Will "For Science" (Hopefully and Finally) Include Flight Controller Support?

[Meecrob]

7 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

But unlike the women and the babies, at least you can expect them to not slow progress down like training new hires invariably does.

Maybe I don't get this, but, what? Who are the women and babies? And what does that have to do with game development? Dude, I get its harder to train new employees than to just do it yourself...but you therefore screwed yourself by not planning properly. I don't get why all the people who are programmers on this board argue this. They claim I don't get game development. I claim they don't get project management. They think its tomaytos vs tomahtos, but its much deeper. Seriously, just plan it out properly and you won't have to make excuses...

[Bej Kerman]

2 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

Maybe I don't get this, but, what? Who are the women and babies?

The analogy becomes quite obvious with the context, which is not included in the part you quoted. The analogy is explaining that 100 developers aren't faster than 10 and also that training a new team would be a colossal timesink.

[Meecrob]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

The analogy becomes quite obvious with the context, which is not included in the part you quoted. The analogy is explaining that 100 developers aren't faster than 10 and also that training a new team would be a colossal timesink.

Yeah, I explained I got that part...So what is up with the women and babies?

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Meecrob said:

Yeah, I explained I got that part...So what is up with the women and babies?

100 pregnant people don't make another person in 0.09 months.

[Periple]

11 minutes ago, Buzz313th said:

Aren't there "Ringers" in the software code business that have a reputation of being able to get things done?  Wouldn't an ace engineering lead straighten this mess out?  Or, if hired months ago, been able to make a bigger difference now?

It's pretty clear that, um, "mistakes were made." The way I see it, 2023 has mostly been all about fixing the mistakes and cleaning up the mess that resulted from them. 

There are super-productive, super-competent coders, for sure; the productivity difference between a marginally competent and a top coder is on the order of 100. The trouble is that super-productive coders are (1) expensive, (2) hard to find, and (3) often highly specialised. It will not be easy to find one when you need one, and it'll be even harder to get one to work for a small outfit like IG when they have their pick of AAA publishers offering them VERY BIG salaries! 

[Meecrob]

@Bej Kerman

I'm trying to have a serious conversation here. Simpsons are funny, yes, I like that show too. Can you speak to the point? You assume I am not coherent enough to get that you are saying that it is faster to have 10 competent people do something as opposed to 100 incompetent people. I get your point...its not difficult to grasp. Can you get to where we can discuss this like adults?

Edited December 7, 2023 by Meecrob

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, Meecrob said:

@Bej Kerman

Oh my god, I'm trying to have a serious conversation here. Simpsons are funny, yes, I like that show too. Can you speak to the point?

I'm trying for a serious convo as well. 100 people don't make a baby in 0.09 months. 100 programmers don't work 100x faster than 1. I don't know what part you're not understanding.

[Bej Kerman]

4 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

You assume I am not coherent enough to get that you are saying that it is faster to have 10 competent people do something as opposed to 100 incompetent people

I'm literally saying the opposite. What's being assumed here?

[Superfluous J]

18 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

Maybe I don't get this, but, what? Who are the women and babies? And what does that have to do with game development? Dude, I get its harder to train new employees than to just do it yourself...but you therefore screwed yourself by not planning properly. I don't get why all the people who are programmers on this board argue this. They claim I don't get game development. I claim they don't get project management. They think its tomaytos vs tomahtos, but its much deeper. Seriously, just plan it out properly and you won't have to make excuses...

I look forward to your game. You seem to have this all figured out.

[Buzz313th]

8 minutes ago, Periple said:

It's pretty clear that, um, "mistakes were made." The way I see it, 2023 has mostly been all about fixing the mistakes and cleaning up the mess that resulted from them. 

There are super-productive, super-competent coders, for sure; the productivity difference between a marginally competent and a top coder is on the order of 100. The trouble is that super-productive coders are (1) expensive, (2) hard to find, and (3) often highly specialised. It will not be easy to find one when you need one, and it'll be even harder to get one to work for a small outfit like IG when they have their pick of AAA publishers offering them VERY BIG salaries! 

Noted..  Thank you.

At what point in a development cycle would management be able to identify a problem or limited progress with the Code Team?    What steps would be taken to mitigate the problem and how long would it take for a change to bring momentum back up to an acceptable level? 

