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Back when game developers actually had to make sure their games worked without major bugs on the **first** release...
@freemo
But that is easy to explain. A game in those times were 40kb long... The number of branches and loops were manageable compared with monsters like No man's sky (11 gb or 11000000 kb) or cyber punk (10 times more)
@pthenq1 There’s also a lot more people working on them, so that’s really no excuse.
Back in the day you could talk about Ron Gilbert’s games, for instance, because they were made by Ron Gilbert and a bunch of others. (They even created their own engine.) Now it’s whole companies and the credits take twenty minutes to roll.
Well it is relevant because the number of branches and loops build a flow graph, and it grows exponentially.
The combination of 10 branches is not 10 times bigger than the combination of 1 branch, but 1000 times bigger....
How many branches and loops has a codebase of 100gb (Cyber punk in PS5) vs a codebase of 40kb (007 in a Spectrum)?
Adding 100 times more testers will not be enough...
@pthenq1 I agree that complexity has skyrocketed in videogames from the 90s onwards, but, again, I think that’s no excuse. We could send people to the Moon with much less than what CP2077 needs to run.
Think that all that complexity is divided into (supposedly) manageable parts. It’s not like every programmer has to oversee the whole thing. Yes, everything may have to potentially interact with everything else, but with a good methodology that builds everything from the ground up, where every step is taken with confidence following a previous one that is proven to work, you could count on bugs to be few and far between, as in RDR2 or Ghost of Tsushima, for example.
In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, I don’t even need to see the code to know that it was pure, unadulterated spaghetti. From the engine upwards, everything was clearly done with no methodology, no plan and no quality control whatsoever. Under those conditions, even a Spectrum game would have turned out, well, like ET.
@josemanuel
It happened something similar with no man's sky.
A graph (or something) growing exponentially cannot be treated with lineal methods in all its growing.
Except if a methodology applies some technique that grows exponentially, at some point it will not scale.
Example visual testing AI supervised grows exponentially. Human testing grows exponentially... While budget grows exponentially 👀
In the end, removing dummyness, inefficiencies, etc can go so long but if they operates (like classical testing with testers) in a lineal technique, the exponential flow map will win each time complexity increases.
It is a mathematical fact.
@freemo