I have never had that bug happen to me, ever. Now the vast majority of my posts are from my Android Phone. My problem some time is the opposite. I might start composing a Comment, then decide not to and delete all the text in the Edit Box. I go out of that Thread and later when I return to the Thread that text is there waiting for me again. It is in some sort of a save draft buffer.
That is not a bug. Everything you type in the text field while in the 'draft' phase is auto-saved. It looks like to me. to counter 'your' bug, you have to remove your text to empty the field, wait for the auto-save, leave the thread.
The edit button comes up when you hit the preview button. I type, check my text, make eventually some changes, check again, post. I seldom use preview, hence, the edit-bug has never happened to me.
There IS another bug, however, albeit a lot more benign in order, where your draft still gets inserted after you already made your post.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Troubleshooting is one of the most difficult things a craftsman can do. As, no doubt, you've discovered by having mechanical issues with your vehicle. The more complex the system, the exponentially more difficult it becomes to troubleshoot it. Sometimes a problem is not inside a piece of the unit, but in how the unit interacts with other units, and to make matters worse, sometimes the problem is intermittant so the troubleshooter has to see it happen before he can even begin to troubleshoot it.
So I don't mind that bugs exist for long periods of time. Sometimes they are annoying and I never like them, but I accept them because I know that humans never achieve perfection for very long.
Absolutely. I'm not competent to strip down the engine and transmission of a car, so not only would I not try and do it myself, I wouldn't try and get a job as a mechanic, or offer to fix people's cars for them. But. I can learn to fix engines and transmissions. I've heard the figure of 10'000 hours being the required studytime to become profficient in a subject. Many apprenticeships typically last five years.
To go back to your example of vehicles, my father in law bought a new Range Rover a little while back. And then proceeded to pack it full of gizmos and gadgets, and now, the battery can't hold a charge, and the suspension management system is fritzed. Had he simply taken it to a garage or even a dealer and asked them to fit his stuff, I bet that it would be working fine. But because he doesn't know exactly how the vehicle is wired in, he's messed stuff up. As as been mentioned, some of the devs are not entirely familiar with the legacy code of the game. So when they make modifications, like my father in law's tinkering, their actions have unanticipated effects in-game. Transparency issues, clipping issues, lighting issues, ships crawling out of a system at impulse, rather than at warp, etc etc. What val seems to be trying to insinuate, is that I think the devs are just unskilled codemonkeys. That's not so. I think that some are lacking in competence with this specific code, so accidents happen, which they then don't know how to fix. But as I pointed out to val, competence can be acquired. Skills can be learned.
I can see that the devs can do good work. I'd bet that if they were given a better understwnding of the legacy code, they would be able to do a better job than they are currently doing, and all those irritating bugs and glitches, would become a thing of the past. Reviews aren't about breaking someone's spirit, but identifying areas where they may need support,and encouraging them to improve and grow as an individual
I would agree with your analogy, if I was the one trying to fix the problems with the game. The issue is that the Devs are supposed to be the experts, the ones who know what they're doing, and it often seems they don't know how to fix things (that often LOOK simple), or can't do so without breaking OTHER things. Again, I'm reluctant to say anything about their competence, as I'm not knowledgeable about programming, and there's no telling what other factors may be contributing to the situation. I can only comment on what I'm seeing, and often it's not very impressive.
My analogy wasn't about a person's personal attempt or ability to fix an issue, but to illustrate that someone who thinks they know what they are doing, can wreak havoc, rather than someone who is the master of their craft, and knows what they're doing. As I pointed out above, incompetence isn't a pejorative, it's simply the descriptor for a lack of competence (in A Subject) and competence can be gained. People can be trained, people can self-teach, and those who are incompetent (in A Subject) can become competent (in A Subject).
So to say someone is incompetent, isn't the insult many currently believe it to be, especially when flaws in someone's work, show that lack. To acknowledge that there are issues which need fixing, only means acknowledging that someone, somewhere, didn't do something correctly (to the best of their ability, no doubt, but not necessarily to the standard required) and that things could be better.
