothly on my system I'll buy it.

I'm happy to pay for a game when I know that it's....
a) getting regular updates
got good support where the company actually listens to their customers
c) got a great community, even if the game itself isn't multi-player.

For me, copy protection doesn't really make a lick of difference at all, it's the post-release support that makes me buy games. In fact most of the games I've bought have had little to no copy protection. Theoretically if a game was so well protected that it's impossible to pirate, I'll generally never play it to begin with and therefore will never buy it.

Yes, I am seeing stars now from the headshot...
Dude, I really don't care one way or the other, the system is what it is and it sucks, period. If there are that many variables to programming, then it is at best a very unrefined technical 'gimmick' of a sort. All of these years and the powers that be in the computer world still cannot refine the system to at least be 'universal' in it's use, kind of akin to the construction/contracting world.
My use of an English paper was in response to whoever it was who made the comment about having someone proofread your work only to find errors that you yourself couldn't recognize. It is possible for the scenario to be played both ways. You are obviously upset because your chosen profession is being 'attacked' by me, if that's what you want to call it. Okay then, the system is flawed and nothing or no one is perfect... well then the price of all these things certainly shouldn't be so high... and the wages that SOME programmers make are way out of scale with the actual work being produced, meaning that there should be some pay cuts across the board for programmers in general who push the 50K envelope, maybe even those in the 40K range.

You obviously have no idea about programming.
I doubt anyone could reason with you about this.
So i'm nog gonna try any more.

You guys really get it. It's sad that so many other do not. I think it's best summed up in your statement, "The focus should be making sure it's more convenient to buy your product than to steal it."

Amen!

I get so sick of pirates getting games first and without the annoying copy protection that often crashes my computer and creates other problems. Why should I have to suffer because some stupid company is paranoid? Way too many companies will inconvenience their entire user base on the mistaken notion that this will stop the pirates. Meanwhile they are cracking the software and using it easily while I have to put up with extra nonsense as a legitimate user. It really makes my blood boil. I've stopped buying software from some companies because of this but I won't mention any names...*COUGH...EA...*COUGH.

In other news, EMI is offering unlocked versions of single tracks for download. They're higher quality and can be freely moved around from one player to another, the catch is that they cost more.

WWW Link

I have been a gamer for over 20 years. I am now a 41 year old gamer who grew up on consoles dating back to the Sega Master system, Pong etc to pc games in the last 10 years. Copy protection has gotten out of hand in the last 5 years. It involves way to many hoops for the legit customers. The copy protection out there hurts performance which in turn sours the game experiance. And to top it all off...copy protection does not work. It frustrates the inexperinaced gamer or parent by making the software not function usually. It keeps people from purchasing pc games to avoid the hassle assossiated with getting them to run correctly. Pushes people to consoles for the ease of use factor. It does not deter the theft of digital media for anyone with basic knowlegde can find a meathod to beat the systems. The true hackers beat the schemes fast and the exp gamer knows where to get the cracks and fixed files to get the games to run the way they should before adding the intrusive copy protection.

I have no problem with Stardocks solution. It is one that makes sense and is not harmful to the consumer. Yes you need internet but most gamers know you need internet to get the latest fixes. If you do not have internet no matter what game you get you will not be getting the latest fix. Games are complicated software and it takes patches to get the ironed out even if they have few bugs.

The industry has to look at how they are destroying the medium they are trying to protect.

The worst form of copy protection I have run into was one that was used on a recent first person shooter from Sierra. They had some code in the game that looked to see if you had ever had a disk emulator program on your machine. (Alchohol) It looked at several things and even if you had uninstalled the emulation program there were still enough telltales left that it prevented FEAR from running. I have had games that wouldn't work with the emulator, but that was the first that the company had sabotaged the game to prevent it from running. It took 3 weeks to finally find out what that problem was and then there was a bad audio bug that took quite a while longer to fix.
I gave the game away. Of course the expansion came out but they lost out on those sales too. Probably won't buy another Sierra game.

You're logic is immensely flawed. Almost all consumer products can potentially have deficiencies. LCDs are frequently shipped with dead or stuck pixels that fall within an "acceptable" limit. Cars frequently have TSBs (technical service bulletins) issued to address small "bugs" that made it through the manufacturing process. Microwaves overheat, the DVD you purchased might have been burned incorrectly, pet food is incorrectly manufactured due to poor quality supplies. Defects in workmanship/materials or unforeseen issues apply to any number of products and scenarios. That's why products have warranties; software patches are how developers honor their warranties. Furthermore, how many companies do you know will add new features to a previously purchased product, free of charge? I'm sure Panasonic gladly gives you a new plasma panel for your TV when they come out with a slightly enhanced product.



