Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[jester]

Plenty of other mods did guns well, that was what really shit me about F&S.  I had hours of fun on blood and steel which has both guns and hand cannons, none of which where game breaking or a huge PIA like getting blown away by a single bandit in F&S

[Sordid]

As far as I can tell they were originally planning on having guns but decided it was a bad idea.

They were also planning to have zombies. If you don't believe me about the laziness, check your textures directory. The zombie texture is still there (at least in Warband). How fucking lazy do you have to be to not even bother removing assets that haven't been used in the game for what, three years? Four?

[Vibhor]

As far as I can tell they were originally planning on having guns but decided it was a bad idea.

They were also planning to have zombies. If you don't believe me about the laziness, check your textures directory. The zombie texture is still there (at least in Warband). How fucking lazy do you have to be to not even bother removing assets that haven't been used in the game for what, three years? Four?

Maybe it was rushed out? Or maybe they cut corners? Or maybe they wanted something for the modders to explore?

[dogstile]

I blame lazyness. Also, why the hell have they not added battle continuation or at least an option? I mean dammit, other lords don't get that bollocks

[Sordid]

Maybe it was rushed out? Or maybe they cut corners?

Those are just other names for laziness.

Or maybe they wanted something for the modders to explore?

They did remove other unneeded things, such as the old bastard sword and great lance models. So nope, that doesn't hold up either.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of laziness, one of Warband's touted features were graphical improvements, including normal mapping on characters and horses. Except even the original M&B had that capability, the only reason it wasn't used was because TW hadn't bothered to actually make the normal maps.

[Asehujiko]

What does it mean when in teatrc, some of my skills are marked red and reduced by 1/2? I now have a horse I can't get back on again if I ever dismount it.

I think that may possibly be related to your character type.

Nope, they were fine before. When I bought my current horse I could mount it, now I would no longer be able to use it if I de-equip, and dismounting in battles won't let me get back up either.

No "you got wounded, go do some merchanting" quests in my log either.

[Vibhor]

So you are blaming an indie company for just leaving a few items?
Seriously?
Maybe they wanted to test the zombie and firearm shit?
I have yet to see a zombie but without the firearm shit there would have not been mods like EatRC

Also, rushing out doesn't mean laziness. It means removing shit that doesn't work instead of getting it working but that doesn't necessarily means that they are bound to remove the files too.
Case in hand, Rockstar and their GTA:SA  PS2 release. In case you don't know what I am talking about then Google "Hot Coffee"

[Robsoie]

There's a very large completely empty zone north of the Vaegirs, another empty zone near the Kerghits that access is completely blocked by convenientely placed boulders, and near the Sarranids there's another huge empty zone too.

I wonder if that mean there were more additional factions planned originally for Warband out of the Sarranids.

[Sordid]

So you are blaming an indie company for just leaving a few items? Seriously? Maybe they wanted to test the zombie and firearm shit? I have yet to see a zombie but without the firearm shit there would have not been mods like EatRC.

That's a bit different, the firearms are fully functional and just disabled, the zombie textures are left in without being used anywhere at all. Also, I'm not "blaming" them for leaving the stuff in, it's not like it does any harm. But I don't see any other explanation for why they removed some unused stuff and left other equally unused stuff in other than lack of thoroughness.

Case in hand, Rockstar and their GTA:SA  PS2 release. In case you don't know what I am talking about then Google "Hot Coffee"

Oh please, that's nowhere close. That wasn't included in the game not because Rockstar were lazy, but because they came to their senses and realized that even in the context of the GTA series something like that would cause a media shitstorm. Which it indeed did once the modders got hold of it.

[Thexor]

So you are blaming an indie company for just leaving a few items? Seriously? Maybe they wanted to test the zombie and firearm shit? I have yet to see a zombie but without the firearm shit there would have not been mods like EatRC.

That's a bit different, the firearms are fully functional and just disabled, the zombie textures are left in without being used anywhere at all. Also, I'm not "blaming" them for leaving the stuff in, it's not like it does any harm. But I don't see any other explanation for why they removed some unused stuff and left other equally unused stuff in other than lack of thoroughness.

Last I checked, TF2 still has models and code for throwable grenades sitting in the code, a feature removed partway through the original alpha testing. Heck, Portal 2 was apparently released with a few scraps of Episode 3's code still floating around. Just before you whine about "lazy indie developers" and such.

Moreover: Assuming that said content isn't accessible from within the game, leaving it alone is less a matter of laziness and more a matter of practicality. In removing those textures, you have to worry about any code chunks that reference said textures; hunting through and removing those chunks might risk adding new defects to the rest of the code. "Don't fix what isn't broken", and in this case, spending time (and therefore money) to make a change that in no way impacts the user, while risking the integrity of your code, would have been silly.

[Sordid]

Yeah, so mainstream developers are also lazy. I don't see how that invalidates my point.

I also don't agree that it doesn't affect the user. If nothing else, it bloats the installation needlessly and depending on whether or not the texture is actually loaded (which I admit I haven't checked) also takes up processing power and therefore slows the game down for no reason. Trimming away superfluous stuff is part of the optimization process that every piece of software should go through, and the argument that it risks adding defects to the code doesn't really hold up. Anything that you do to the game during development risks adding defects. You just have to not be lazy and make sure you don't actually add any.

[Thexor]

Again with the "just don't be lazy" claim. Remember, every time you "stop being lazy", you're costing money. If there's no benefit sufficient to warrant the cost, there's no point.

Optimization is not a process of making your program as small and as fast as possible; it's a process of making your program small enough and fast enough. (Which pretty much defines engineering in general, by the way.) Removing unneeded textures has nothing to do with speed, and the change to file size is minimal - anyways, F&S is only 1.2GB, which means that further optimizations to size are pretty much unnecessary.

This still comes down to spending time and money on a change that will provide at best a few extra bytes to the end user, and at worst will have absolutely no impact on the majority of owners. If I were the lead engineer working on the project, I'd see absolutely no reason to bother hunting down and removing a handful of excess textures.

[Sordid]

Again with the "it's okay to be lazy" claim. It's not enough to look only at the apparent lack of benefits, you need to weigh the benefits against the costs. In this case, pressing the delete button once. I'd say that's a pretty good deal even if the benefit is minimal. And again, the designers did see a reason to bother hunting down and removing a handful of excess models and their textures, so clearly in their minds the benefits were worth the effort. It's just the fact that they stopped halfway that irks me.
Just so we're clear, it's not just because of a few excess textures that I think TW are lazy. That's just one of the symptoms. Every single aspect of the game is less polished than it could be, and some of these design flaws are fixed with a very simple edit of the game's files (eg. the much maligned lack of battle continuation in WB and WFAS)

[Grakelin]

I hope this 'laziness' you guys are citing isn't the same 'laziness' we ignore with Troika's Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, Planescape, and Bloodlines, all of which were also filled with unimplemented content, upon which countless massive and popular mods were built.

[Sordid]

Yep, the same. Just because good use was found for it by the community still doesn't make leaving it in any less lazy, IMO. If you can't finish the game fully then it is actually very nice of you to give the unfinished bits to the modders to implement, and if it was compiled into some kind of "modders resources" package, I'd have no problem.