As you quite rightly note, the devs are supposed to be the experts. As I noted, they do a maintenance every week, sometimes more, if something goes wrong with the initial update patch. But we don't necessarily get new content every week, and although the patch notes say what is being done, there are still many bugs and glitches which appear to be going unaddressed, and as you quite rightly say, these bugs and glitches really should be addressed.
For sure, there could be issues under the hood which we as non-coders can't understand, but, if devs were to at least release a weekly statement, even if it's just in the same format as the patch notes ambassadorkael posts, rather than a forum post where people can/would have a pop at them, they could simply say something along the lines of 'We know x is an issue, we are looking into it, it might take x days/weeks to fix... The bugs we will be looking at next, will be xyz', then players would at least be in the loop on what's happening, rather than feeling ignored and overlooked, and that reported bugs go un-acknowledged and unattended. A little PR on the dev's part, even if it's through ambassadorkael's patch notes, would go a long way, and I'd hazard a guess would go down much better than their current WallofSilence approach
As for why people would continue to play something they see such problems with... There IS a lot to enjoy in the game, and many of us see the enormous potential it STILL HAS, and continue to hold onto the hope they might start doing some of the things they need to do to begin to realize that potential.
The little problems I've pointed out are trivial compared to such things, as I've said before.
Absolutely, there really is a lot to enjoy in the game, and there's something for everyone, that's why it's such a great game. Wifey enjoys dilithium mining more than regular ground missions, and won't even touch space missions, but makes me fly them for her She doesn't touch the exchange at all (because any good Ferengi knows that fe-males don't have the lobes for business ) I enjoy the exchange enormously, as well as boff crafting (not sure if that will be the case if I can't restore the 'dry look', because last I saw, my toons had all been fubar by being rendered in the 'Wax Look'. Some of the additional detail in the fabric is nice, but what's been done to the skin and hair textures: Let's just say I preferred how they looked before)
As you say though, there's definitely potential to be striven for, and perhaps Lighting 3.0 will sort these appearance issues, and out control back into the hands of the players. If a toon has to look a certain way, with some minimal customizing options, such as how in GTA V, Trevor can't wear the same clothes Franklin can, then that's fair enough, limited options means limited options. But when the premise of the STO toons is that we can craft them the way we want them, the devs shouldn't then do stuff which changes the way that they look from what we had settled upon. The 'plastic wrap' look meimei described, sounds like an absolute nightmare, and makes me wonder if the person who implemented it, was simply someone who found a new filter, and decided to use it Because It's New, rather than Because It Looks Good. That kind of thing, simply shouldn't happen. Not when the premise of the game, is essentially Burger King's motto, of 'Star Trek - have it your way!' I had it my way, and I believe that the Wax Look presentation mode, doesn't look as good as the previous one. Improvements are improvements, but change for the sake of change, isn't necessarily an improvement
"I fight for the Users!" - Tron
"I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth
Yeah, I have cleared it completely and then saved that as draft but I assume it won't if there is nothing, hence Azreal's stating to leave a single letter and save. I had resorted a couple of times to changing the text to 'Duplicate Post' and posting that.
Thanks everyone.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
These specific bugs may be minor, that's true. But they are illustrative of the state this game is in. STO is a tapestry of bugs, graphical glitches, unfinished content and inconsistencies. You either learn to love it or you leave it. But given the rest of the Star Trek franchises are in a similar state of disarray, learning to love it is probably your best option.
In general, scale in the last few years has been much more in line with real human sizes than it was at the beginning of STO. That said, liberties have to be taken, and even our recent stuff is overscaled slightly, mostly due to the camera.
