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Sandweed posted:So how is the ZDF members dealing with the Kings disappearance?  something, something, totally organic e: lmaoing at the latest reply dates in the super-secret members only area 
Beet Wagon fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 05:23
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Beet Wagon posted:
“It’s almost funny how wrong you have it....” 
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Feb 2, 2020 05:46
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Beet Wagon posted:
Perhaps you should reach out to Jade Starwalker for comment.
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Feb 2, 2020 05:50
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Feb 2, 2020 07:18
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Agony Aunt posted:Perhaps you should reach out to Jade Starwalker for comment. Please someone touch the poop on this. Not me, no, asking for a friend.
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Feb 2, 2020 10:10
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Beet Wagon posted:
I don't know... this whole Org-thing in a pseudo-MMO with 50 player limit seems strange. Is there even anything in the game remotely related to Orgs or is that just a gimmick on the CI
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Feb 2, 2020 11:09
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Beet Wagon posted:
there is simple explanation really. Nobody uses spectrum group chats. Instead they are in cloud using the power of the machines in a server mess.
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Feb 2, 2020 11:25
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Agony Aunt posted:Well, that certainly explains the terrible state of the engine. Yeah this is one of the biggest tell-tale signs that these idiots genuinely don't understand game (or software) development. As a personal anecdote, I've been crunching like crazy this past week to get our prototype ready for testing launch next Tuesday. Towards the end of the week I was coding for 11 hours straight, and the results of that crunch aren't good work! It's totally counterproductive, because you're not thinking straight at that point, and you'll be making mistakes, and coming up with stupid solutions that you'll have to redo the next day anyway. And this is not complicated code, it's very basic stuff but there's a lot of it to do*. The idea that "game coder codes 16 hours a day" is a good thing is so loving stupid. It's a colossal sign of horrible project management and a pretty loving sure fire sign that the project is going to fail. [*] and the guy who was coding the project before I got hired made some loving interesting decisions, which I'm now paying for.
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Feb 2, 2020 11:51
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Der Shovel posted:Yeah this is one of the biggest tell-tale signs that these idiots genuinely don't understand game (or software) development. This. Every time I look back at my rushed work, all I see are security issues, dumb recursive poo poo for no good reason and loving lists EVERYWHERE. poo poo works but then I have to redo it every time.
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Feb 2, 2020 12:07
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Der Shovel posted:Yeah this is one of the biggest tell-tale signs that these idiots genuinely don't understand game (or software) development. This is a good post. There is a problem with software which does not have any certification or audit process behind it (like software that might threaten the safety of people or even cause deaths if there is a bug in them): you can create it in so many ways. As soon as you run out of time, and the crunch starts, there might come a point where you realize that even with 16 hour days, there is no way to create the thing you are tasked to create in a good way. It's a very, very unsettling feeling, and I hope people never have to experience it. You are already worn out, and the realization sinks in that what you HAVE to do can't be done in time. Since this is software...this is not building a house, where shortcuts would actually threaten the people living in that house, and they can't be cleared up later on, as you can't switch out parts of the foundation, or a wall, or whatever...so everyone knows you can change it (theoretically) at any time. So you HAVE to take ugly shortcuts during crunch. You don't want to be the guy that "failed" the deadline (and the whole crunch) for the rest of the team. So you do whatever you need to do to get it to work (or, of you are in a cool and good company, you could talk to your project lead, explain him why it is not possible to finish the task in a good way, and make him and the client reconsider the deadline....hey, I made it through that sentence without laughing...), and add some comments like "TODO: fix this" or "TODO: ugly hack, fix before release" etc. Because the bugs coming out of it might not actually cause death, and could be debugged really soon...... ....unless the next crunch period piles upon this broken code, and the poor guy who has to work around the poo poo you wrote to make deadline has to write more poo poo to make the next deadline etc. Now imagine this going on 24/5 in multiple timezones. "Here, Germany, let's have our poo poo while we sleep for four hours before we get your poo poo back while you sleep for four hours". Crunch so often leads to lovely software and code, that it mostly only works for something like games and "unimportant" applications (social media, operating systems out of redmond, huge, huuuge databases with personal data attached to some lovely webpage), but if you look at software development like building a house, or a car, or a plane, or a vaccine...you might want to take your time to get it right. With all the delays currently happening with a bunch of AAA-titles, I can only hope some parts of the industry acknowledged that they don't want to have an Anthem or Fallout 76 or whatever in their portfolio. tuo fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 12:33
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tuo posted:This is a good post. There is a problem with software which does not have any certification or audit process behind it (like software that might threaten the safety of people or even cause deaths if there is a bug in them): you can create it in so many ways. As soon as you run out of time, and the crunch starts, there might come a point where you realize that even with 16 hour days, there is no way to create the thing you are tasked to create in a good way. It's a very, very unsettling feeling, and I hope people never have to experience it. You are already worn out, and the realization sinks in that what you HAVE to do can't be done in time. Since this is software...this is not building a house, where shortcuts would actually threaten the people living in that house, and they can't be cleared up later on, as you can't switch out parts of the foundation, or a wall, or whatever...so everyone knows you can change it (theoretically) at any time. So you HAVE to take ugly shortcuts during crunch. There is a story from the early days of Microsoft Office when they were under massive pressure to make fixes quickly. Apologies if i mangle the story, doing it off hazy recollection. Bug report came in, something like correct font size not being reported when font size set to 10. Fix: return(10); Of course, now it breaks every other case, but hey, they hit their deadline.
