I just started getting back into gaming and I'm seeing shit like this all the time. It's amazing that stuff like this is so common while the Quake fast inverse square root algo is so well known.

How is it that these companies spend millions of dollars to develop games and yet modders are making patches in a few hours fixing bugs that never get merged. Not some indie game, but AAA rated games!

I think you're right, it's on both management and the programmers. Management only knows how to rush but not what to rush. The programmers fall for the trap (afraid to push back) and never pull up a profiler. Maybe over worked and over stressed but those problems never get solved if no one speaks up and everyone is quiet and buys into the rush for rushing's sake mentality.

It's amazing how many problems could be avoided by pulling up a profiler or analysis tool (like Valgrind).

It's amazing how many millions of dollars are lost because no one ever used a profiler or analysis tool.

I'll never understand how their love for money makes them waste so much of it.

▲ bigstrat2003 4 days ago | parent [-]

AAA games are, largely, quite bad in quality these days. Unfortunately, the desire to make a quality product (from the people who actually make the games) is overruled by the desire to maximize profit (from the people who pay their salaries). Indie games are still great, but I barely even bother to glance at AAA stuff any more.

▲ godelski 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

  > by the desire to

An appropriate choice of words.

I'm just wondering if/when anyone will realize that often desire gets in the way of achieving. ̶T̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶n̶n̶y̶ ̶w̶i̶s̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶l̶i̶s̶h̶.̶ Chasing pennies with dollars

▲ pjmlp 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That has been like that since there have been publishers in the games industry.

Back then, the indies stuff was only if you happened to live nearby someone you knew doing bedroom coding, distributing tapes on school, or they got lucky land their game on one of those shareware tapes collection.

Trying to actually get a publisher deal was really painful, and if you did, they really wanted their money back in sales.

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versteegen 3 days ago | parent [-]

Shareware tapes collection? Was there really such a thing? If so I would imagine it would be one or two demos per tape?

	▲	pjmlp 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes there was such a thing, for those of us that leaved throught the 1980's. There are tons of games that you can fit into 60m, 90m, or 180m tapes, when 48 KB/128 KB is all you got. More like 20 or something. Magazines like Your Sinclair and Crash would have such cassete tapes, https://archive.org/details/YourSinclair37Jan89/YourSinclair... https://www.crashonline.org.uk/ They would be glued into the magazine with adhesive tape, and later on to avoid them being stolen, the whole magazine plus tape would be in a plastic.