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Franky
Guest
sorry, you're wrong on this one - it is possible.
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Welcome Back to Digital Pinball Fans - please read this first
Another eternity until DLC 1 is released.
- Thread starter Richard B
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sorry, you're wrong on this one - it is possible.
If you think so, i will not dispute with you. However, i never found a bug free software... And i was never able to write one...
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Nik Barbour
Guest
I do a bit of occasional programing at work (autolisp & VBA for Autodesk Inventor) and no matter how much you test or if you check it over 50 times, you always miss something, and once you find it it's usually something embarrassingly obvious!
DJ Clae
New member
- Jun 17, 2012
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I don't think most of us can pretend to know how difficult it is to digitize a pinball machine and then debug it, so most of these complaints about the quality or where you think the quality should be are completely a stab in the dark. The fact that bugs are an unavoidable part of life is a fact they teach in every basic programming class.
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Franky
Guest
it's understood that we don't talk about "non-findable" bugs or some small "code-bugs" no one will ever notice - we talk about disappearing balls, wrong measurements and distances, lags, lightning, sounds, graphics, physics ...
And even those bugs are very hard to find. We are many, who want to play the game. However testing can only be done by a very limited number of people. Those will never find all bugs. And even if you test everything a lot more, every player is playing different and this can not be tested!
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Franky
Guest
and once more - i don't talk about you guys try to do a little pacman game once in a while - i talk about professionals, i talk about a company that's more than 20 years in business. There has to be a different measure between a hobby and profession.
But this is exactly what makes me mad and when "fanboy" comes into play - always trying to find an excuse for just sloppy work. it is what it is and it is not my fault - it is simply sloppy work. almost every bug could have been avoided if they would have tested it, or be more carefully right from the start, or didn't make that much tables at once, .....
sorry man, but bugs have nothing to do with how someone plays. a table have certain functions and they need to work properly. And every bug i've read was findable - once again - these guys are professional they have to find it.
however, It is what it is, but now they have time enough to proof i'm wrong - this would make me to the happiest person on earth.
So as James Thurber once said:
"Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness"
But this is exactly what makes me mad and when "fanboy" comes into play - always trying to find an excuse for just sloppy work. it is what it is and it is not my fault - it is simply sloppy work. almost every bug could have been avoided if they would have tested it, or be more carefully right from the start, or didn't make that much tables at once, .....
sorry man, but bugs have nothing to do with how someone plays. a table have certain functions and they need to work properly. And every bug i've read was findable - once again - these guys are professional they have to find it.
however, It is what it is, but now they have time enough to proof i'm wrong - this would make me to the happiest person on earth.
So as James Thurber once said:
"Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness"
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Mike Reitmeyer
FarSight Employee
- Mar 13, 2012
- 1,735
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The difference between a pac man game you make at home and a game like pinball arcade is the code base on pinball is hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and thousands of source code files. Pinball is more complicated than you give credit. Not to mention 1000's of combinations of events.
Sometimes bugs aren't found because it does matter how you play. More specifically what happens and in what order. For example, an issue with multiple balls in the plunger lane on Cirqus (reported a little while ago and recently fixed) was caused by a ball being in the juggler lock at the end of a game. You could play the table 20 times in a row and never have that happen. While the next guy gets it to happen 20 times in a row cause he hits the juggler lock a lot.
Also, the ROM's for the tables even have bugs in them. And when you add in features real tables don't have "like the ability to reset (quit and start again)" you can create issues. The real table you would power off and on again. For us, we can't have the user waiting for a minute or so for it to reboot after they quit and restart. To do this the table has to be reset to specific state. If even one switch is incorrect, the entire table gets messed up.
When someone reports a bug, we look into it, hopefully are able to reproduce it so we can fix it. Not being able to reproduce a bug consistantly is the biggest challenge in fixing it.
We strive to make the best pinball game there is. And it will only get better.
Sometimes bugs aren't found because it does matter how you play. More specifically what happens and in what order. For example, an issue with multiple balls in the plunger lane on Cirqus (reported a little while ago and recently fixed) was caused by a ball being in the juggler lock at the end of a game. You could play the table 20 times in a row and never have that happen. While the next guy gets it to happen 20 times in a row cause he hits the juggler lock a lot.
Also, the ROM's for the tables even have bugs in them. And when you add in features real tables don't have "like the ability to reset (quit and start again)" you can create issues. The real table you would power off and on again. For us, we can't have the user waiting for a minute or so for it to reboot after they quit and restart. To do this the table has to be reset to specific state. If even one switch is incorrect, the entire table gets messed up.
When someone reports a bug, we look into it, hopefully are able to reproduce it so we can fix it. Not being able to reproduce a bug consistantly is the biggest challenge in fixing it.
We strive to make the best pinball game there is. And it will only get better.
Who are you, to define who is a professional developer or not? I am a developer and my day work is to do programming. I know what it means to write code, to find bugs and to be not able to reproduce bugs! I really like to play pinball, but foremost I can feel what it means to deliver code you tested for months and the first customer finds a show stopping bug. It is no fun, and it means a lot of work... But you can not do more, than work as hard as you can and sometimes you need a break... No customer understands that and the only thing you can do is to try to communicate, that you are working on a solution. However some customers never care and the best thing you can do in those situations is to do not care either...
- Thread starter
- #150
Pac-Man itself has bugs in it. For instance, there is a seemingly random quirk in which Pac-Man passes through ghosts unaffected, as well as the infamous "split screen" on level 256, caused by storing all the fruit counter values in a single byte. This latter bug wasn't discovered until 15-20 years after Pac-Man was released.
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Franky
Guest
@ ridcully - i don't want to start a neverending story now - things need to go on - but anyway thanks to Mike Reitmeyer for the reply and i really hope you manage to bring the cabinet mode it will push you ahead.
i didn't talk about the original pacman at all - this just means that there is a difference between programming a quick pacman game for fun or programming a more complex pinball game for commercial use and that a company which is for more than 20 years in business needs to be measured differently.
i didn't talk about the original pacman at all - this just means that there is a difference between programming a quick pacman game for fun or programming a more complex pinball game for commercial use and that a company which is for more than 20 years in business needs to be measured differently.
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- Feb 19, 2012
- 1,991
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I agree, thread is done.
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