As a developer, I take extreme pride and care in my job to deliver the best possible products to my customers. Unfortunately, bugs and unforeseen incompatibilites do slip through testing, which is why there are patches. Most developers are perfectionists and, as was mentioned above, code would never be released (at least not on time) if it were up to us. Sometimes developers are at the mercy of the customer that wants an extremely complex product, for the lowest possible price, and delivered in an unreasonable amount of time (including testing, UAT, and QA.) Even though a developer might explain to the customer the unrealistic expectations, it doesn't matter.

Your problem is that you do not understand the complexities of software development. It has nothing to do with us being satisfied with releasing buggy software or not taking pride in our work. Developing anything more than the most trivial of applications is a complex task. The hardware and even the 3rd party libraries that we use (.NET Framework, ACE library, etc) can introduce unforseseen bugs and issues. I highly doubt that you are perfect in your everyday life as well.

Actually, I'm not sure there is enough time and money to guarantee a 100% bug free game as complex as GC.

You could get pretty close if you could afford 1000s or even 10s of 1000s of testers, but unless you have more testers than end users it's almost certain some of your users are going to have something that wasn't tested.

Or maybe you could have an open beta test of several years...except new stuff is always being released so you can never test everything for a really long time and if you waited too long your game is going to look dated (plus all this testing time means your not releasing anything so you're not making any money to actually pay people to fix the bugs your extended testing finds).

You're quite right about user's paying the developers/publishers bills, by the way, so where do you think the cost for either the 1000s of testers or the coder's pay during the extended test time is going to go? Are you going to pay £500 per 100% bug free game? Even if you are, it'd mean you'd buy games a lot less often. Or perhaps you think 10 times more people would buy games if they knew there wouldn't be any bugs?

You could also get a lot closer to bug free in a reasonable time and budget if you restricted system requirements a great deal (which is why console games are generally a lot less buggy than pc games), but how would you feel if a game's system requirements stated an exact (and very short) list of hardware, software and drivers you could use?

What you seem to either fail or refuse to grasp is that every product is a tradeoff between cost, time and usefulness (I'd include the ability to run on different hardware etc in usefulness as well as utility and extra features etc.):


Really? So a £5 watch should keep time as well as an atomic clock? A £5000 car should handle like a top of the line sports car? Of course not! You get what you pay for, and when you shell out your ~£40 for a game you get one typical to the market. If you don't feel that's good value you can wait a few months for the price to drop and patches to be released.

You mentioned (post 88) TVs, cars, refrigerators and jeans, all these products come in a huge variety of price ranges and for the most part the low-end, cheap version are pretty shoddy compared to the expensive versions. Cheap TVs have smaller screens, more dead pixels etc in the case of flat/plasma models, less or different I/O jacks, poorer quality finish. A cheap car won't have the ABS you mentioned, won't have a GPS system, good speakers or leather seats and won't handle as well or go as fast. Cheap jeans have poorer stitching, rougher cloth, colour that fades faster.
The only difference is that there's no high end games market, just regular and budget. The reason for that is there aren't enough people willing to buy 'high end' games to make making them economically viable.

Disregarding the entire 2nd half of my post, your entire series of comparisons is flawed. All the problems you mention:


These, when translated to software terms would be termed showstopper or crash bugs, e.g. if DA had been released and if you tried to select the Korath the gamed crashed and this happened to everyone, not the compatibly bugs everyone else is arguing are impossible to eliminate.

I really hate that argument. Not because GC2 was released bug free (it wasn't) but because it is so unfair. Can anyone think of any game released by any company on the PC in the last five years which has not been patched? And if you can think of one, does that mean there really are no bugs or is it simply that the developers went bust or just didn't bother to patch it?

Stardock take the rare approach of admitting to problems, discussing them and then fixing them. What bugs there are tend to appear more obvious because they are being discussed, not because there are unreasonable problems.

I took a look at the STALKER forums the other day, a game that is notoriously buggy despite a massively extended development cycle. This is a game that is literally unplayable for quite alot of people even after the first patch has been released. I struggled to find ant developer comments on the current state of the game or a release date for the next patch. There is probably less bug discussion going on there than there was here post Dread Lords release. Because the developers there aren't commenting on issues.

Stardock are open about problems and work hard to resolve them with their customers. It is not fair to assume that means they have something to make up for. GC2 was released in acceptably good order, in better condition than many other games are released. Post-release they have given away an expansion pack's worth of new features based on customer feedback. This is bonus material, it is not required to play the game at all.