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1 hour ago, MarkEzra said:

Let's see How should I use my time today?

1. Work on Scenarios, and QB Maps while beta testing multiple titles,

2. Read Forum threads written by players wondering 'what's going on, why the delays', OR 'don't you guys understand business or customer service'.

3. Take a Nap.

Gosh, I just can't make up my mind...Why not help me choose.

Why not do a bit of everything...;) (if you are allowed to comment on BFCs part)

We apprisiate the work you are doing and the QB-maps, scenarios and various testing...But...It's not like it's going to take forever to make some simple statements regarding the current state of the patch....

Surely you guys are discussing this  quite alot internally and more people then Steve are 'up to date' on the current state of things. 

With his promission...maybe others could be allowed to post information on this forum.

You don't have to read through the entire thread here for example...It can hardly be news for anyone connected to BFC that a number of people are kindely asking for some updated information regarding the state of this patch...

A simple statement like these...

"The patch is making very good progress...The latest version have been in testing now for a number of weeks and as of yet no problems have been reported...Some more testing are needed but if no new issius comes up we are pretty happy with the way the game engine works now. All things going well we are hoping for a release at the begining of maj...But no promosies !"

or

"Unfortunatelly we are still struggeling with a few issius with this new patch. An easy fix does not seem to be possible. We appologize for the delay but we are working as hard as we can to fix these issius. It's impossible right now to give a predicted release date because of these issius."

Something like this would not take any more time to post then the quote above....And would atleast give us a 'hint' to if this patch is pretty much ready or not...

I'm pretty sure that 99 percent of the people on these forums would not accuse you of neglecting your primary task if you 'sacrificed' an hour of your time every now and then to share some information....

Working on the game is GOOD ! :) But does it really have to be this 'black and white' (or how to best describe it...)

Work or not work...share information or not share information....

It seems a bit strange honestly...

 

 

 

 

 

 

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4 hours ago, Heirloom_Tomato said:

How about some scenario and beta testing work followed by 20 minutes of napping and then back to working on some more amazing QB maps? Please?

Because you asked so nicely... I just made a pot of coffee and will get back to the work I love.  Thus ending my latest foray into the forum muck.

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On February 24, 2018 at 4:46 AM, Warts 'n' all said:

Ithikial often says in his videos that he has a beer on hand whenever playing CM. Of course, being a 400 year old Puritan I disapprove of the use of both beer and Rizlas (or The Devil's Papers as we call them). And I have no use for such things. The Lord always guides me in battle. .... Exits stage right Limey tongue firmly in cheek   --------------->

I would like to head off a potentially catastrophicly erroneously characterization and stereotype of the misunderstood Puritans. They were not at all adverse to drinking beer (or ale as it was known then), except in excess. In fact, one of the reasons the Mayflower landed in my home State, the PDR of Massachusetts, was because they ran out of ale on their way to Virginia, and had to land to brew more. Of course, you would be put in the stocks if you had a ladder leaning against your house on Sunday. OT I know, but I couldn't stand that the Puritans could be so vilified. 🍻

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7 hours ago, RepsolCBR said:

With his promission...maybe others could be allowed to post information on this forum.

This is likely never gonna happen.  BF figures you guys should know their policy by now on why they don't bother to spend much time on updates on POTENTIAL timelines.  What's the point?  So now you know what MIGHT be another possible date.  You guys - no disrespect intended- need to get some other things to fill the void - MAKE SCENARIOS :D 

Yeah I beta test now, but I was in your position then (and sometimes still am) and I understood they'd update when it made sense to update.  That time is not now, at least right now. What? no way Steve I just said not now, give it at least another day, they can wait... oh crap is this mic on?

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1 hour ago, sburke said:

 You guys - no disrespect intended- need to get some other things to fill the void - MAKE SCENARIOS :D 

 

That is a very good suggestion B)

But i'm afraid that the lack of new scenarios might very well be a result of  - the lack of the patch -

Before spending to much time in the editor many designers are probably waitning to see how the new patch will impact  gameplay...To avoid having to re-pogram the AI and re-test the scenario if some significant changes are made to how things will work.

sure...some initial research can be made...the map maybe...but the AI ? and scenario testing ? Maybe not so much...