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Feb 2, 2020 12:59
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Even from the general publics point of view, we actively hate that crunch time exists and will condemn companies that force it on employees when the word gets out even if it happens only towards the end of the projects release, times like the EA spouce letter come to mind. CIG not only does this kind of crunch time all the time whenever they want, with no sense of awareness are happy to say it with smiles, they are praised for it as if people want to work 18-20 hours a day to please the dorks.
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Feb 2, 2020 13:51
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Der Shovel posted:Yeah this is one of the biggest tell-tale signs that these idiots genuinely don't understand game (or software) development. Signed. I can considered myself lucky (well, most of the time) working on safety relevant software (in the sense that if something goes really wrong, people will die), so we have crystal clear rules from "above" regarding working hours. If you sit 10 hours a day just once, prepare yourself for a not-so-funny-talk with your supervisor. If there is an accident due to faulty software and the following investigation would turn up crunching developers (which also means a failed project management), a lot of people would be in deep poo poo. You can see this kind of things currently happening with Boeing. But well, it's video games we are talking about. At the end of the day they don't matter much and most of them will be forgotten after a year or so. I don't know if devs like Id or Rockstar really let the engine programmers crunch for longer periods of time or if experience shows that the results get worse and there is nothing to gain by doing that. I`am also not sure if the "hard" engine coding is still an issue a few months before release or if the open points are mainly scripting issues, missing artwork and the such with just minor engine bugs left. I think these romanticizing pictures of a lone John Carmack, buried in a hotel room for 3 weeks straight in the mid-90s, fixing issues with the renderer in Quake are a relic of the past. Development of AAA-games just became too large of an endeavor with way too many people involved that such things are feasible today. When it comes to CIG, well. Their *In the beginning, they framed CR to be this guy, but after that "Is Dennis around here?" cringefest I assume nobody still believes that. I`am pretty sure CR isn't even able to properly type on a keyboard.
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Feb 2, 2020 14:19
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Kellanved posted:I have a folder full of catte and doggo videos from this thread, it makes it all worth it. Thanks star citizen! Me too. A look at Thoatse post history is a cure for depression.
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Feb 2, 2020 14:20
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stingtwo posted:Even from the general publics point of view, we actively hate that crunch time exists and will condemn companies that force it on employees when the word gets out even if it happens only towards the end of the projects release, times like the EA spouce letter come to mind. CIG not only does this kind of crunch time all the time whenever they want, with no sense of awareness are happy to say it with smiles, they are praised for it as if people want to work 18-20 hours a day to please the dorks.  All part of the narrative. It`s more important the backers believe they are hard at work, having actual results is secondary to that. And maybe the lower decks even are hard at work, with this kind of leadership it all goes to poo poo, though. btw., the last of these "let's photograph a random employee"-twitter-posts Sandi liked to do is from Apr 10, 2019. What happened there? Has some employee told her to gently caress off with that stupid camera or he will shove it up her dumb face?
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Feb 2, 2020 14:44
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Der Shovel posted:[*] and the guy who was coding the project before I got hired made some loving interesting decisions, which I'm now paying for. Careless bugs might be embarrassing but they can usually be fixed in minutes/hours, but reams of code that railroads everything that depends on it for evermore, is hard to change but littered with assumptions that won't be true next week and has its tendrils all over the codebase takes *months* to fix and rots your code from the inside out as anything that's built on it is instantly tech debt.
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Feb 2, 2020 15:25
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toiletbrush posted:Dunno if this guy's code was also written during crunch but in my experience this is where most of the pain of crunch code comes from - there might be bugs or it might work fine but crunch code is pretty much always poorly architected or not architected at all. They are crunching because there is SO MUCH STUFF to be done. Not in the world it can be because its poorly architected or managed. Its Chris Roberts! He can't overestimate his workers or badly architect or badly manage! Hes THE micromanager, he knows how to!