There is a misconception here though. The camera-scale connection is not that we have to make ROOM for the camera, but that our camera is generally 10-20' behind and above your character. In addition, our default FOV is 55. At that distance, ACTUAL human scale (for rooms) feels tiny and cramped. If we were a first person game, instead of a third person game, human scale would feel more correct. As it is, we have tried many times to make rooms to exact human scale, and every time, they feel tiny and cramped. Instead, what we've made in recent years that "feel" right (like the Voyager/TOS Interiors), are actually scaled up about 50%. That is still much closer to real scale than the really old Interiors from launch that people still talk about.
That extra 50% is where things feel right, even if they are not correct. This does cause issues. Namely, when we make props like tables and chairs, do we make those at human size? or +50% size? Generally we'll leave props at roughly normal human size, and then just pad the room a bit, but it varies, and we may not always get it right.
As for the footprints, someone else pointed out that these were reused from the Taurus map in Agents of Yesterday, where the footprints were of giant Taureans. We probably could/should have made a new asset for smaller feet, but again, as your camera is usually behind and above you human sized footprints would likely not be (as) noticeable. Gameplay often trumps Art when it comes to this kind of thing. Making sure the mission is playable (i.e. footprints are noticeable) is more important than making sure that they are realistic.
The console screen mis-match is a known (and fixed internally) issue, but I don't know when the fix will make it out to Holodeck.
Quite so. This is my point. Yes, all the game breaking things need attention, and probably more immediately. However, most of the things I'm pointing out are ongoing things that look unprofessional, and in any sort of entertainment medium, presentation is a BIG part of your business. More, many of these things are ongoing (ie. mistakes they keep making) or newer (ie. broken recently). In each case, they need to stop making thing in such a slipshod manner and fix the things they broke.
It looks shoddy and unprofessional, and really should be addressed. I'm not saying they're more important than the actual GAMEPLAY bugs, but they're still important overall.
^^^^^^^
All This.
I can't decide if it's apathy or incompetence on the part of the devs. Given that new bugs keep being created, I veer towards the latter. Yes, they can clearly do good work, but if all these bugs keep being caused, and they can't fix them, they clearly don't reallyknow what they're doing. It's like an apprentice who has skills, but still makes mistakes, and needs the Master to come and fix it for them, but who has branched out on their own, so there's no longer a Master around to fix the mistakes which they don't know how to. As mentioned, in an IP of Star Trek's stature, it's disappointing to see :-\
I think it was Taco who once asked us whether we would prefer a whole Season of nothing but bug-fixes. Thing just is, it doesn't work like that. Sure, you'd get all bugs fixed (assuming you can), but as soon as you start working on the game again, new bugs will appear (or old ones!).
It's actually true they don't really know what they're doing. LOL. No, seriously. Not too recently (with all the nerfs going on) Bort admitted to saying it's often extremely difficult to predict/anticipate the synergy of a manifold of buffs interacting. Which, I reckon, is why many things turn out to be OP, as some unanticipated cross-mojonation took place somewhere.
T'weren't me. If anything, I've been one to elaborate about how stopping everything to "fix all the bugs" is a fool's errand.
For all of the discussion of bugs, and apathetic devs, etc.: Tracking down and fixing bugs in a 7 year old, constantly running game, with another year and half of development prior to that, is not easy.
That file that I need to mess with, which I've never touched before, was last edited by someone who doesn't even work here anymore, and was touched by 3 other people before him, all of whom don't work here anymore, and was created by a 5th guy, who also doesn't work here anymore. That file, is tied into 1000 other files, and systems. Altering it may fix the issue at hand, but cause issues elsewhere.
We are not lazy. We are not incompetent. We are not apathetic.
We are human.
As an allegory, do you know about the Wolves of Yellowstone Park?
Fixing a bug can be like killing off the wolves. You see a problem (wolves eating livestock), and you fix that problem (kill the wolves). It is often nearly impossible to comprehend EVERY possible connection that your one change can have. Sometimes your change affects nothing else, and those are grand days. Sometimes, you kill wolves, which let the deer thrive, which eat all the vegetation, which drive away birds and beavers, which leads to erosion.
