Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Vendor and Stockroom Issues Pt 2
BignoseJoe wrote:
My opinion is you've got a Dev team that went through a long hard push to get the game live. Since its gone live they've had to work even harder to meet deadlines for adding content and new features. The attention required to bug fixes on top of everything else has made for too many tasks trying to be done too soon by the team. New code gets piled on top of old code and not enough time is available to give the attention required to ensure the new code is going to work properly with the old code.
Very much agreed, Joe. For what it's worth, I doubt the devs are really the ones to blame - it's probably either management or marketing breathing down their necks to get the thing out the door with a full feature matrix, bugs be damned.
I reiterate that if that's the case (they've been rushed all this time and the code's maintainability has suffered), the only solution to the problem is to take some time off from making functional changes (yes, including bugfixes), and do infrastructure work to make the code maintainable and well documented. Of course, marketing can't sell infrastructure work, and management may or may not have the foggiest notion of what "code cleanup" is, but it's a very necessary part of an ongoing development cycle, especially one that's just gone through an extended period of "burst run".
Malitevv wrote:
p4Samwise wrote:
Forget fixing professions. Take a month off to clean up all that code - and the parts you can't clean up, put copious comments in so the next person to come along and do maintenance won't have to guess at what he/she is breaking by making what look like innocuous changes. It'll be time well spent.
Why do you assume it is unclean and uncommented? What if all the introductory level programming practices you mention are already being used and the problem is simply a typo in a single conditional expression in a data base query?
That's all it would take to cause exactly what everyone is observing. I'm not saying it is the cause, but to assume the code is badly written and poorly documented because of an issue like this is just silly.
I sort of doubt the vendor bug responsible for item deletion inside player vendors is the result of a single typo somewhere in 1 line of the database. If that were the case, the likelihood of item deletion taking place would involve the disappearance of items outside of player vendors as well. If it happened to take place in a part of the database that views vendor held items, you wouldn't see such a common occurrence centered around item deletion taking place 14 days after items are placed from player inventories and being listed as a 30 day item sale. Its also possilbe that a single typo somewhere in the database code would not lead to item deletion at all, but rather cause the line of code to merely just fail to perform its task. Lets not split hairs over what a single typo somewhere in the database could or could not cause. The important issue on this vendor bug lies within the vendor code, initially and does result from placing new code on top of older code. As a whole, it obviously fails to perform its intended task.
After looking over a couple of my vendors today I noticed that items put back up for sale from the stockroom went onto a 7 day listing. These items will not be affected by the 14 day timer set to monitor when item deletion takes place inside the vendor.
The problem seems to be isolated to when an item is placed for sale and is listed as a 30 day sale item. The same 14 day timer that is put in place to monitor when item deletion is to occur now over rides the new 30 day timer that controls the length of time new items are meant to remain listed as for sale before the code intended for these items to move to the stockroom. This part of the code is unable to complete its intended task because the 14 day deletion timer kicks in first.
I think its safe to assume the two timers were designed to complement each other and its the shorter clock on the deletion timer that has caused the item loss in vendors.
Dear Customer,
WELCOME TO BETA TESTING...
where YOU pay US for thehonor of testing our product.
THANK YOU, $oE
Thank you for the message on the launchpad and the update! Good to hear items will be attempted to berestored!!
-Ki
p4Samwise wrote:
Eutock wrote:
The reference to "method inside an object" was a light suggestion to potential challenges in debugging objects.
It was a patently absurd one, which is why I had to mock you for it.
If a system is well designed and constructed, especially in the context of OOP, then yes, there will be very positive dividends when it comes time for maintenance and debugging. If there is a poor design, or inadequate QA, or continual "hacks" of the code just to meet deadlines, then all bets are off. The latter is what was assumed here, and the higher the complexity of the systems and data structures, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the code. In my experience I have seen several instances where it was easier to completely rewritesubsystems instead of modifying existing code, just to fix minor problems.
My opinion, in watching how bugs have been discovered, reported, and corrected, is that they still need more robust QA. When bugs of any significance are discovered on TC they should be corrected before going live. I am thinking specifically of the problem where droids were not craftable for several days a few months ago.
OK i log in after the fix and what did i get restored.. a bunch of empty backpacks, none of the items that were in the packs got restored, so now instead of being all happy I am even more depressed because looking at the empty packs I know everything that I have lost now. I am so disappointed over this I just logged out and I'm not sure I will ever log back in again.
Thanks for trying, but I almost wish you hadn't, i think i was better off just specualting on what I lost.
Issogi'Ka
So I tip my Hat to you Devs great work this is the type of work we need to see for the rest of this game
Lord-Brisbane wrote:
Want to say thank you to the Devs for fixing this issue in the timley manner they did i loged in this morning to find all 181 items return that i lost due to this bug
So I tip my Hat to you Devs great work this is the type of work we need to see for the rest of this game
What he said. I do not have a complete list but all the items I remember have re appeared in the satchel. I happen to have cleared my inventory so had room for all the items without worry about how to move them.
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On a related note I did today have a client crash that when I got back in I was missing about 40-50k of recent class 7 radioactives that I had just picked up from a harvester.
The water picked up a few min before was there but not the radioactives. Sigh. Should have chosen the other order. (did send a ticket.)
What was interesting about this is I JUST read last night about a similar case. Must be a new bug.
-Indene-
P.S. tried logging and back. no luck. will try the long wait method next.