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Geek Culture / Are today's programmers becoming lazy?

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Lonnehart
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 01:57
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Most of the games I have bought for the PC recently (that's not many) have often required patches one way or another (and I'm not talking about the reason being that new features were added). And nowadays games are ballooning in the amount of memory and storage space needed. I'm starting to wonder if the people making commercial games are getting lazy... I remember reading long ago that many programmers are very tight with their code. Back then CPU power and memory space was scarce and they had to make do with what they had. Games were pretty simple back then too. But you didn't need to patch the things the moment you bought them.

Nowadays there's so much CPU power and so much storage and RAM space that you have quite a bit of room to do what you like. What are the chances that programmers are leaving behind bits of useless code in the finished product when it leaves for the factory? Or rather code that isn't meant to be used by the player at all but it's still in the finished product anyway?

In the beginning there was nothing. There'll be nothing in the end...
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Darkowen
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 02:05
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I reckon its probably the opposite, programmers are being pressured into doing alot of code, too much infact that it doesnt always reach the deadline of release, so they either leave some code in there that will then be continued on the patch, back in the old days companies were not pressured into releasing games to Rival other companies games, definetly not as much as todays games.


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David R
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 02:15 Edited at: 28th Jun 2009 02:18
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Quote: "But you didn't need to patch the things the moment you bought them."


No - you couldn't patch them, which is why it could not be used as an excuse to push releases forward. With the ability to patch, however, comes the managerial pressure to "magic away" bugs - "Put the fix in the patch, and we'll release this version ASAP". It's an external pressure, not programmer laziness.

I take pride in my work, and I'm fairly certain it's the same for everybody - releasing or 'shipping' code that isn't 100% up-to-scratch (or at least, the best it can be) is the most hated thing ever - nobody wants to do that, irrespective of how lazy they are.

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Seppuku Arts
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 02:33
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Pressure is most of it I reckon. And that projects are bigger, thus there's a whole lot more to do and more work to put in, yet developers try to meet deadlines, which is why I'm not amongst the people who drone when a deadline is push forward. Final Fantasy XIII is meant to be out 2 months ago, but I am happy waiting another year so that the game works.

Though releasing patches is perhaps a ridiculous trap, I think David R points it out nicely, the ability to patch means earlier release. I suppose it's okay if they get the patch out speedily and/or actually fix the problems. I am still moaning about Mass Effect for the PC, it took ages to release a patch, and it was rubbish, at the beginning of this year, they said there would be another patch 'soon', with no indication of how soon and I've not heard anything yet about the new patch. It seem ridiculous as a number of customers who paid good money for the game, still can't play it. I'm glad I found the XBox 360 version in the bargain bin. But this perhaps illustrates the annoyance when companies say, "lets not spend so much time bug testing and fixing it, but release it, patch it and move on".

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Jeku
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 02:46 Edited at: 28th Jun 2009 02:47
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Games are exponentially more difficult to program than they were before, and it is impossible to release a game that is 100% bug free. I can honestly say I'm glad that patching is a common thing nowadays, as it's better to fix the bugs after the fact than have a giant recall and force everyone to exchange their disc for a new one.

I remember NCAA Football 07 for the PSP had a large bug that was not found during development, and EA had to recall all the discs in an expensive move, because PSP games can't be patched. You can't really blame EA for that, because it was an honest mistake (I was working closely with that team at the time).

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Lonnehart
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 05:11
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I guess I misinterpreted the whole thing. So with companies trying to outdo each other, the pressure is on all the people involved in creating a game to put the thing out on time and then patch it later. I wonder though... how much money do they save by not going through extensive game testing?

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JoelJ
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 05:52 Edited at: 28th Jun 2009 06:09
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How extensive are you talking? When you release a game and you sell millions, that's millions of users. Someone, somewhere is going to find a bug that a team of two or three hundred, even thousand, testers will never find.

I have to agree with what was first said, it's the fault of the management. I never really thought about it before and blamed lazy programmers. But I totally can see it as previously explained.

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Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 07:46
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I always see programmers in big companies like the programmers in the company ScumSoft in Space Quest 3. The whole game rests on their shoulders and if something major goes wrong their the first to blame... and this is the way their treated most of the time.



Notice the whips.

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Jeku
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 21:08
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Quote: "I wonder though... how much money do they save by not going through extensive game testing?"


Actually you'd be surprised how many bugs they KNOW about and will still ship without fixing. Programmers only fix what their managers tell them, and they are not allowed to fix other bugs.