This is exactly what happened with the console screens. Our graphics team created a simplified way of creating scrolling textures. This was all behind the scenes and should have changed nothing visibly, but made things less costly. There are hundreds (maybe over 1000) materials that use some kind of texture scrolling and were affected by this change. The programmer responsible checked many of them, and when they all looked fine, he checked in his change. However, the console screens are mutated slightly, and do things a little differently. With his change checked in, the console screens now scroll incorrectly. He didn't know they existed. He checked many of the materials. He couldn't have possibly checked every material without taking days to do so. He's not incompetent, he's not apathetic, he's not lazy. He just had no way of knowing that someone, somewhere, years ago, had hooked up a number of materials in this oddball fashion.
In general, scale in the last few years has been much more in line with real human sizes than it was at the beginning of STO. That said, liberties have to be taken, and even our recent stuff is overscaled slightly, mostly due to the camera.
There is a misconception here though. The camera-scale connection is not that we have to make ROOM for the camera, but that our camera is generally 10-20' behind and above your character. In addition, our default FOV is 55. At that distance, ACTUAL human scale (for rooms) feels tiny and cramped. If we were a first person game, instead of a third person game, human scale would feel more correct. As it is, we have tried many times to make rooms to exact human scale, and every time, they feel tiny and cramped. Instead, what we've made in recent years that "feel" right (like the Voyager/TOS Interiors), are actually scaled up about 50%. That is still much closer to real scale than the really old Interiors from launch that people still talk about.
That extra 50% is where things feel right, even if they are not correct. This does cause issues. Namely, when we make props like tables and chairs, do we make those at human size? or +50% size? Generally we'll leave props at roughly normal human size, and then just pad the room a bit, but it varies, and we may not always get it right.
As for the footprints, someone else pointed out that these were reused from the Taurus map in Agents of Yesterday, where the footprints were of giant Taureans. We probably could/should have made a new asset for smaller feet, but again, as your camera is usually behind and above you human sized footprints would likely not be (as) noticeable. Gameplay often trumps Art when it comes to this kind of thing. Making sure the mission is playable (i.e. footprints are noticeable) is more important than making sure that they are realistic.
The console screen mis-match is a known (and fixed internally) issue, but I don't know when the fix will make it out to Holodeck.
Quite so. This is my point. Yes, all the game breaking things need attention, and probably more immediately. However, most of the things I'm pointing out are ongoing things that look unprofessional, and in any sort of entertainment medium, presentation is a BIG part of your business. More, many of these things are ongoing (ie. mistakes they keep making) or newer (ie. broken recently). In each case, they need to stop making thing in such a slipshod manner and fix the things they broke.
It looks shoddy and unprofessional, and really should be addressed. I'm not saying they're more important than the actual GAMEPLAY bugs, but they're still important overall.
^^^^^^^
All This.
I can't decide if it's apathy or incompetence on the part of the devs. Given that new bugs keep being created, I veer towards the latter. Yes, they can clearly do good work, but if all these bugs keep being caused, and they can't fix them, they clearly don't reallyknow what they're doing. It's like an apprentice who has skills, but still makes mistakes, and needs the Master to come and fix it for them, but who has branched out on their own, so there's no longer a Master around to fix the mistakes which they don't know how to. As mentioned, in an IP of Star Trek's stature, it's disappointing to see :-\
I think it was Taco who once asked us whether we would prefer a whole Season of nothing but bug-fixes. Thing just is, it doesn't work like that. Sure, you'd get all bugs fixed (assuming you can), but as soon as you start working on the game again, new bugs will appear (or old ones!).
It's actually true they don't really know what they're doing. LOL. No, seriously. Not too recently (with all the nerfs going on) Bort admitted to saying it's often extremely difficult to predict/anticipate the synergy of a manifold of buffs interacting. Which, I reckon, is why many things turn out to be OP, as some unanticipated cross-mojonation took place somewhere.