If we could get atleast some clues as to what the status of the pacth is...Maybe some scenarios would be released with the current game Engine if the wait for the patch is likely to be quite a while yet...But if the patch is released in...two weeks ? 

It might be better to 'pause' the scenario designing...:)

 

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3 hours ago, Vet 0369 said:

I would like to head off a potentially catastrophicly erroneously characterization and stereotype of the misunderstood Puritans. They were not at all adverse to drinking beer (or ale as it was known then), except in excess. In fact, one of the reasons the Mayflower landed in my home State, the PDR of Massachusetts, was because they ran out of ale on their way to Virginia, and had to land to brew more. Of course, you would be put in the stocks if you had a ladder leaning against your house on Sunday. OT I know, but I couldn't stand that the Puritans could be so vilified. 🍻

Don't worry. Elsewhere on this forum I have made reference to Elizabeth Cromwell's brew kettle.

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48 minutes ago, RepsolCBR said:

That is a very good suggestion B)

But i'm afraid that the lack of new scenarios might very well be a result of  - the lack of the patch -

Before spending to much time in the editor many designers are probably waitning to see how the new patch will impact  gameplay...To avoid having to re-pogram the AI and re-test the scenario if some significant changes are made to how things will work.

sure...some initial research can be made...the map maybe...but the AI ? and scenario testing ? Maybe not so much...

If we could get atleast some clues as to what the status of the pacth is...Maybe some scenarios would be released with the current game Engine if the wait for the patch is likely to be quite a while yet...But if the patch is released in...two weeks ? 

It might be better to 'pause' the scenario designing...:)

 

That is poor reasoning.  How specific does any designer get as to really really specific AI reaction and KNOWING that the only reason BF would be considering a patch is the behavior needs to be adjusted makes that a pretty strawman excuse.  Make your maps, pick your forces, lay out basic parameters.  All that can be done, no excuse.  Once more into the scenario creation breach my friends!!!!   Hell look at the scenarios created for CMSF 1 without all the benefits of the 4.0 engine...oh the shame...  :D 

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Actually, it is quite good reasoning. I basically abandoned/put on hold my work on Ithikial's latest project (geared towards Single player) because 'fire few rounds of 60mm and HE, slaughter battalion of rats swarming in the open' was neither challenging, fun, or rewarding as a scenario designer to see. Before you go 'but you can plan the AI now and wait on the patch...' I've been waiting on the patch for quite long enough already, when I have other ideas I want to put down (such as my H2H scenarios in Black Sea) and it makes playtesting impossible, and functionally moving ahead also.

I see no point in pumping out something that will be for all intents and purposes unplayable. Wasted effort. That's what the singleplayer and mapmaking experience is currently like in the series: un-play-able. 

Edited by Rinaldi
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From my favourite book on software development, and the only I think anybody needs to buy. I don't think everything below applies, but I will leave it here to invite some reflection.

https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/software-entropy

 

Software Entropy

While software development is immune from almost all physical laws, entropy hits us hard. Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of “disorder” in a system. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics guarantee that the entropy in the universe tends toward a maximum. When disorder increases in software, programmers call it “software rot.”

There are many factors that can contribute to software rot. The most important one seems to be the psychology, or culture, at work on a project. Even if you are a team of one, your project’s psychology can be a very delicate thing. Despite the best laid plans and the best people, a project can still experience ruin and decay during its lifetime. Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature’s tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well.

What makes the difference?

In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict .

A broken window.

One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

The “Broken Window Theory” has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.

Don’t Live with Broken Windows

Don’t leave “broken windows” (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to fix it properly, then board it up. Perhaps you can comment out the offending code, or display a “Not Implemented” message, or substitute dummy data instead. Take some action to prevent further damage and to show that you’re on top of the situation.

We’ve seen clean, functional systems deteriorate pretty quickly once windows start breaking. There are other factors that can contribute to software rot, and we’ll touch on some of them elsewhere, but neglect accelerates the rot faster than any other factor.