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Feb 2, 2020 15:44
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The existence of crunch in 2020 just baffles me. I mean Henry Ford moved to an 8 hour week almost a 100 years ago. And it wasn't because he was a soft hearted friend of the working man. Every study since shows productivity plummets and error rates soar as work hours increase. Extra long crunch will actively get less work done than a sane schedule because *shocker* it turns out exhausted zombies aren't very productive.
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Feb 2, 2020 15:56
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Dark Off posted:there is simple explanation really. I mean that's probably at least a little accurate, in that I'm sure their Discord is more active. I'm too lazy to to check though.
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Feb 2, 2020 15:59
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i watched an interesting video about crunch in the VFX industry recently. If anything, it appears to be even worse than for code monkeys. * The company is usually paid a flat fee * The producers go back and ask for changes however many times as they like, and its your problem if you go over your budget * Since the company has no more money, the artists are expected to work unpaid overtime, repeatedly * If you complain you get blacklisted as well as flat out removed from the credits. * Because the companies are always chasing tax credits, the next job might be in Vancouver, or England, or whatever random place. So you go away from your family and friends for months at a time, living out of a hotel room or lovely rental. * The VFX companies go bankrupt ALL THE TIME * if you do a really good job all the credit usually goes to the director, producers, and actors.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:05
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:i watched an interesting video about crunch in the VFX industry recently. If anything, it appears to be even worse than for code monkeys. Yeah, the company that did the Sonic redesign (and the original I assume) shut down in December, right? I'm guessing they didn't get paid any more to redo their original (forcefully rushed) work.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:17
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ggangensis posted:Signed. Well, at the least the UK office should be protected from this sort of thing by the EU Working Time directive... oh... Brexit... oh dear. Still, there were always ways around that. And yeah, my last company had strong words to say about people doing crunch for extended periods. It means the project manager wasn't doing their job right and it led to poor results.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:20
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:i watched an interesting video about crunch in the VFX industry recently. If anything, it appears to be even worse than for code monkeys. Did not see that particular video, but one that dealt with the question why a lot of VFX in movies looks worse than a lot from, 10 or 15 years ago. They're answer was that VFX became a sweatshop-industry over the years. The demand grew so quickly because everyone and his little brother now makes special effects heavy films. If you look at marvel shovelware movies, it is sometimes hard to tell if these are from a videogame or actual movies. Because of the high demand, exactly what you state happens: Unpaid overtime, rushed productions while operating on a dime. I think there is just one sane way to go with it: Never, ever work for the entertainment industry. It is no secret that the gaming industry doesn't pay well (except you are one of the gifted few in a sea of thousands. Looking at you, Tiago) and the working conditions are often abysmal. The main problem here is that being a "game coder" sounds pretty cool and it's a dream of a lot of young people, mine included a few years back. So what happens when a lot of people want the job and the bulk of applicants is straight from university? Right, it dumps the wages and allows a culture of crunch time. Young people often don't know their rights or just lack the foresight that working yourself into burnout is nothing you will hear even a single "thank you" for. I think this is pretty singular when it comes to software development. Sure, writing backend-stuff for a bank might be boring, but a at least it pays well and you are home by 6.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:25
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Agony Aunt posted:Well, at the least the UK office should be protected from this sort of thing by the EU Working Time directive... oh... Brexit... oh dear. The crunch culture is present in the game industry worldwide, even in the EU. The EUWTD has plenty of derogations, and certain industries simply don't give a gently caress about it. The video game industry has such a deeply internalized culture of subservience that even in Germany, Crytek employees didn't go to court and kept working for months without pay. ggangensis posted:[...] Also, this.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:30
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Yeah, the entertainment industry is predatory as gently caress. I wanted to be a concept artist when I was younger because art was the only thing I thought I was any good at. I dropped out of my illustration program the more I heard from people working in the industry about the hours, the pay, seeing prints of their art being sold by these huge companies but getting almost nothing in return. We are surrounded by entertainment but capitalism doesn't value or reward the artists who make it. These companies know that a lot of young and ambitious people will tolerate garbage wages and long working hours because they get to work on games/movies. Elderbean fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 16:32
