Quote:Original post by The C modest god
Well, I believe these are mostly logical bugs. Bugs of bad design or bad OO.
If a character gets stuck, but basically the game works fine withuot any memory leaking or any crashing (there are also crashing bugs in oblivion), then its a bug purely of bad design.

No, it's a case of bad coding.

You know when it's bad design? When the programmer codes himself into a corner. Or when the application can't have some extra functionality because it's designed improperly.

Most of the time, you don't see bad design, you see the programmer errors. Even if an application is badly designed, it can still run great without errors.

Your view of when something is a design bug is flawed. Design has nothing to do with coding in fact. What you're facing, is probably a bug somewhere in a script. Not design, coding.

Quote:Original post by jfclavette

Quote:Original post by Talroth
personally, I would push for laws that would require companies to release products that meet some standard. how to set those standards? Not sure yet, but tools that break after only a few hours of common work, software that has a bug poping up commonly that actually affects how the program runs. Some NPC walking backwards or something wouldn't be a biggy, but a tax program that keeps resetting your income to -3mill or something would be considered illegal to sell.

I don't think industries should have to have laws to say how they work, but most usually do need them eventually.

This would stifle innovation so fast that you'd be back in the seventies. I consider an OS crash rather severe. Would that mean Windows is illegal ? If you do that, you can kiss goodbye any complex piece of software or see it released in 4 years at 8 times the price point.

Lets just not take it to extreme.
Crashing is one thing.
Ok game crashed, you lose what you did until the last time you saved.
but having a bug reoccur every time you load a saved game, thats a dissaster.
It is as if you have saved a bug in your save game.
However, if your save game contains a bug, why wouldnt the software allow users to send the save games to them and see what is wrong?
These I believe logical bugs. What I mean by that is that there is no problem with the implementation of some algorithem, but rather the algorithem itself is logicaly incorrect.

Quote:Original post by Toolmaker

Quote:Original post by The C modest god
Well, I believe these are mostly logical bugs. Bugs of bad design or bad OO.
If a character gets stuck, but basically the game works fine withuot any memory leaking or any crashing (there are also crashing bugs in oblivion), then its a bug purely of bad design.

No, it's a case of bad coding.

You know when it's bad design? When the programmer codes himself into a corner. Or when the application can't have some extra functionality because it's designed improperly.

Most of the time, you don't see bad design, you see the programmer errors. Even if an application is badly designed, it can still run great without errors.

Your view of when something is a design bug is flawed. Design has nothing to do with coding in fact. What you're facing, is probably a bug somewhere in a script. Not design, coding.

What do you mean by error?
A simple example is those games where a character runs and the character become trapped inside a wall because it has width and they didnt do the collision with the wall very good.
These are the kind of bugs that oblivion has.
They just didnt thought of their ideas and design enough.

I don't consider them bugs. I consider them nostalgia. Brings me back to the days of playing Fallout 2. Good times, buggy game. The Fallout 2 patch even invalidated saved games. Oh, those were the days. Say, doesn't Bethesda own the rights to Fallout now?

Quote:Original post by The C modest god

Quote:Original post by Toolmaker

Quote:Original post by The C modest god
Well, I believe these are mostly logical bugs. Bugs of bad design or bad OO.
If a character gets stuck, but basically the game works fine withuot any memory leaking or any crashing (there are also crashing bugs in oblivion), then its a bug purely of bad design.

No, it's a case of bad coding.

You know when it's bad design? When the programmer codes himself into a corner. Or when the application can't have some extra functionality because it's designed improperly.

Most of the time, you don't see bad design, you see the programmer errors. Even if an application is badly designed, it can still run great without errors.

Your view of when something is a design bug is flawed. Design has nothing to do with coding in fact. What you're facing, is probably a bug somewhere in a script. Not design, coding.

What do you mean by error?
A simple example is those games where a character runs and the character become trapped inside a wall because it has width and they didnt do the collision with the wall very good.
These are the kind of bugs that oblivion has.
They just didnt thought of their ideas and design enough.