You may be thinking that no one has the time to go around cleaning up all the broken glass of a project. If you continue to think like that, then you’d better plan on getting a dumpster, or moving to another neighborhood. Don’t let entropy win.

Putting Out Fires

By contrast, there’s the story of an obscenely rich acquaintance of Andy’s. His house was immaculate, beautiful, loaded with priceless antiques, objets d’art, and so on. One day, a tapestry that was hanging a little too close to his living room fireplace caught on fire. The fire department rushed in to save the day—and his house. But before they dragged their big, dirty hoses into the house, they stopped—with the fire raging—to roll out a mat between the front door and the source of the fire.

They didn’t want to mess up the carpet.

A pretty extreme case, to be sure, but that’s the way it must be with software. One broken window—a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project—is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it’s all too easy to slip into the mindset of “All the rest of this code is crap, I’ll just follow suit.” It doesn’t matter if the project has been fine up to this point. In the original experiment leading to the “Broken Window Theory,” an abandoned car sat for a week untouched. But once a single window was broken, the car was stripped and turned upside down within hours.

By the same token, if you find yourself on a team and a project where the code is pristinely beautiful—cleanly written, well designed, and elegant—you will likely take extra special care not to mess it up, just like the firefighters. Even if there’s a fire raging (deadline, release date, trade show demo, etc.), you don’t want to be the first one to make a mess.

Challenges

  • Help strengthen your team by surveying your computing “neighborhood.” Choose two or three “broken windows” and discuss with your colleagues what the problems are and what could be done to fix them.
  • Can you tell when a window first gets broken? What is your reaction? If it was the result of someone else’s decision, or a management edict, what can you do about it?

 

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5 hours ago, Rinaldi said:

I've been waiting on the patch for quite long enough already, when I have other ideas I want to put down (such as my H2H scenarios in Black Sea) and it makes playtesting impossible, and functionally moving ahead also.

Rubbish.....There are plenty of workarounds to fix the issue and allow testing to proceed. 

If the balance of a scenario is affected by a later patch, an able scenario designer should have no difficulty whatsoever rebalancing it.....It would not be the first time it's happened after all.

5 hours ago, Rinaldi said:

I see no point in pumping out something that will be for all intents and purposes unplayable. Wasted effort. That's what the singleplayer and mapmaking experience is currently like in the series: un-play-able. 

How in god's name would v4's issues affect map making? 

 

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Apparently you are too busy being your contrarian self ("opinions that are not my own are rubbish, but do not take me to task for my rubbish opinions") to truly grasp the point being made:

AI is objectively broken, making even the most fine-tuned AI plan impossible to evaluate in testing. This is a direct result of AI cutting and running after the lightest of indirect fires; a botched, if well-meaning, implementation of additional self-preservation features. This guts singleplayer play, and trivializes it. Which brings me back to the salient point of: why bother wasting my time attempting to code AI plans in that environment? Which is a key part of single-player scenario design.

Note I didn't say I've stopped designing maps or indeed even scenarios for head to head; which if you spent more time walking around with your eyes open you'd have noticed: a map has been published and a second scenario based on another's map is currently being playtested. I don't make maps for the piss of it, I create them for a scenario, and the current singleplayer projects I was helping create are impossible to evaluate with 4.0 in its current form. Was the AI plan trash, or did the human tester fire some off-map 105 and make an entire platoon cartwheel into a MG? Do I need to draw a picture for you?

38 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

If the balance of a scenario is affected by a later patch, an able scenario designer should have no difficulty whatsoever rebalancing it.....It would not be the first time it's happened after all.

Yawn. Not when the issue is fundamentally beyond the scope of a scenario designer.

Next time you have a go at me, or decide to call something I say rubbish, make sure all your synapses are firing, your contrarian drivel is truly starting to bore me now. 

Edited by Rinaldi
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33 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

So all the other people who are scenario designing, map making, playing and testing the game right now are wrong and you are right?  :lol:

I'm beginning to wonder if you are a loony TBH?  :mellow:

Yeah he's right.  As stated numerous times by numerous people, the infantry bug simplifies winning as the attacker into "fire arty barrage on defending enemy units."  It's not hard to see the problems with this.  

