The incident which almost delayed the release of 1.8.2 was caused by the Nehahra mod, and specifically it's use of different names for some of the menu graphics. Nehahra basically has 3 main menu graphics, any of which may be used in different circumstances, depending on whether you're running the game only, the game plus demo movie, or the demo movie only.
Now, the one of these that interests DirectQ is the game only mode, as DirectQ does not support the demo movie (I'm not even certain if that's available for download by us mere mortals who don't have FilePlanet subscriptions).
However, in this mode the main menu graphic is called "gamemenu.lmp" whereas it's otherwise always called "mainmenu.lmp"; the Nehahra mod only loads "mainmenu.lmp" when you're playing the game plus demo movie mode.
The code I had written to detect this worked fine in the Debug build of DirectQ but didn't in the Release build (in fact it completely broke the menus even if Nehahra wasn't running). So Microsoft are partially at fault here too for having a compiler that generates inconsistent behaviour; you must assume that the results of a Debug build are not necessarily valid for a Release build. This seems crazy to me but i'm only a lowly hobbyist here so what could I possibly know?
So in the absence of being able to break into the debugger during a Release run to see what the f--k was going on, I was left with two choices. I could either have delayed the release indefinitely while going through laborious testing or I could have constructed a cheap and nasty fix. I chose the latter, and the end result turned out to be better overall anyway.
There are two parties at fault here (a third if you include me for not testing Release builds earlier, although I'd argue that I shouldn't have to). Microsoft for starters for deciding on this bizarre different behaviour, and the Nehahra team for constructing a series of unpredicatable hacks.
Overall I have quite a distaste for the Nehahra mod so maybe my opinion is coloured a little by that. In many ways it's similar to Hipnotic (which I also dislike), being a collection of hacks rather than a robust and cohesive overall product. Too much of it is in slavery to the Great Gods of QC for my taste as well.
So that's what happened and that's how I came to release yesterday after all.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
The evil that mods do
Posted by
mhquake
at
5:24 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I wish some god amongst programmers would descend and clean the mods up to work with newer standard conventions.
Oh, and so do I.
Post a Comment