T'weren't me. If anything, I've been one to elaborate about how stopping everything to "fix all the bugs" is a fool's errand.
For all of the discussion of bugs, and apathetic devs, etc.: Tracking down and fixing bugs in a 7 year old, constantly running game, with another year and half of development prior to that, is not easy.
That file that I need to mess with, which I've never touched before, was last edited by someone who doesn't even work here anymore, and was touched by 3 other people before him, all of whom don't work here anymore, and was created by a 5th guy, who also doesn't work here anymore. That file, is tied into 1000 other files, and systems. Altering it may fix the issue at hand, but cause issues elsewhere.
We are not lazy. We are not incompetent. We are not apathetic.
We are human.
As an allegory, do you know about the Wolves of Yellowstone Park?
Fixing a bug can be like killing off the wolves. You see a problem (wolves eating livestock), and you fix that problem (kill the wolves). It is often nearly impossible to comprehend EVERY possible connection that your one change can have. Sometimes your change affects nothing else, and those are grand days. Sometimes, you kill wolves, which let the deer thrive, which eat all the vegetation, which drive away birds and beavers, which leads to erosion.
This is exactly what happened with the console screens. Our graphics team created a simplified way of creating scrolling textures. This was all behind the scenes and should have changed nothing visibly, but made things less costly. There are hundreds (maybe over 1000) materials that use some kind of texture scrolling and were affected by this change. The programmer responsible checked many of them, and when they all looked fine, he checked in his change. However, the console screens are mutated slightly, and do things a little differently. With his change checked in, the console screens now scroll incorrectly. He didn't know they existed. He checked many of the materials. He couldn't have possibly checked every material without taking days to do so. He's not incompetent, he's not apathetic, he's not lazy. He just had no way of knowing that someone, somewhere, years ago, had hooked up a number of materials in this oddball fashion.
Can't argue with that, thanks for taking the time to comment
"I fight for the Users!" - Tron
"I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth
Yeah GREAT explanation Gecko and thanks for taking the time to do this as well. I second the motion to place this thread on a sticky for posterity's sake.
@tacofangs Many thanks for dropping in and providing some feedback. I follow the forums almost religiously and Dev input is extremely rare.
That was not a complaint BTW, I would much rather y'all Devs spend your time working on the game instead of spending your time typing messages in the forums. Keep up the good work.
Taco should not have dignified the comments in this thread with a response -- not worth his time to drop to some of the lowest common denominators on the forums to justify his job (and the effort he puts into his job).
Why do you think should he not have replied, and why do you think it's not worth his time?
Last I heard, subscriptions and cash payments, were what paid for the game to keep running, and which pays his (and all the other devs) salaries. Who pays those subscriptions and makes these purchases? You do. I do. We, as a community, do. Someone was posting earlier, that they've just dropped $500 on the game to update themselves, and try and spent a fixed amount each month, like a subscription, to do their part toward keeping the lights on.
If we have issues with how the game is running due to glitches, it's reasonable to ask for an explanation as to why that is, and a decent company responds to customer enquiries and feedback. How many weeks was the MVAM console broken? How many patch updates occured in that time? How many times did a dev take the time to at least say they were working on it?
Like I said, if the weekly patch notes were to include a section on what bugs they're aware of, what bugs are being fixed, and the time scale involved for harder fixes, it would save people getting pissed off to the point where this kind of thread gets made. All it would take, is a little PR. The same amount of time it took tacofangs to write up that post, but it would be in a format that anyone who checks the patch notes would see
I appreciate tacofangs taking the time to post, because now we have it, quite literally from the horse's mouth, that they quite simply don't know what all the code does. Without using the I Word and #triggering anyone, tacofangs freely admited that collectively, they don't know exactly what they're doing with the code due to its complexities, and the people who did, are long gone from the company: So they're doing the best they can with what they can, and what they know. That's all anyone can ask of anyoneone doing a job: That they do their best
tacofangs says they're doing their best. I accept that and I appreciate it. But that doesn't make the questions raised any less valid
"I fight for the Users!" - Tron
"I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth
Comments
There IS another bug, however, albeit a lot more benign in order, where your draft still gets inserted after you already made your post.
