Anonymous Game Helpers 1

Message

Zahmatra(n) · #1 Post by **Zahmatra(n)** » Sun Sep 17, 2006 7:30 am

I have been following all the QFG2VGA project for quite a long time, and I always remained neutral about the very question of "When will the game be released."

Now, I understand that the game is being develop for free in their free time, and you have decided to do most of the debugging in-home.

However, I believe that a good idea would be that a new team could be created only with the purpose of help AGD1 and 2. The name: Anonymous Game Helpers.

I know, I know you would say, that is called beta testing.

Well, I believe that AGH could be created with people who HAS good programming and debugging skills and the idea would be that AGH could have access to the bugs database and the code itself. AGH could focus on:

1) Bugs who were not addressed by AGD yet.
2) Bugs who are hard to reproduce, helping together with AGD.
3) Bugs who are difficult for AGD to solve.

AGH should study the script for a month until they became extremely familiar with it. After that, they could little by little start helping by either finding the errors in the script or helping finding what situation is causing the bug. If possible, even AGH could fix code and present the solution to AGD for them to apply it.

I would think also that AGD would be a little concern about releasing their code to a third party, but AGH could make some kind of "agreement" (?) to no disclose the code to anybody.

To sum up, I have vast experience reading programming code, and I know that AGD has a long and tedius task ahead. The idea is to give a helping hand to them. The more people studying a problem, the faster a solution can be reached.

Just like "House" (please refer to the cranky doctor who solves medical mysteries), I usually find the solutions to big problems in the every day life.

What do you think? Should be possible?

#2 Post by **Anonymous Game Creator 2** » Sun Sep 17, 2006 8:09 am

The concept has merit, but at such a late stage in development it'd take more time to train extra people to understand all of the custom code we've written. It would be faster to continue fixing all the glitches ourselves.

The bugs remaining at the moment are not game-halting issues and, in fact, the game can be fully played without crashing to windows at all. The remaining bugs are things that are all pretty easy to rectify. It all comes down to the number of issues of and the time needed to fix them all, rather than the complexity of them. The alpha testing process will weed out further issues that the programmers aren't aware of. By giving the rest of the team a chance to play through the game as a normal player would (at their own leisure) and report bugs that the programmers otherwise wouldn't have discovered in their normal testing process.

While it's still too early to really give an accurate estimate on the release date, I'll say that we're probably closer to the finishing line now than most people think!

Zahmatra(n) · #3 Post by **Zahmatra(n)** » Tue Sep 19, 2006 7:29 pm

Well, the idea is not for you to train us.

But for us to train ourselves.

At least, in my case, I can say that I could learn and understand the entire script in one month without anybody explaining it.

Let me help. I am sure that I can give a hand.

#4 Post by **Erpy** » Tue Sep 19, 2006 9:32 pm

We appreciate the offer, but we're not sure if adding additional scripters at this point would be a good idea. There's definitely an advantage to having more people look at bugs, but at the same time, having multiple people plug away at the game also causes a slight loss in efficiency and with people new to the game source, there's definitely a bigger chance that they overlook things, causing new bugs in the place of the old. (it even happens to us every once in a while)

QFG2VGA has a global script (modules included) slightly over 35.000 lines and that's not counting all the room files, which usually have between 500 and 3500 lines of code. Reading though 120.000+ lines of code takes quite a lot of time, let alone mastering it to the point where you can quickly tell where the cause of a bug is likely situated.

Groveborn1234 · #5 Post by **Groveborn1234** » Wed Sep 20, 2006 9:12 am

yeah.

Klytos · #6 Post by **Klytos** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 12:11 am

From IA's experience, I would also point out that any programmer scripts things in their own unique way. The beautiful thing about AGS is that there is more than one road to Rome, so to speak. There's plenty of ways to get something done.

I see code at times and I'm like, I'd do that completely different. I think adding scripters into a project at a late stage would cause more bugs than it would fix.