Edited December 7, 2023 by Buzz313th

[Meecrob]

Just now, Superfluous J said:

I look forward to your game. You seem to have this all figured out.

Where is yours? Glass house and all.

[Bej Kerman]

4 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

I explained I get that 100 idiots don't make up for 10 trained individuals...what

Okay, well "100 idiots" is a blatant oversimplification of the dev team and you're not gonna see results by throwing them out and replacing them with more developers than before, and whoever is saying that "100 idiots don't make up for 10 trained individuals" isn't me.

Edited December 7, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[Meecrob]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

Okay, well "100 idiots" is a blatant oversimplification of the dev team and you're not gonna see results by throwing them out and replacing them with more developers than before, and whoever is saying that "100 idiots don't make up for 10 trained individuals" isn't me.

Oh, come on, you know that is not what I was getting at. If you just want to twist my words, then I'm done replying to you. Have a good one.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Meecrob said:

Oh, come on, you know that is not what I was getting at. If you just want to twist my words, then I'm done replying to you. Have a good one.

...why use, and I quote if the marks don't make it evident, "100 idiots" to describe the dev team if that's "not what I was getting at".

[Bej Kerman]

4 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

I was saying for the third time that I understand you cannot throw people at a project and expect it to get done faster.

Oh, you do. The previous way you were wording it sounded like the complete opposite;

27 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

you are saying that it is faster to have 10 competent people do something as opposed to 100 incompetent people

This is probably the bit that confused me, cause I never said they'd be faster or slower.

[Buzz313th]

16 minutes ago, Buzz313th said:

The trouble is that super-productive coders are (1) expensive, (2) hard to find, and (3) often highly specialised. It will not be easy to find one when you need one, and it'll be even harder to get one to work for a small outfit like IG when they have their pick of AAA publishers offering them VERY BIG salaries! 

When would it have been obvious that it was time to look for an "ACE"?    Or was this recognized and instead, the decision was made to simply hire another "Socials" person  for "Marketing" as it's more "Cost Effective"?

[Meecrob]

4 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Oh, you do. The previous way you were wording it sounded like the complete opposite;

This is probably the bit that confused me, cause I never said they'd be faster or slower.

Wait, so you are saying you don't get your own point? I thought you were trying to school me on how 100 devs who don't know the project are worse than 10 devs that are totally into the project kinda thing. I get I keep changing my wording...I am trying to be more accurate. Still though, you have yet to make any sense...none of you arguments actually opposed what I was saying. If you were golfing, you would be hooking it bigtime.

Edited December 7, 2023 by Meecrob

[Bej Kerman]

9 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

Wait, so you are saying you don't get your own point?

I'm saying your working somewhat minced the point I was making.

9 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

I thought you were trying to school me on how 100 devs who don't know the project are worse than 10 devs that are totally into the project kinda thing.

It was slower, now it's worse. Speed and effectiveness are two different worlds from my understanding of programming and development.

Edited December 7, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[HebaruSan]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

it'll be even harder to get one to work for a small outfit like IG when they have their pick of AAA publishers offering them VERY BIG salaries! 

Some of them probably also prefer to start fresh new innovative projects rather than parachuting into other people's disasters to clean them up. Why put yourself in a position to get harassed for your work on social media if you could be widely adored like Shigeru Miyamoto instead?

[Periple]

1 hour ago, Buzz313th said:

At what point in a development cycle would management be able to identify a problem or limited progress with the Code Team?    What steps would be taken to mitigate the problem and how long would it take for a change to bring momentum back up to an acceptable level? 

That's actually a really tough question and it's not easy to give an answer that's either misleading or really, really long, or "it depends!" But I'll try.

Normally, a game development plan will have milestones: things like "first playable," "vertical slice," "alpha," "beta," and so on. These will usually be further defined in terms of characteristics. For something like KSP, a "first playable" would have a minimally functional construction UI and minimally functional flight physics: you'd be able to build a rocket, launch it, and fly it. But Kerbin might just be a featureless, atmosphere-less sphere, there might be no map view, and the rocket might just implement the rocket equation. A vertical slice would have Kerbin with terrain and atmosphere, a VAB with a functional construction UI, a launch pad, a map view with orbit lines and maneuver plans, a minimal set of parts from each category, and so on. An alpha would have that plus the Kerbolar system and roughly KSP1-equivalent part sets. And so on.