Quote: "I always see programmers in big companies like the programmers in the company ScumSoft in Space Quest 3. The whole game rests on their shoulders and if something major goes wrong their the first to blame... and this is the way their treated most of the time."


Haha, it's my favourite game

But actually programmers are shielded from the fallout of crazy bugs being found. Programmers are 100% reliant on QA to find the bugs, and from the producers/designers to tell them which ones to fix. It was NEVER a programmer's fault if an unknown bug made its way into the finished product, nor should it be. It's a meta-game within the whole game process. Myself, it was always my favourite part of the game dev cycle

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Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 22:48
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Quote: "Haha, it's my favourite game"


I love Space Quest too.

Is there a sort of bug score list. If more QA people find the same bug it scores as a higher priority than the other bugs?

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Phaelax
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Posted: 28th Jun 2009 23:17
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As Jeku said, I would agree that it's more due to today's games being more complex. But I've also become quite lazy myself.

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Jeku
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Posted: 29th Jun 2009 00:14
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Quote: "Is there a sort of bug score list. If more QA people find the same bug it scores as a higher priority than the other bugs?"


There's a bug database. The only bugs that must be fixed 100% of the time are crash bugs. In that case Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo will not allow the game's release. But all the other bugs have priorities. It's more or less how big a deal the bugs are as opposed to how many QA people found the same bug.

I'm SO glad I'm not in QA anymore.

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JoelJ
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Posted: 29th Jun 2009 01:29
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Quote: "But I've also become quite lazy myself."

Yeah, I think that I fall for that sometimes, too.
Most of my teachers always say to make the code look good, and not optimise unless you have to because it makes for ugly code.

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 13:03 Edited at: 30th Jun 2009 13:04
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I agree, in some cases programmers seem to be getting very lazy nowadays. If you think back to the days when they had to write in assembler and still managed to get decent 3D graphics and sound, today a lot of programmers rely heavily on APIs and debuggers. (see Elite) In many programming environments it's possible to write a cross-platform program that uses simple 3D graphics with pretty much no knowledge of programming whatsoever. Of course, that's a million miles away from a fully blown game engine with media management, physics, etc. but it shows how much more work is done for the developers nowadays. To write GTA4, for example, in assembler without APIs like Elite was, would be a total nightmare both in the actual creation of the game and in the support of the game. So yes, developers are getting a little lazy but as a result they're doing more. Driving instead of walking is lazy, but it gets you around the world quicker.

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Butter fingers
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 13:37 Edited at: 30th Jun 2009 13:42
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Quote: "To write GTA4, for example, in assembler without APIs like Elite was, would be a total nightmare both in the actual creation of the game and in the support of the game. So yes, developers are getting a little lazy but as a result they're doing more. Driving instead of walking is lazy, but it gets you around the world quicker."


Lol, that's ludicrous! THe whole point of evolution (even evolution within games) is that the process is exponential. It's not building from scratch every time, it's building on the previous knowledge that has been accumulated.

I don't know. I think in response to the original question, programmers aren't becoming more lazy. If you think about the first video games, they were sweaty, bearded outcasts making games in their bedrooms. Over the last 30 years the industry has become more and more corporate. More controls, more procedure, more middle management, deadlines, "signing off", executive pressure, marketing scumbags etc etc.

Think about it, programmers are just another transistor in the giant motherboard of the industry. They've pretty much gone from total creative freedom to being basically another quite formal office job, what I mean is, it's gone from being a labour of love, something you would spend hours perfecting in your room, alone, to being you in a team of 25, and all you're responsible for is one tiny corner of the game, you don't really care as much because it feels less like your game.

That's why I think indy dev appeals so much. Like I can sit in my room and think; I'm going to make a game about a lesbian magpie ninja who's on a quest to save a hippo from North Korea, and I can do it! Nobody is going to tell me it doesn't appeal to the target demographic or whatever, I'll just do it and see what people think.

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David R
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 13:40 Edited at: 30th Jun 2009 13:44
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Quote: "To write GTA4, for example, in assembler without APIs like Elite was, would be a total nightmare both in the actual creation of the game and in the support of the game. So yes, developers are getting a little lazy but as a result they're doing more."


There's a difference between a completely impossible task and being lazy. Making something like GTA4 in ASM would be idiotic - both from a managerial perspective (imagine the code base for something like GTA, and coordinating huge teams to work on it) and from a scale perspective (assembly is more bug prone, more complex and hence makes a complex concept like GTA exponentially more complicated than it needs to be).

