EVE General Discussion

The difference between code and a valve is that a valve goes up and down, and code does EVERYTHING. Relating a program to a car engine isn't the best relation, as code does a lot more than just 4 strokes.

CCP does have QA, but the thing is, that unless you've a QA department the size of your playerbase, you're not going to catch everything.

tldr: if cars were like computers, pressing the wrong button, would fill your fuel tank with live raccoons.

Not really? Being a programmer, you need to assess risk and priorities. If there's a massive game breaking issue with the game, it'll get fixed really quickly, otherwise? It'll probably fall behind on a backburner till someone yells loud enough and it gets bumped up. Programmers are expensive people, so it's best to keep them producing new content / money making features, than fixing an issue that affects <5% of the playerbase

Imagine you would have to write a book with 50000 pages and you are not allowed to have any spelling and grammar errors or any contradictions. Could you?



They do the same. Sadly their "car" got quite a few engines, not one of them the same then another and many of them run on different physical principles. If you do engineering you try to keep the moving parts down for a reason. EVE is an machine with 100000 moving parts. Not one the same then the other.

If you build a physical engine you stop at some point to add complexity simply because you could not move it anymore at some point. The most complicated machines we build are aircraft carriers and they only work because they are made from many independent subsystems that can be tested separately.

With software you don't have that weight limit, nor any limit to complexity. And in many cases you don't have a clean separation between subsystems (or they would not work together).

You can't really compare physical engines because any engine with the complexity of a big software system would work equally well and nobody in his right mind would spend any money for that.

Your car's engine is made of a certain amount of pieces. Dunno how many, but likely are in the thousands, right?.

Software is built of pieces of text called "lines". Those lines interact with each other much as mechanical parts do (just some interactions are pretty complex).

On a unofficial guesstimate, EVE's code has got about 10 million lines. And I guess that if you had to tinker with an engine made of 10 million pieces, some of them would slip out of place each now and then... specially when adding a few hundred thousand parts more to the old beast without as much as, huh, stop it and see what parts were doing what when somebody else built it 10 years ago...

And, the internet is a bunch of tubes...your browser is like a pick-up truck...

The guy didn't ask for a laundry list of how they're managing to do it WRONG. He's asking why they don't do it RIGHT.

They are creating something, you are maintaining something. IN eve we create. Think of it this way. Riceburner comes in the shop with no head on the block. They look at you and say design, cast, machine asseble the missing part without having any pictures or an idea what is to fit on top of it. Somehow you manage to invent the wheel, shim and bucket, overhead valves, associated ignition and injection and exhaust parts and you strap it on top with rice glue and hit the power button.

Whats the chances that you don't have to take it apart to get it to work rright.

Whats the chances you could even design and build a valve without a drawing that drops right in and runs?

Your Valve works in a Dodge. Put it in a Datsun it might not do so well.

That's how code works. Thank MicroSoft and legislation from 20 years ago for that. I'm actually surprised code works at all considering how many parts manufacturers there are out there. Graphics cards alone, on several different versions of Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

They can't know, let alone test on every possible hardware/ Software configuration out there.

EvE is also quite old.
an Oldsmobile converted into a Ferrari
The Ferrari is almost complete (old code replaced whit new one
but some parts of that Oldsmobile can still show up as a ghost in the machine.

Imagine designing a car - not a modern one with engine management stuff, a proper mechanical car.

Now imagine your customer can (and does) install their own carb and turbo/supercharger. They then change the brakes.

The car subsequently crashes and kills the driver. Investigation shows its because the engine is developing too much BHP, the torque overstresses the chassis, the suspension collapses on high speed corners and the brakes can't stop the car.

Is that your fault? You did the design for the car after all and surely it should work whatever? Clearly nonsense isn't it?

All sorts of idiots build computers just like that.

Then they sell them to idiots who install all sorts of crap which affects the operation of the machine (think of this as putting a wardrobe on top of a Porsche 911 and complaining when you crash on a bend at top speed).

No software which is even a tiny bit complex is bug-free, just the same as no car or engine is perfectly machined. If it works as intended 99.99% of the time then its "good enough"

Probably a crap analogy but there we go.

Edit - personally I haven't seen a bug which prevents me patching/playing Eve since I returned in 2008. Plenty bugs in gameplay but that's to be expected given the original dev documentation ;)

The programming behind a modern computer game is considerably more complex and, perhaps more importantly, more difficult to test than any car engine. Really, that's all there is to it.

/thread.