292 replies to this topic

[Von Falkenstein]

Thanks for showing the critics that PGI has talented and dedicated people working on this project afterall. Congratulations and thanks again for this fix.

[William Knight]

Hard work, well done, I'm going to go buy some MC now.

[SynAckFin]

Excellent write up! Being a network engineer and not a programmer I couldn't follow all of it, but I do appreciate the feedback and giving us the option to read the gory technical details if we so desire.

[PanzerMagier]

Now this is real progress.
*calls billionaire friend*
Hello buddy? Could you clone liek 10 this Karl Berg guy and send them to PGI's staff? Thanks.

[Hydrophobia]

Late to the thread party I know, but a massive thanks and congrats to the programmers for fixing this one.

The game is awesome, keep up the great work

[stoph]

ShadowDarter, on 16 May 2013 - 04:13 AM, said:

Can you please include some more of these types of answers into the general pool of knowledge as to inform people what you guys do behind the scenes, and please thank the Q&A staff for the great work.

The problem with that is now anyone with knowledge and ability to convey us that information in a way that even a few people would understand and the rest of the community wouldn't jump on for being unclear, evasive, or whatever the flavor criticism of the day is would be spending all their time trying to explain what they are doing instead of just doing it. It is likely that the post took several hours to write for the very concerns previously mentioned...So if Karl or whoever is working on an issue has to write one of those up every other day to keep the community from throwing a tizzy the issue will take that much longer to resolve.

Just my 2cents.

[Sprouticus]

Shumabot, on 15 May 2013 - 06:45 AM, said:

Because, as has been stated repeatedly, the bug applied itself at random. Players could simply initialize their hud until it didn't appear. The ability to restart the process of loading into the game environment would also help with a lot of other uncommon bugs.



It's a bug that is literally as old as the game itself. How is it "now now now" to not be celebratory that it took into late stage open beta with publicly advertised sales (that don't mention its a beta) to fix a massive game breaking bug? I'm sorry, but as much of a victory as this is, this is a victory that came a half a year late at least. You sound like a sycophantic tool if I sound like a petulant child. Having a legitimate criticism for the extreme lag in fixing this bug doesn't make me wrong. I read the post. I'm not the one making up the fact that this bug is "new" and was "handled with expediency". It was clearly a low priority.

This is factually incorrect. I have been in the beta since mid June of last year. The HUD bugs did not start cropping up until roughly November or December. Then they went away and came back in other forms in January.

[Mitta]

Very nice, I understand the struggle to find bugs like this as I'am a developer to. Explaining to the customer why it took so long is always very difficult especially with seemingly random behaviour.

[alochmar]

Excellent write-up and good work figuring this out, cheers.

[Shumabot]

Hammerfinn, on 15 May 2013 - 07:42 PM, said:

Did you actually READ the blow-by-blow? You have no understanding of how long this stuff takes if you REALLY think they could have done it faster. You can't pop code into the microwave, hit a button, and make it right.

As someone who has worked in software design I'm pretty sure you don't actually have a handle on what you're talking about. A bug that takes half a year or more to track down in a live environment when it's prioritized and is receiving scrutiny implies something is massively dysfunctional behind the scenes with either their code base, management, or personnel. Karl has been around the entire time so it's not their personnel. This is the kind of hyperbole these forums are full of. They fixed something eventually and suddenly the problem wasn't longstanding and it gets "fast tracked" retroactively in the minds of the forum base. Reality doesn't work that way. This is a live product, bugs of this magnitude persisting that long in a user facing product don't just magically become half a years work. Entire game engines take less time to write and debug.

They did a pretty great job tracking down what was a very obscure bug, I just was wondering the prioritization of this issue and if they developed tools that could prevent further issues like these. I'm not stating this is a pushbutton fix, but skyscrapers have been made in less time than this took.

Edited by Shumabot, 17 May 2013 - 08:42 AM.

[Fnord5]

Thanks for the peek behind the curtain, and keep up the good work.

[Karl Berg]

I don't want to get into too many specifics regarding scheduling and prioritization as it's outside my scope of responsibility. A simple answer is that I spent between 4 and 5 days isolating this specific issue. I transitioned off as soon as I checked in a hot-fix for the CCryName issue, as I have other high priority tasks with very fast approaching deadlines; and Sean and Jin located and resolved the precached texture issue themselves.

The reason I was not immediately assigned to these bugs was of course we assumed the bug was in Piranhas UI code. Assigning Sean and Jin to these bugs then makes complete sense, as Sean is our lead UI/HUD guy, and Jin is a magical genius of all things graphical. I was only brought on to help once they were reasonably certain it was an engine issue, and requested additional resources. There were other causes for delays as well, some of which I won't be aware of, but certainly including critical UI 2.0 work, other bug and maintenance work, and the hope that the automated tools would be in a working state in time to assist.

[Ice Cream Mech]

Great debugging. No HUD bugs in a few days of play.

As a programmer nothing as satisfying as watching function.add(2,2) return BAZINGA! then you have it figured out.

That's why I like programming.

[LoneGunman]

I have to say that was a great read. I can relate 100% to this sort of bug hunt as a software engineer and a manager of them. As I've often told people asking for bug fix estimates on a bug that has not been identified at the code level, it could take us days to find it and five minutes to fix it. Once your codebase gets beyond a few thousand lines and has multiple hands on it (not to mention having to dig into and troubleshoot code from a third-party), it's just a nightmare. I dreaded every time something like this manifested (i.e. a bug that can be reproduced some of the time but wasn't stand-out obvious).

Keep up the good work!

[Hayashi]

I have no idea what he just said. I'm staying far, far away from programming.

[Flux Reversal]

TY for fixing this! 13 losses in a row with pug-tards and not one hud-bug or crash.

Nice work!

[Madok Pryde]

thank you for all of that, most worthwhile, effort

[MadTulip]

nice read . sux if the library is to blame. i once had a processor familly that would corrupt memory on a certain PPL clock setting every once in a while which was not even under maximum load. so the memory corruption was not even produced by software, could appear anywhere and was not at all reproduceable compleetly random stuff happening .. anyway.

i can imagine that your boss came and said :" now explain to the raging folks out there why it took so ******** long." and you coudnt realy answer by : "well,this plug was not in." hillarous, as prob. noone raging about it understands it.

ill interprete it as a joke .

[Henry Pride]

Btw, my HUD Bugs disappeared after the Hotfix.. so Good job PGI

[zinetwin]

Thank you so much for actually taking the time to explain everything to us. I would wager that less than 10% actually understand all of it but it helps show the dedication of the folks behind the game who are committed to making a great game.
Now that it's fixed I'll actually be playing again because running around in a jenner with no hud or a borked hud was no fun.