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Tell me Squarehead, do you enjoy being wrong when you try to taunt others?

The last map published for Black Sea with an AI plan: just coming up to the 7 month mark.  The one before that, mid-summer 2017. That's just for BS: let's look at the latest uploads of finished, published scenarios:

  • An empty QB map; 
  • A H2H for CMBN;
  • A H2H for CMFB;
  • 4 maps for CMSF, which do not suffer from the AI problems

I'm noticing a stunning lack of singleplayer scenarios being published here. You sure showed me. Once again: if you're going to have a go at me, bring your A game, not this drek. I'd say that the sheer effort involved in publishing maps is among one of the reasons, but the futility of playing singleplayer is almost certainly a factor as well. As to those who are trucking on: my hats off to them, I do not share their patience for the broken state of SP play - and I'd wager they are in the minority.

Finally, how many maps have you published for the 4.0 version games, again? 

PS: the irony of being called a loon by a conspiracy peddling contrarian is, by the way, not lost on me. Trot on.

Untitled.png

Edited by Rinaldi
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45 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

So all the other people who are scenario designing, map making, playing and testing the game right now are wrong and you are right?  :lol:

 

Hopefully the guys scenario designing and testing the official stuff right now are doing so with a WIP version of the patch that have solved...or atleast almost solved the reported problems...

Other then the official stuff being made there are not all that many people right now posting about stuff they are working on...A few guys...sure :)

But not all that many as far as i know atleast...

 

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For those who want a summary of the conflict in this thread that has turned so hostile, so quick:

Sing, forum poster, of the rage of @Rinaldi. Black and murderous it cost the Battlefront devs incalculable pain, it pitched many countless forum posters and fanboys into the dark depths of Hell (otherwise known as graviteam tactics). 

Begin with the clash between squarehead-the most dedicated of forum frequenters and The mad Canuck-Rinaldi. 

Which issue set these two at each other’s throats this time? The 4.0 patch, the son of the immortal Steve. 

Edited by sid_burn
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3 hours ago, Rinaldi said:

I'm noticing a stunning lack of singleplayer scenarios being published here. 

Most people don´t care anymore. And frankly almost 18 months for a patch...pfff. Shows that the developer doesn´t care either for one reason or the other. Don´t get me wrong it´s their business, they can do whatever they want. But the average customer expectation is to get stuff fixed within a reasonable amount of time and to communicate with the customer. Since neither is taking place here everyone has to draw his own conclusions.

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33 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

 

Most people don´t care anymore. And frankly almost 18 months for a patch...pfff. Shows that the developer doesn´t care either for one reason or the other. Don´t get me wrong it´s their business, they can do whatever they want. But the average customer expectation is to get stuff fixed within a reasonable amount of time and to communicate with the customer. Since neither is taking place here everyone has to draw his own conclusions.

Yeah, battlefront said soon and the problem is probably fixed yet it's almost the end of April and no more communication on the issue.

 
Quote

 

Oh yes!  The Engine 4 patch.  That should be out fairly soon.  Testers have indicated the running away problem is probably fixed so we're just making sure of it.  I'd like to have the patch out much sooner than later.

Steve

 

:rolleyes: 

 

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man you guys are just way over reacting.  and Sgt Squarehead, flinging personal insults is gonna get you a time out.  You know Steve has a low tolerance for that.

As to the rest, think about it just a minute before continuing to get wound up.  The 4.0 patch isn't just an item for one title.  There are now CMBN, CMFI, CMFB, CMRT, CMBS and CMSF2 to worry about.  Also the infantry reaction to artillery etc may not be all BF wants to address and you all already know they are working on multiple titles so c'mon it really isn't all that outrageous for an essentially 2 man team.  Yes we'd all like things to move faster, but they aren't so chill out.

Or you can do what I did today.  I'm tearing up my driveway so I took a couple slabs of the concrete, spray painted 4.0 on them and hit em with a sledge hammer.  I feel SOOOO mush better. :D 

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