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Many games are held together by duct tape

polygon.com

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Re: Many games are held together by duct tape

#121

Post by SloopJon »

huffmsa wrote: post #45
michaelbrooks wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to Breath of the Wild, I've recently enjoyed watching a few speedruns and it's amazing to see the number of glitches in BoTW. Check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEtHpCfi_DE I also don't understand how anyone can accept speedrunning through glitches as a world record, but I guess if everyone does the same run with similar or the same glitches then it's fair? Seems like it just becomes a race to know…

Playing the meta is part of the game. If you're not loading in other code or using 3rd party assistance, it's fair. Understanding the buy strategy in CSGO doesn't make you a "cheater", in means you understand how to stretch the game to it's limits. Mike Vrabel taking penalties to burn the clock might seen unfair, but he was just leveraging the rules as written to improve his chances of winning.

> Mike Vrabel taking penalties to burn the clock might seen unfair

Certainly not unfair to do it against Bill Belichick, who did almost the exact same thing earlier in the season--first time I'd ever seen a delay of game or false start penalty declined.

Re: Many games are held together by duct tape

#122

Post by markandrewj »

kelvin0 wrote: post #67

Ex-Game dev here: shipped many titles on console (AAA and some zzz titles). When comes time to shipping a game, the crunches, pressure and overall stress is through the roof. Most everything goes at that point: duct tape, hot glue, bobby pins and toad spit. And if you disagree with management over these 'not so best practices' (in order to ship faster...) they will find someone to do it and you could be out of a job.…

I enjoy playing games, but have long felt conflicted because of the studio practices so many AAA shops have (i.e. long hours and lack of job security). I have quite a bit of respect for studios like Klie (https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/5/29/4362838/the-birth...) because of this. I wish more studios would spearhead cultural change like this, instead of waiting until they are forced by employees.

Re: Many games are held together by duct tape

#123

Post by cjfd »

AstralStorm wrote: post #104
cjfd wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'You have not worked on bad enough code base.' You know, it is a bit pretentious to read a few sentences that someone wrote and then conclude a lot about what they know or do not know. And I actually do know what ravioli code is. I think ravioli code is mostly a good thing. Also the people on the c2.com page are not uniformly negative about it. Not all code should be ravioli code but in a project with complex require…

Main problem with the style is lack of overarching structure and cohesion. Preferable state is high internal cohesion and low coupling. Most code is opposite. Ravioli is when you trade high coupling without introducing cohesion, which is structure. Typical state after dumb refactor rather than rework. Simple extraction of functions does not get you anything (if done well within a module, maybe increases cohesion), wh…

It is quite possible to get an MVC by deduplicating things. Image we have two tables that display some data by the same means, e.g., a web page. This will be about the same code twice. For instance, both will iterate over rows and columns. Removing that duplication will give you an M and a V. Then you may also have to react to some events in about the same way. Remove that duplication and you have a C.

Re: Many games are held together by duct tape

#124

Post by davidkpiano »

lzralbu wrote: post #110
_the_inflator wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it works! I learned a lot about preventing magic with this here: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/state.html For me - and I mostly do frontend apps now - I always advise to go for state pattern instead of complex if/thens. Thanks to the aforementioned article.

Does Redux help with things like this?

If you have enough discipline, sure. Finite state machine tools like XState are more strict about this.

Re: Many games are held together by duct tape

#125

Post by nineumbrellas »

steveklabnik wrote: post #89
xena wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the glitches in breath of the wild are just systems of the game interacting in weird ways. There are sometimes "glitchless" categories, but sometimes it's very difficult to figure out what is and is not a glitch. Calling something a "glitch" or not is a surprisingly subjective thing. To one player it may be a legitimate use of the bullet-time mechanic to turn frozen enemies into physics cannons while shield-…

This can get super heated. There was a controversial "glitchless" run of Mirror's Edge at GDQ a few years back... Sometimes people make a "no major glitches" or "no OOB" category, where specific glitches are disallowed, but others are allowed.

If we're thinking of the same Mirror's Edge run, that was meant to be a joke and to bring to light the ridiculousness of a "glitchless" run as a lot of things can be interpreted as a glitch or not.

Re: Many games are held together by duct tape

#126

Post by godot »

kelvin0 wrote: post #67

Ex-Game dev here: shipped many titles on console (AAA and some zzz titles). When comes time to shipping a game, the crunches, pressure and overall stress is through the roof. Most everything goes at that point: duct tape, hot glue, bobby pins and toad spit. And if you disagree with management over these 'not so best practices' (in order to ship faster...) they will find someone to do it and you could be out of a job.…

I used to work in a large FB/Mobile game studio (one of the largest) and was on a team that launched a certain FB flash-based game. It was a project that was on "crunch" from beginning to launch (about 6-9 months). Literally 3 days before launch we found a severe flaw in our client-server communication layer that didn't do what we needed (this was almost a decade ago, I no longer remember what exactly the issue was). I spent an entire day heads down rewriting the whole client-server communication architecture that day. I've been in non-game, software dev jobs after that company, and can't imagine something like this happening in any other company/industry, even in aggressive scrappy startups. Duct tape and hot glue are pretty much the norms in game industry. Like you said, I also wouldn't trade that experience for anything else, but I am also never going to get back to it.

Re: Many games are held together by duct tape

#127

Post by tracker1 »

AstralStorm wrote: post #114
tluyben2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engines (Doom, Quake) need to be much cleaner and more consistent than (one-off) games.

Mind you both reused many ideas from previous ones. Doom reused Wolfenstein 3D, Quake reused pieces from Doom. (WAD format for example.) The engines made for the games were indeed intended to be one offs. Reuse of design and formats does not imply reuse of code. This is very different from new "universal" engines like Unity, Unreal Engine, Ogre, Frostbite, Dawn Engine or Unigine. Those were designed to be separate fr…

Sometimes the best code comes from making something that's meant to be temporary, replaced or duplicated instead of reused.

Re: Many games are held together by duct tape

#129

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

I'm sure there are oodles of creators out there who hold back their source code because they don't want to deal with being shamed. We should be using these opportunities to learn and grow together, and not as a soundboard to feel good about how much better we are than someone else.

Re: Many games are held together by duct tape

#130

Post by RockIslandLine »

thrower123 wrote: post #83
clarry wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I still buy and play games that were made 20+ years ago. Shame they have so many bugs we can't really fix. I don't buy websites that were made 20 years ago. Almost every commercial site has seen multiple rewrites in that timespan.

For many old games, it's not even certain whether the source code even exists any longer. I'm always impressed with the sometimes herculean efforts that fan communities will achieve to patch and fix old abandonware games.

IMHO, this is a failure of the copyright model. All information required to build software should be required to be escrowed at release.
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