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Agony Aunt posted:And yeah, my last company had strong words to say about people doing crunch for extended periods. It means the project manager wasn't doing their job right and it led to poor results. This. In the end its a question of company culture, I guess. We still have this time tracking system in place where you sign in when you enter office and sign out when you leave. If you are passing the time threshold the next 2 higher ups receive an automated E-Mail, which would be my supervisor and well, his supervisor. Sure, it's a matter of saying "oops, yeah, I worked on that other thing and forgot time, won't happen again", but well... it's pretty embarrassing and I just don't want to be in that situation. As I've started working there I thought of this as a bit silly, but it works pretty well and nobody talks about it anymore or has issues with it. The overtime hours are in normal ranges, the sickness figures are low, so I guess it does its job.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:34
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Elderbean posted:Yeah, the entertainment industry is predatory as gently caress. I wanted to be a concept artist when I was younger because art was the only thing I thought I was any good at. I dropped out of my illustration program the more I heard from people working in the industry about the hours, the pay, seeing prints of their art being sold by these huge companies but getting almost nothing in return. Im still stuck in game art, making lovely 3d for mobile games and some illustrations here and there. I love the work itself but the jobs blow, the money is okay right now since i work freelance, but i dont feel secure at all. What did you end up doing? Im 30 and feeling like i wanna switch lanes soon. From the EU btw.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:39
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ggangensis posted:I think this is pretty singular when it comes to software development. Sure, writing backend-stuff for a bank might be boring, but a at least it pays well and you are home by 6. Know quite a few coders who left developing games to work on the boring industries as soon as they realized they had the skills to get paid a whole lot more for a whole lot less stress and hours.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:45
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Megalobster posted:The video game industry has such a deeply internalized culture of subservience that even in Germany, Crytek employees didn't go to court and kept working for months without pay. I remember reading about this. This is basically the gaming industry in a nutshell. Enthusiastic, young people fleeced until burnout. It doesn't help that engine coding itself is complicated, I think most engine coders could easily work in other industries with better pay and a healthier work environment. But for some reason, they don't. True idealism, who knows. For artists it might be another thing. Knew someone who tried to get a footing as a game artist, but the market is incredibly over-saturated and after a series of unpaid 6-month internships she said gently caress it and is now doing something else. Good riddance. At least when it comes to this, CI
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Feb 2, 2020 16:50
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thebacil posted:Im still stuck in game art, making lovely 3d for mobile games and some illustrations here and there. I love the work itself but the jobs blow, the money is okay right now since i work freelance, but i dont feel secure at all. Joined the Navy as a radar tech (Firecontrolman) and when I was done with my enlistment I went back to school without much of a direction and dropped out to focus on applying my technical experience from the Navy to a job. I work for a company that makes thermal instruments, we make sensors and chambers designed to test textiles, cars, firefighting equipment, hospital beds, etc. It's a small company, work gets noticed, my hours are predictable, and I get to build neat stuff. I can't complain. It's definitely easier than my fledgling attempts at getting work as an illustrator. People really don't want to pay for art lmao. Elderbean fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 17:05
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Agony Aunt posted:Know quite a few coders who left developing games to work on the boring industries as soon as they realized they had the skills to get paid a whole lot more for a whole lot less stress and hours. I know this might wind up being a controversial opinion, but it matches my experience that developers who truly enjoy coding will enjoy the satisfaction that comes with writing efficient, elegant, optimized code whether it's in a video game or some unknown backend credit card service. Even if they're video game fans. "The dream" of working on video games is something of an illusion, unless your passion exceed normal safety levels. A satisfaction of a job well done writing good code for a small company and getting recognized and appreciated for your work is far better than working endless crunch so nerds can bitch about the end result on Youtube. ggangensis posted:Sure, writing backend-stuff for a bank might be boring, but a at least it pays well and you are home by 6. This is exactly what we do and to be honest, it's just as satisfying as writing game poo poo. We even have a dev who makes indie games in his spare time. He gets far more satisfaction from the "boring" work. Solid code is its own reward. Scruffpuff fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 17:10
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I wouldn't be surprised if the whole crunch culture has driven a lot of the best engine programmers out of the video game industry and thus made the overall quality of code drop a bit.
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Feb 2, 2020 17:15
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Honestly as a former cloud systems engineer myself, the prospect of getting paid a buttload more money for less hours worked in a boring industry to feed my video game addictions was vastly more appealing than setting up terraform scripts to automate scaling more Fortnite servers.