"Right tool for the job" springs to mind. Not laziness.

EDIT: Also, it's worth noting that whilst yes, Elite is a massive technical achievement, it also takes huge advantage of psychology. Whilst being extremely complex for the platform it was targeting, a lot of the logic behind it is actually very simple. Due to the way it is presented, however, it can appear a lot more complex than it actually is. The same applies to games like SimCity - they don't necessarily need to simulate everything. It's about how the 'mental model' of the game is held by the user. If the game can get away with appearing more "deep"/complex than it actually is (without simulating it) it's a boon to the overall perception of it.

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Van B
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 13:42
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The thing with assembly though is that your dealing with standards - the video memory is the same footprint and location on every computer, so you can rely on certain aspects. If you get a piece of assembly code that scrolls the screen for example, it will scroll the screen no matter what, coders didn't have to worry about file consistency, hardware differences, OS differences, so really I'd say that Assembly on the 16-bit computers is probably as tough as C++ on modern PC's, to learn and use - completely different languages but they became standards. 20 years ago all professional coders would be using assembly, there was simply no other way to make truly fast games on 16-bits. I spent a lot of time using SpriteWorks for GFA Basic on the Atari ST, which was the 'then' equivalent of a plugin. It gave special features that you could only really get with Assembly, but in a basic language - fast blitters, copper lines, sprites, scrolling, sound, MOD music. I guess it would be like starting out with DBClassic, then buying a plugin for £5 that gave it DBPro power.

Maybe things haven't changed that much for me in 20 years, maybe in 20 years commercial games will be written in languages as easy to use as DBPro. Maybe all those extra cores our processors have will be used for something one day, like processing scripted code through the engine. Wouldn't it be great to have scripts run really fast, as fast as native C++ code - then we might see a leaner commercial market and much higher quality indi market. So professionals might get even lazier, but it might also kick open some doors, indi developers could go from strength to strength, the industry will come full circle so keep your hand in!.

Personally I'm looking to make a 2D game creator system, one with some balls, that can tackle a lot of different game types (platformer, shooter, etc). This would be quite a lot like an advanced SEUCK, a lot of people look down on packages like that, but really I just want to load something up and get working on a game without needing to think too much. I'm used to having 20 game ideas a day, I think it would be nice to have a system that lets me make them quickly, in the safety of 1 single package. I'm not even using my main PC for it, I have DBClassic on my laptop, runs quite well, so I'm using that - mainly because I like to sprawl out and work in comfort now and again.

So I'd say I was getting lazy, but I need to put in a lot of work to be a lazy as I want to be .


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Jeku
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 17:58
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I think it's smart for game teams to license 3rd party engines in all situations as much as they can. I think some people are confusing laziness with idiotic... ness. Take a game like GTA4, and look at all the different engines they've licensed. It's rare to see a triple-A game on any platform that doesn't use any 3rd party engine.

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JoelJ
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 20:52
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Quote: "It's rare to see a triple-A game on any platform that doesn't use any 3rd party engine."

Yeah, no need to reinvent the wheel. It would probably even cost them more (hiring engineers, paying for their time, etc) to make an engine comparable to the engines they're using. So I would agree that that is the SMART thing to do, not the LAZY thing

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Michael P
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 21:05 Edited at: 30th Jun 2009 21:13
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I think there are an increasing number of bad professional programmers out there. Alot of software like iTunes and Steam are bloated, and games like battle field 2 are unnecassarily resource expensive, with poor networking, physics and graphics.

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n008
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 21:25
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Speaking of battlefield 2, I do get more instances of frame drops in that game than in Crysis on Very High settings. Multiplayer doesn't even work for me on battlefield 2... =/

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David R
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 21:37 Edited at: 30th Jun 2009 21:40
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Quote: "Alot of software like iTunes and Steam are bloated"


Additional resources and libraries required by a cross-platform application != Bloat. Platform neutrality / portability comes at a cost: and 'bloat' (albeit necessary bloat) is normally it

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Michael P
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 22:07 Edited at: 30th Jun 2009 22:08
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iTunes is not well designed and it is more resource intensive than it needs to be. I don't think this is just down to portability.

iTunes regularly becomes unresponsive, sometimes for several seconds e.g. when ejecting a device. The iTunes store is very slow, I load most websites faster, and the iTunes store isn't much more than a fancy website. Playing videos via iTunes uses alot of CPU time, yet the videos are not of particularly high quality, and the video file size is not that small.

