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If they knew exactly what they were doing then it seems very unlikely that they would decide against doing it, because Peter Thoman's method only took about 2 w

If they knew exactly what they were doing then it seems very unlikely that they would decide against doing it, because Peter Thoman's method only took about 2 weeks of his own time. The method the developers were considering may have been an internal one that required some kind of refactoring, and they were either unaware of any other way to do it, or they were aware but didn't know how long it would take because they've never done it before. Not every game developer has an extensive understanding of how to manipulate DirectX, considering that you can put together a pretty decent game by just using a game engine and ignoring the underlying graphics altogether. I can see them failing to hire someone who has experience with the lower-level stuff on PC, when the game wasn't for PC to begin with...

pavel_lishin 13y ago
But Peter's method, as he himself said, isn't good enough for software that would be released by a company for people to use: > Thoman says the difference between his fixes and official patches are primarily an issue of quality assurance. “When I write and program something, I make sure I didn’t make any obvious errors, and then I just release it,” Thoman told WIRED. “If it works for 90 percent of people, I already consider that a success.” > From there, Thoman starts working for that other 10 percent, but he says that there’s probably one percent of people that he will never be able to help. If he were in charge of a commercial product rather than a fan-made patch, he’d have a responsibility to make sure whatever he released worked for everyone and didn’t break anything.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  What's wrong with having having a checkbox to "Enable experimental renderer" and let people tweak the settings there? Certainly that's better than restricting your entire customer base because some of them don't have the right setup.
  - pavel_lishin 13y ago
    From a product management perspective: it adds complexity, and it adds other things for people to complain about your product. People might complain that your car's top speed is 60mph, and that the acceleration is crap, and that is bad for your car and company's reputation. It would be much worse if there was a switch a driver could flip that would double the speed and acceleration, but would soimetimes eject the windshield, exhaust pipe, and door handles.
Luc 13y ago
Aw, come on, I'm sorry, but you simply don't know what you're talking about. Durante has some awesome skills and he sure as hell Gets Things Done, but this was much simpler for the original devs to do, and mostly a dreary slog of creating art assets, getting it to work reliably on all configs and running it through QA umpteen times. All that is very boring and just takes time and money.

pavel_lishin 13y ago

But Peter's method, as he himself said, isn't good enough for software that would be released by a company for people to use: > Thoman says the difference between his fixes and official patches are primarily an issue of quality assurance. “When I write and program something, I make sure I didn’t make any obvious errors, and then I just release it,” Thoman told WIRED. “If it works for 90 percent of people, I already consider that a success.” > From there, Thoman starts working for that other 10 percent, but he says that there’s probably one percent of people that he will never be able to help. If he were in charge of a commercial product rather than a fan-made patch, he’d have a responsibility to make sure whatever he released worked for everyone and didn’t break anything.

MichaelGG 13y ago
What's wrong with having having a checkbox to "Enable experimental renderer" and let people tweak the settings there? Certainly that's better than restricting your entire customer base because some of them don't have the right setup.
- pavel_lishin 13y ago
  From a product management perspective: it adds complexity, and it adds other things for people to complain about your product. People might complain that your car's top speed is 60mph, and that the acceleration is crap, and that is bad for your car and company's reputation. It would be much worse if there was a switch a driver could flip that would double the speed and acceleration, but would soimetimes eject the windshield, exhaust pipe, and door handles.

Luc 13y ago

Aw, come on, I'm sorry, but you simply don't know what you're talking about. Durante has some awesome skills and he sure as hell Gets Things Done, but this was much simpler for the original devs to do, and mostly a dreary slog of creating art assets, getting it to work reliably on all configs and running it through QA umpteen times. All that is very boring and just takes time and money.