Manage Drafts under Account Options (the gear to the right of the bookmark star)
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
So to say someone is incompetent, isn't the insult many currently believe it to be, especially when flaws in someone's work, show that lack. To acknowledge that there are issues which need fixing, only means acknowledging that someone, somewhere, didn't do something correctly (to the best of their ability, no doubt, but not necessarily to the standard required) and that things could be better.
As you quite rightly note, the devs are supposed to be the experts. As I noted, they do a maintenance every week, sometimes more, if something goes wrong with the initial update patch. But we don't necessarily get new content every week, and although the patch notes say what is being done, there are still many bugs and glitches which appear to be going unaddressed, and as you quite rightly say, these bugs and glitches really should be addressed.
For sure, there could be issues under the hood which we as non-coders can't understand, but, if devs were to at least release a weekly statement, even if it's just in the same format as the patch notes ambassadorkael posts, rather than a forum post where people can/would have a pop at them, they could simply say something along the lines of 'We know x is an issue, we are looking into it, it might take x days/weeks to fix... The bugs we will be looking at next, will be xyz', then players would at least be in the loop on what's happening, rather than feeling ignored and overlooked, and that reported bugs go un-acknowledged and unattended. A little PR on the dev's part, even if it's through ambassadorkael's patch notes, would go a long way, and I'd hazard a guess would go down much better than their current WallofSilence approach
Absolutely, there really is a lot to enjoy in the game, and there's something for everyone, that's why it's such a great game. Wifey enjoys dilithium mining more than regular ground missions, and won't even touch space missions, but makes me fly them for her
As you say though, there's definitely potential to be striven for, and perhaps Lighting 3.0 will sort these appearance issues, and out control back into the hands of the players. If a toon has to look a certain way, with some minimal customizing options, such as how in GTA V, Trevor can't wear the same clothes Franklin can, then that's fair enough, limited options means limited options. But when the premise of the STO toons is that we can craft them the way we want them, the devs shouldn't then do stuff which changes the way that they look from what we had settled upon. The 'plastic wrap' look meimei described, sounds like an absolute nightmare, and makes me wonder if the person who implemented it, was simply someone who found a new filter, and decided to use it Because It's New, rather than Because It Looks Good. That kind of thing, simply shouldn't happen. Not when the premise of the game, is essentially Burger King's motto, of 'Star Trek - have it your way!' I had it my way, and I believe that the Wax Look presentation mode, doesn't look as good as the previous one. Improvements are improvements, but change for the sake of change, isn't necessarily an improvement
"I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth
Thanks everyone.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
My character Tsin'xing
Qapla
"I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth
In general, scale in the last few years has been much more in line with real human sizes than it was at the beginning of STO. That said, liberties have to be taken, and even our recent stuff is overscaled slightly, mostly due to the camera.
There is a misconception here though. The camera-scale connection is not that we have to make ROOM for the camera, but that our camera is generally 10-20' behind and above your character. In addition, our default FOV is 55. At that distance, ACTUAL human scale (for rooms) feels tiny and cramped. If we were a first person game, instead of a third person game, human scale would feel more correct. As it is, we have tried many times to make rooms to exact human scale, and every time, they feel tiny and cramped. Instead, what we've made in recent years that "feel" right (like the Voyager/TOS Interiors), are actually scaled up about 50%. That is still much closer to real scale than the really old Interiors from launch that people still talk about.
That extra 50% is where things feel right, even if they are not correct. This does cause issues. Namely, when we make props like tables and chairs, do we make those at human size? or +50% size? Generally we'll leave props at roughly normal human size, and then just pad the room a bit, but it varies, and we may not always get it right.