Despite these things, there are much worse equivalents to iTunes. 4oD (channel 4 on demand) is probably the worst media download system I've used, it make iTunes look like heaven.

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David R
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 22:15
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Quote: "I don't think this is just down to portability."


Well - that and the fact that Apple have no actual incentive to improve it is probably part of it too (iTunes 'being better on mac' - which it actually is - is a good selling point. Inverse halo effect)

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lazerus
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 22:45
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mmm imagine if monster hunter freedom 2 unite has a glitch, thats something like 6 million copies...

Thier has never been a lazy programmer just an unmotivated one,
nowdays motivation is in the bucket load with increasing pressure for shorter deadlines to cut back on costs.

simply put a patch is a breather for coders and they can fix as many mistakes they need to.

As for patching PSP's you can do that with some games such as monster hunter. The new psp uses Digi DL's so itll be all good.


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Jeku
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Posted: 30th Jun 2009 23:41
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How is Steam bloated? Doesn't seem like there's needless features in there, and it doesn't appear to slow down any of the games.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 01:35
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Quote: " Playing videos via iTunes uses alot of CPU time, yet the videos are not of particularly high quality, and the video file size is not that small"


That's really all on QuickTime. iTunes wasn't bad when it was first released, but Apple has continued to add more and more crap into it that was outside of the initial design. I bet if they rewrote it they could drastically improve its performance.

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 01:47
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The same can be said about WinAMP, WMP to a degree. ZINF is probably one of the few simple, basic media players (unfortunately audio only) that does a lot without bloat.

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Michael P
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 11:25 Edited at: 1st Jul 2009 11:27
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Quote: "How is Steam bloated? Doesn't seem like there's needless features in there, and it doesn't appear to slow down any of the games."

The UI is fairly unresponsive, it is usually not instant response time. Steam takes around 4 minutes to load for me, and it is not just connecting, it is reading from my hard drive. Browsing games with their store is slow, much slower than if an internet browser were used. I assume there is bloat under the hood, due to its sluggishness.

Why doesn't steam use the standard windows skin? That seems like wasted resources to me, but far worse, is when anti virus start making themselves look pretty! Whos stupid idea was that? I don't want an anti virus that consumes resources to look nice, I want an anti virus that protects me!

Here are some more interesting things that make me angry:

MSN Messenger has little flash adverts at the bottom, some of these adverts consume large amounts of CPU time just by having the window open, minimizing does not help.

Channel 4 on demand and some equivalent software (e.g. Sky Anytime) use something called Kontiki which is a peer to peer system. Without telling users, this software is installed, and even when not using the initial service (4oD), your computer is used to stream content to other users; unknowingly user's bandwidth is being stolen. If I had lots of money I would take these companies to court. This confirms what I'm saying.

The problem isn't really with programmers, its with consumers. Software would always be perfectly optimized if consumers didn't buy inefficient software.

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djmaster
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 12:57
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Michael P: Looks like theres something wrong with your Steam then.Mine works fast and ive got tons of games on there.When I use Steam it takes 3% of my CPU,how is that supposed to be much?

I think the problem in unoptimized games is the release date.They put an release date and hope they will fix all bugs till then but they hurry so much they leave tons of bugs behind.

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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 16:20
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Quote: "Are today's programmers becoming lazy?"


Do we still use punch cards ? - There's your answer


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Ravey
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 16:25
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I don't punch cards, I often punch walls though when trying to fix an "undesired feature".

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Kevin Picone
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Ahh, makes one pine for the old days. Back when finding a new VicChip bug was easy, but finding a use for it was almost impossible.. ahh memories


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Roxas
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 16:44
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If they are anything like me then i guess they are. Mostly i just open Code::Blocks IDE and look at the code.. Then I'm thinking next I'm gonna implent <insert core part here> system and then think myself "Heck, thats a lots of code!" and close the IDE.

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 16:55
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@Roxas

My issue isn't laziness, it's tiredness. I wrote some code at 3 in the morning and I'm trying to track down a 4mb/sec memory leak.

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Roxas
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 16:59 Edited at: 1st Jul 2009 17:00
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Quote: "4mb/sec memory leak."

O_o thats pretty big memory leak. Should be something easy to detect. Just check the parts where you allocate lots of stuff. I have one memory leak in my code. But it is so small that its amazingly hard to find, i know it is in character creation code tho. My memory leaks had the same reason to be there. Coding late and at morning >.<

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 1st Jul 2009 17:32
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Yeah, I found it. My background loader thread wasn't marking media as loaded so it was loading it time and time again into the same slot...

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Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2009 08:49
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Quote: ""undesired feature""


Hahaha I like that.

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Skynet Games
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 02:15
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Quote: "Games are exponentially more difficult to program than they were before, and it is impossible to release a game that is 100% bug free. I can honestly say I'm glad that patching is a common thing nowadays, as it's better to fix the bugs after the fact than have a giant recall and force everyone to exchange their disc for a new one.

I remember NCAA Football 07 for the PSP had a large bug that was not found during development, and EA had to recall all the discs in an expensive move, because PSP games can't be patched. You can't really blame EA for that, because it was an honest mistake (I was working closely with that team at the time)."


Your wrong jeku, look at left 4 dead. That game was released nearly bug free, it was because people kept finding a way to find glitches implemented in to that users server, same goes for CSS, and DOD.

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Jeku
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 02:55
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Quote: "Your wrong jeku, look at left 4 dead. That game was released nearly bug free"


I don't understand, you're just confirming what I said. It is impossible to release a game nowadays that's 100% bug free.

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Skynet Games
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 03:45
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yea, your right. Some games ARE bug free though, i would like to see screen shots of a game that wasnt... Never mind, scratch that, there are games that dont have any bugs, Like mario for example, in those games, there wasn't and glitch of any type. Not bad if i do say so my self, considering its from the old NES consoles.

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n008
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 05:23
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Yeah, but mario is such a friggin resource hog!

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Jeku
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 09:13
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Quote: "Never mind, scratch that, there are games that dont have any bugs, Like mario for example, in those games, there wasn't and glitch of any type. Not bad if i do say so my self, considering its from the old NES consoles."


First of all, do a search for Mario glitches. Many of the Mario games have known glitches. And there are bugs that are not visible that you may never run into. Take it from me, there are bugs in EVERY single game released, even if they are never discovered. Producers will PURPOSELY not have a bug fixed if it's not a priority bug and if they're tight on time.

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Seppuku Arts
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 10:37
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Jeku is right, not all bugs are noticeable or negatively effect the game, that's why producers might not get them fixed. Left4Dead has bugs, it's a well polished game, but it still has them, when I first played it, my friend's lower spec laptop played the game a lot more smoothly than mine, once I got a large number of Zombies on screen my computer had difficulty handling it, his didn't. You might consider it poor optimization on my hardware configuration. I wasn't the only one with the problem either, it happened on certain Dual core processors. The plus side of curing Left4Dead's bugs was the public pre-release BETA demo.

For Mario, I thought Super Mario Bros was an incredibly buggy game, heck it's notorious for them.

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Airslide
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 11:27
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I must say, overall, games made with the Source engine have been pretty good to me. I can't actually remember any bugs that weren't Garry's Mod related Except for this weird texture problem in CSS, but that was only one server...


My opinion is pretty much the one regarding more pressure these days (won't repeat it, senseless). Of course, I must wonder, are programmers adequately paid to make patches? It could explain the somewhat slow patching process of many games - I heard that [theoretically, not 100% sure on this] games like CSS and DOD only have one or two guys looking after it in their spare time...granted, they aren't in need of critical fixing, and engine problems are directed to Valve's Source team, so it may be a special case.

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 13:53
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Is the original Pong bug-free?

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David R
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 14:26 Edited at: 5th Jul 2009 14:27
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Quote: "Is the original Pong bug-free?"


Considering Pong encompassed its own hardware, I'm guessing no. Where do you draw the line though? I mean, in Pong's case any physical hardware malfunction could be a 'bug'. It depends entirely on what your definition is

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Aertic
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 14:40
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Quote: " Except for this weird texture problem in CSS, but that was only one server..."

CSS being Counter strike correct?
And the weird texture being the Pink & Black squares...

Your bug may be caused by skins or custom skins on a server, it's not the games fault, it's either your's or the server's fault, as some servers use Source-Mod or Mani Mod of which allow custom models, and the idiots in charge of the FTP often incorrectly install custom event scripts and skins that don't work properly...
-_-

That weird texture bug happens in EVERY source game...

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Skynet Games
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 15:07
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true.. i guess.

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djmaster
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Posted: 5th Jul 2009 21:29
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Airslide: There is one bug in CSS,actually its quarter-bug.The infamous myth of "inaccurate hitboxes".Its no fully true,its true that it appears too slow in cl_hitbox 1 mode but are accurate and can be easily solved by changing the refresh rate of them to a higher value

So my bet on bugfree games goes on CSS.

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