How is a bug in the collission detection code a design flaw? It is not, it's a bug. What if the programmer made an accident and used a x < y instead of x > y? That's not design, it's a code bug.

It's the same with this. How much coding did you do? If you coded more than enough yourself, you'd realize this are the kind of bugs that happen when a programmer isn't paying attention, or just isn't thinking straight.

Toolmaker

Quote:Original post by Toolmaker

Quote:Original post by The C modest god

Quote:Original post by Toolmaker

Quote:Original post by The C modest god
Well, I believe these are mostly logical bugs. Bugs of bad design or bad OO.
If a character gets stuck, but basically the game works fine withuot any memory leaking or any crashing (there are also crashing bugs in oblivion), then its a bug purely of bad design.

No, it's a case of bad coding.

You know when it's bad design? When the programmer codes himself into a corner. Or when the application can't have some extra functionality because it's designed improperly.

Most of the time, you don't see bad design, you see the programmer errors. Even if an application is badly designed, it can still run great without errors.

Your view of when something is a design bug is flawed. Design has nothing to do with coding in fact. What you're facing, is probably a bug somewhere in a script. Not design, coding.

What do you mean by error?
A simple example is those games where a character runs and the character become trapped inside a wall because it has width and they didnt do the collision with the wall very good.
These are the kind of bugs that oblivion has.
They just didnt thought of their ideas and design enough.

How is a bug in the collission detection code a design flaw? It is not, it's a bug. What if the programmer made an accident and used a x < y instead of x > y? That's not design, it's a code bug.

It's the same with this. How much coding did you do? If you coded more than enough yourself, you'd realize this are the kind of bugs that happen when a programmer isn't paying attention, or just isn't thinking straight.

Toolmaker

The kind of bugs you describe, of putting a + instead of a - by mistake usually cause some noticable hazards. They are easier to discover, because you didnt implemented well what you ment to happen.
The example I gave is an algorithmic bug.
The programmer thought, I will move the character each frame by the time the last frame took. Then if the character in the new position intersects the wall, I will move it backwards to its last position.
However, the programmer didnt thought the character can get into the wall or past the wall if it moves fast enough. Thats a flaw in the algorithem itself.

This discussion is pointless. I'm working on a gameboy advance game for school. We worked out an algorithm to load the map into the memory, but I map a terrible mistake with the implementation of the algorythm. The design is still ok. Some just made a stupid mistake in some of the scripts, or committed some last minute changes to the script before shipping.

Yes, Oblivion has bugs since writing zero defect software is impossible. Go complain on their forums, or jump off a cliff.

Alternavitely, you could just wait a few weeks and install the patch they'll release by then.

Quote:Original post by The C modest god
[...]These I believe logical bugs. What I mean by that is that there is no problem with the implementation of some algorithem, but rather the algorithem itself is logicaly incorrect.

You likely have it backwards (as Toolmaker said) again: The problem is almost certainly in the implementation and the algorithm itself is probably fine. It's possible that the developers chose an algorithm without understanding the consequences of doing so, but it's unlikely you would directly notice such a mistake (it's far more likely to affect the design tools, the game's run speed, etc than something like falling through floors).

For example, in one of the algorithms I was working with recently I wasn't paying attention and I left off a single small constant in one spot. The program worked perfectly in most cases, but eventually I noticed a problem - somehow one test image was being offset by a single pixel under certain circumstances. The problem? I was truncating instead of rounding, which is exactly the kind of thing that can cause all manner of algorithms to fail in rare circumstances. Rounding errors and off by 1 mistakes are very easy to make and can be very difficult to find. Lucky for me, I only had one algorithm in a few-hundred line program and it was obvious where the problem was simply because there was only 1 place where coordinates were calculated. When you have (hundred-)thousand-line programs, mistakes can be very hard to reproduce and even more difficult to debug.
(1 pixel off might not sound like a big problem, but it would have been for this project since it's effectively destroying data)