As for the footprints, someone else pointed out that these were reused from the Taurus map in Agents of Yesterday, where the footprints were of giant Taureans. We probably could/should have made a new asset for smaller feet, but again, as your camera is usually behind and above you human sized footprints would likely not be (as) noticeable. Gameplay often trumps Art when it comes to this kind of thing. Making sure the mission is playable (i.e. footprints are noticeable) is more important than making sure that they are realistic.
The console screen mis-match is a known (and fixed internally) issue, but I don't know when the fix will make it out to Holodeck.
T'weren't me. If anything, I've been one to elaborate about how stopping everything to "fix all the bugs" is a fool's errand.
For all of the discussion of bugs, and apathetic devs, etc.: Tracking down and fixing bugs in a 7 year old, constantly running game, with another year and half of development prior to that, is not easy.
That file that I need to mess with, which I've never touched before, was last edited by someone who doesn't even work here anymore, and was touched by 3 other people before him, all of whom don't work here anymore, and was created by a 5th guy, who also doesn't work here anymore. That file, is tied into 1000 other files, and systems. Altering it may fix the issue at hand, but cause issues elsewhere.
We are not lazy. We are not incompetent. We are not apathetic.
We are human.
As an allegory, do you know about the Wolves of Yellowstone Park?
Fixing a bug can be like killing off the wolves. You see a problem (wolves eating livestock), and you fix that problem (kill the wolves). It is often nearly impossible to comprehend EVERY possible connection that your one change can have. Sometimes your change affects nothing else, and those are grand days. Sometimes, you kill wolves, which let the deer thrive, which eat all the vegetation, which drive away birds and beavers, which leads to erosion.
This is exactly what happened with the console screens. Our graphics team created a simplified way of creating scrolling textures. This was all behind the scenes and should have changed nothing visibly, but made things less costly. There are hundreds (maybe over 1000) materials that use some kind of texture scrolling and were affected by this change. The programmer responsible checked many of them, and when they all looked fine, he checked in his change. However, the console screens are mutated slightly, and do things a little differently. With his change checked in, the console screens now scroll incorrectly. He didn't know they existed. He checked many of the materials. He couldn't have possibly checked every material without taking days to do so. He's not incompetent, he's not apathetic, he's not lazy. He just had no way of knowing that someone, somewhere, years ago, had hooked up a number of materials in this oddball fashion.
"I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth
That was not a complaint BTW, I would much rather y'all Devs spend your time working on the game instead of spending your time typing messages in the forums. Keep up the good work.
Last I heard, subscriptions and cash payments, were what paid for the game to keep running, and which pays his (and all the other devs) salaries. Who pays those subscriptions and makes these purchases? You do. I do. We, as a community, do. Someone was posting earlier, that they've just dropped $500 on the game to update themselves, and try and spent a fixed amount each month, like a subscription, to do their part toward keeping the lights on.
If we have issues with how the game is running due to glitches, it's reasonable to ask for an explanation as to why that is, and a decent company responds to customer enquiries and feedback. How many weeks was the MVAM console broken? How many patch updates occured in that time? How many times did a dev take the time to at least say they were working on it?
Like I said, if the weekly patch notes were to include a section on what bugs they're aware of, what bugs are being fixed, and the time scale involved for harder fixes, it would save people getting pissed off to the point where this kind of thread gets made. All it would take, is a little PR. The same amount of time it took tacofangs to write up that post, but it would be in a format that anyone who checks the patch notes would see
I appreciate tacofangs taking the time to post, because now we have it, quite literally from the horse's mouth, that they quite simply don't know what all the code does. Without using the I Word and #triggering anyone, tacofangs freely admited that collectively, they don't know exactly what they're doing with the code due to its complexities, and the people who did, are long gone from the company: So they're doing the best they can with what they can, and what they know. That's all anyone can ask of anyoneone doing a job: That they do their best
tacofangs says they're doing their best. I accept that and I appreciate it. But that doesn't make the questions raised any less valid
"I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth