QA. A Rant.

[Argh]

[RANT MODE: ON]

Look, I'm going to be very blunt. I got done looking at the latest portable, and I'm pretty upset.

QA for this engine needs to use a better process. Since you guys have abandoned Release Early, Release Often, the quality has actually fallen.

For example, here are 4 major issues with the current public build:

1. Shadowmaps. They're still broken on more than half the hardware that can run Spring.

Shadows are a basic feature on any engine worth giving the name to, these days, and yet the engine can't even do simple shadows from a single light source.

And shadows are such an important part of the visual experience of a game that lacking them makes the engine look downright quaint.

Yes, I know the issue's frustrating and annoying, and I know we've looked into it. We need to look again. I would be happy to root around source from other projects and discuss this- most things I've read indicate that the best solution is a scenegraph.

This has been a vague object of discussion, and the issue seemed to get nowhere on account of developer worries about a non-issue, that of synced behavior no longer matching up with unsynced animation quite as perfectly. What do I need to show people to convince them that this is not a problem at all? Go play any FPS, and if you pay close attention, you will see that characters don't match their action states perfectly. It's not a big deal; the discontinuities are too small to notice unless you're not actually playing.

2. Pathfinding. Pathfinding changes should probably be reverted to 9 months ago, when it was working about as well as it ever has. At that point, Units could use reverse movement, two turning styles, and everything worked pretty well. The only thing that was obviously awful was local steering code, and I think most players probably wish it was the only issue atm.

I don't have a better idea than to revert it; if somebody has a plan, this would be a good time to do that 'communication with game developers' stuff that you guys can't even put on your agendas any more.

3. There is something wrong with SSMF. Right now, in tests over here, SM3 is performing better, at least on this hardware, and turning off map rendering entirely results in huge performance gains. I'm not even going to guess what is wrong, but I'm fairly certain about causes now.

4. Sound. I would like the changes to sound reverted. It's ugly and it's also fairly CPU intensive. What we had before, with Auswaschbar's additions, was stable, useful, controllable and nice. What we have now is muddy sounds.




None of this should have never passed basic QA. All of these things are important issues that make the engine substantially worse. And there haven't been major features that can distract us from this- for the vast majority of players and game developers, hardly anything new has been done.

But apparently nobody is actually doing QA since I quit, largely because I got tired of listening to people whining at me for bringing things up that needed to be said. I've decided that since I'm going to Unity after this, though, that I'll just say what needs saying, and forget about worrying about whether you like what you hear.

There needs to be a QA process. It needs to involve testing with multiple games. It should be performed by somebody who will look at the engine like a player, instead of just checking stuff off on a list.

The fact that the "release manager" can't be bothered to do that job means that we probably need a new one, or that somebody else needs veto powers over official releases so that we don't have embarrassing results like this. It's very unsettling that the engine has degraded so badly, and yet the person we've put at the helm seems to be calmly oblivious.

If I wasn't planning on leaving as soon as I can, I'd probably ask the saner developers if they would like to fork this engine, with a focus on getting all this stuff fixed instead of blathering endlessly about MT changes which should not be done until the engine is where it was 9 months ago.

And if I were Licho, I would be doing it right now, instead of hoping that things get straightened out in time for his commercial project's debut.

There is no better way to convince me and others to jump ship than to have a release like 82.6 and then make bland statements that suggest it's all fine when anybody who played games on this engine a year ago would disagree.

The fact that this stuff isn't even on your agendas is very disturbing. It's all vital, it's stuff that's been known to be broken for months or even years.

Please get focused on the right problems, or we'll eventually get an MT Spring that is at least partially broken on > 60% of all hardware, performs poorly, plays poorly, and sounds like it's been dipped in a well of deep tar, largely because the people signing off apparently are too lazy to do the most rudimentary review. And then it will be "too hard to fix", and that will become the excuse forevermore, and the engine will become even less attractive than it is right now.

[/RANT]