01 December 2007

Update and problems

We had our update Monday, and I am not entirely pleased with the results.
The good thing is that for most of the people, the client is working fine, and they had little or no problems installing the update.
But for a small minority (around 6%) there are constant problems that make the game unplayable, and the game crashes on most of the computers, but not very often.

In the last month or so, I did very little programming work, and focused mainly on coordinating the update, do the testing, suggest bug fixes on the forums, try to find more information on things, and so on. This is getting frustrating, because there are quite a few new features I would like to add, but can't, due to lack of time.

The crashes are not entirely our fault (the blame is shared between our code, 3rd party libraries and drivers), but we need to find some workarounds anyway, because it is frustrating to have unstable code. Generally, if you do not fix the bad code in the early stages, and keep adding on it, you will be in a bigger mess with each new update. Because of this, I decided to have another feature freeze until we can identify and solve the most common problems.

While we are at it, I want to expand the debugging support for the client, so that when the client crashes we can have some meaningfull information which we can analyze. Right now, only a minority of players (those who can compile their own client and run a debugger) can send us precise information on where/why the code crashes.

2 Comments:

Blogger rogerdv said...

Why not to get somebody to do the organization work?

3/12/07 14:37  
Blogger Radu said...

That would be great, but such a position requires some programming knowledge, lots of time, lots of dedication, knowledge of how the game works, and so on, so it is very hard to find such a person.

5/12/07 23:58  

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