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Feb 2, 2020 17:15
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Scruffpuff posted:I know this might wind up being a controversial opinion, but it matches my experience that developers who truly enjoy coding will enjoy the satisfaction that comes with writing efficient, elegant, optimized code whether it's in a video game or some unknown backend credit card service. Even if they're video game fans. "The dream" of working on video games is something of an illusion, unless your passion exceed normal safety levels. A satisfaction of a job well done writing good code for a small company and getting recognized and appreciated for your work is far better than working endless crunch so nerds can bitch about the end result on Youtube. I wholeheartedly agree with that. To quote Chris here, what is game coding anyway? Writing some serializer that happens to live as part of a game engine isn't necessarily more interesting than writing a serializer that sits in some business application. However, finding an elegant solution to a tricky problem is what counts. As part of some formal regulations, our product ships only with pretty basic compiler optimizations, so writing efficient code is really a must here without sacrificing too much readability. This is quite challenging and a pretty fun part of the job, even if my domain is so far apart from gaming as it could possibly be. If a poor soul that thinks about entering the gaming industry as a software dev reads this: Don't, there are other domains with interesting problems where you aren't treated as a modern slave. Also, the programmers there, in general, aren't worse than your "engine gods", despite the picture some devs try to paint. Bofast posted:I wouldn't be surprised if the whole crunch culture has driven a lot of the best engine programmers out of the video game industry and thus made the overall quality of code drop a bit. Considering the state most modern AAA titles ship in, this is probably true.
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Feb 2, 2020 17:39
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Bofast posted:I wouldn't be surprised if the whole crunch culture has driven a lot of the best engine programmers out of the video game industry and thus made the overall quality of code drop a bit. While a lot of games are dumpster fires, most of the major engines are pretty fantastic. I suspect the top talent is either working on the engines themselves (and thus having a more enjoyable job where they're focused on developing and refining technology rather than trying to cobble together a broken game to some incompetent designer's brainless specification) or they're working at smaller studios and getting ownership shares. There's really not a hell of a lot of reason to work for an AAA publisher if you're any good at anything. e - to expand on that, since it's been true for... well, forever, that especially programmers and anyone capable of designing/managing a product can make more money outside of games, the only reason anyone is in the industry is that they're either really passionate or really poo poo. If you're really passionate, why would you want to work on soulless AAA games? K8.0 fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 17:53
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K8.0 posted:I suspect the top talent is either working on the engines themselves (and thus having a more enjoyable job where they're focused on developing and refining technology rather than trying to cobble together a broken game to some incompetent designer's brainless specification) or they're working at smaller studios and getting ownership shares. I see what you did there.  Good thing he is now focusing on the important stuff like moon clothing ggangensis fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 18:01
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ggangensis posted:If a poor soul that thinks about entering the gaming industry as a software dev reads this: Don't, there are other domains with interesting problems where you aren't treated as a modern slave. Also, the programmers there, in general, aren't worse than your "engine gods", despite the picture some devs try to paint. There are a few exceptions (like FDev, which seems to be mostly crunch-free), but yeah, in general the industry is not worth it. There was VFX thrown in, but anime (and manga and comics, etc) also counts into this - lots of enthusiastic young people working for miserable wage, just so they can say they work on an anime, and the potential big profit goes to the investors (though to be honest, if anime flops, they also eat the loss). It's kinda sad thing, sadder still because when a studio (KyoAni) tries to get its employees better terms, schooling facility, etc, in the end they get a building burnt and employees killed by an angry otaku :/
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Feb 2, 2020 18:09
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:i watched an interesting video about crunch in the VFX industry recently. If anything, it appears to be even worse than for code monkeys. It's absolutely terrible. Luckily, there does seem to be at least some movement being made (especially after seeing the initial stirrings of a similar impulse in the games industry) to try to make things better at VFX houses. MPC Vancouver imploding shook people hard, probably moreso than even R&H going under did. Not that that will help me, I'm still chained to the Wheel of Pain on the production side, but it would be a Very Good Thing.
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Feb 2, 2020 18:09
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Wasn't it Journey to the Center of the Earth where the VFX team wasn't paid at all?
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Feb 2, 2020 18:13
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Bofast posted:I wouldn't be surprised if the whole crunch culture has driven a lot of the best engine programmers out of the video game industry and thus made the overall quality of code drop a bit. Which then leads to slow development times, buggy products, projects lacking in features on release, and players complaining about the games saying that the devs are lazy and don't care and how games used to have better quality and how easy it must be (armchair devs) to implement X and why don't the devs do it. It makes you think maybe CR, which his experience from decades ago, also thought this, and thought, i can make it work, and then fell into the same trap as many other game dev shops, with the additional hinderance of his own massive ego and demands for fidelity. He thinks if he pushes harder and harder he will get better results... and then can't undertstand it why it all turns to poo poo. And this is why he is spending 16 hours a day rewriting the physics engine.
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Feb 2, 2020 18:17
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