Management would become aware that there's a problem when a milestone is missed, or when the milestone is missing functionality that it was supposed to have. Most of the time they don't specify performance targets for milestones because games are usually optimized pretty late in the process. 

So it can happen that the game is hitting all the milestones while at the same time accumulating technical debt, and it only becomes apparent just how bad the situation is when it's time to release. Optimization isn't going anywhere, fixing one bug creates two more, systems that work in isolation refuse to integrate, and so on and so forth.

An experienced production and management team will usually pick up on things not being quite right earlier, but it's really easy to fool yourself into thinking everything is fine even if it isn't. It could even be that there's just one key person who's very charismatic and convincing and is able to keep juggling knives until they all come down at once and there's a lot of blood on the floor!

[Buzz313th]

2 minutes ago, Periple said:

That's actually a really tough question and it's not easy to give an answer that's either misleading or really, really long, or "it depends!" But I'll try.

Normally, a game development plan will have milestones: things like "first playable," "vertical slice," "alpha," "beta," and so on. These will usually be further defined in terms of characteristics. For something like KSP, a "first playable" would have a minimally functional construction UI and minimally functional flight physics: you'd be able to build a rocket, launch it, and fly it. But Kerbin might just be a featureless, atmosphere-less sphere, there might be no map view, and the rocket might just implement the rocket equation. A vertical slice would have Kerbin with terrain and atmosphere, a VAB with a functional construction UI, a launch pad, a map view with orbit lines and maneuver plans, a minimal set of parts from each category, and so on. An alpha would have that plus the Kerbolar system and roughly KSP1-equivalent part sets. And so on.

Management would become aware that there's a problem when a milestone is missed, or when the milestone is missing functionality that it was supposed to have. Most of the time they don't specify performance targets for milestones because games are usually optimized pretty late in the process. 

So it can happen that the game is hitting all the milestones while at the same time accumulating technical debt, and it only becomes apparent just how bad the situation is when it's time to release. Optimization isn't going anywhere, fixing one bug creates two more, systems that work in isolation refuse to integrate, and so on and so forth.

An experienced production and management team will usually pick up on things not being quite right earlier, but it's really easy to fool yourself into thinking everything is fine even if it isn't. It could even be that there's just one key person who's very charismatic and convincing and is able to keep juggling knives until they all come down at once and there's a lot of blood on the floor!

Thank you.

[Buzz313th]

4 minutes ago, Periple said:

just one key person who's very charismatic and convincing and is able to keep juggling knives until they all come down at once and there's a lot of blood on the floor!

Sounds like every production in the entertainment industry..

 

[Periple]

5 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

Some of them probably also prefer to start fresh new innovative projects rather than parachuting into other people's disasters to clean them up. Why put yourself in a position to get harassed for your work on social media if you could be widely adored like Shigeru Miyamoto instead?

Engineers are very rarely in the spotlight. They're all about interesting engineering challenges (and the pay). Fixing somebody else's mess in a small studio's first project for just average pay wouldn't be very attractive to them, if the other offers on their table are "come make UE5 work for this AAA project we're kicking off" or "come implement a millimeter to AU-level streaming system for our next-gen in-house game engine" or things like that.

[Periple]

2 minutes ago, Buzz313th said:

Sounds like every production in the entertainment industry..

Yeah. Charismatic people with big egos are not uncommon in this line of work.

[Buzz313th]

11 minutes ago, Periple said:

Engineers are very rarely in the spotlight. They're all about interesting engineering challenges (and the pay). Fixing somebody else's mess in a small studio's first project for just average pay wouldn't be very attractive to them, if the other offers on their table are "come make UE5 work for this AAA project we're kicking off" or "come implement a millimeter to AU-level streaming system for our next-gen in-house game engine" or things like that.

Or, somebody doing the right thing and saying the quiet part out loud like, “Hey folks, we have an incredible potential to continue the legacy of an amazing product, but it’s going to take some unpopular internal decisions.  I think it’s time to dig in and realistically execute a solution and at the same time be forthcoming with the people who are willing to support those decisions.”  
 

it’s a job risk, but it shows integrity and could be the right thing to do.