So are we not gonna talk about the coding

Also explains why every other patch something new breaks and some old bug comes back that was fixed

Ooohh wooow dudes pay respect to this seasoned veteran, he’s played at least thirty minutes of Overwatch.

loud noises

I’ve played before workshop was announced. I’d say that’s a long time.

Also, oof, 30 minutes :rofl:

👁👁

Tell me what you said

`https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRfvBPkIQ9M

That’s a rick roll ain’t it.

If you can’t post it visibly, I ain’t clicking on it.

I won’t speak for them since I don’t work there and obvious don’t know the specific details, but I can make some educated guesses.

Firstly, when talking about binary assets (not code/text), some source code repositories dont handle versioning very well, and as a result it can very quickly inflate to unmanageable sizes. While many games ship at what most would consider a reasonable size, you must understand that the shipping game is commonly only a fraction of the total assets they have. There can be hundreds or even thousands (or more) of unused art assets from development phases and prototyping that go unused. And these aren’t the nice compressed versions that ship with the game either. They are typically raw data formats, and corresponding data formats that go with various programs used to make them (e.g. PSD’s for photoshop).

Additionally, in addition to raw art assets he mentioned technical difficulties. Even if they were just doing a straight “revert code base to date 05/24/16” there are significant hurdles that they’d need to do, but that’s not even what they attempted to do. They were trying to version specific parts of the game to run on the latest version of the game in the arcade. A lot of stuff in the game no longer works the same way. The physics engine changed - along with movement mechanics for many heroes. The rendering system changed. And most importantly, the networking infrastructure probably changed substantially. Probably nearly every subsystem in the game has undergone a lot of changes and hooking them all together would not be simple.

Making these all work in the current version of the game is undoubtably quite a challenge itself. I Jeff’s brevity on the details probably stems from a combination of not knowing the exact details of all of the issues, and also not wanting to go into the detail for the majority of players who wouldnt even know what he’s talking about.

I have to assume you’ve never worked for a software company.

No, that’s pretty standard – you make major changes and if someone needs changes on a prior software release it’s significant effort. Sometimes just not even possible.

For people citing WoW classic – they basically redid the entire game from scratch with the same rulset. It wasn’t simply digging up old code. :confused:

Screenshots are there take that as you will.

1 Like

They probably have all the code for old abilities saved elsewhere but its not attached to the current game code meaning they would have to go in and specifically re-create the character with their old abilities and that is only assuming they didn’t change the way they handle certain functions or maths meaning those would have to be redone for their new standards

This would make more sense to me if he just said this.

Okay, I’m the last guy you’d call to get some coding done, but shouldn’t shield generator still be there? I mean, it’s a different model (even if it is jus a modified teleprter), it’s just the way it acts that got overwritten, right?

I know sigma has a shield generator voice line but…

i dunno.

assets like images, animations, models, etc. probs not so much because those would be stored as binary files, which isn’t really something that can be version controlled well and takes up more space than code (text). if you’re version controlling them, any slight change = entirely new file rather storing the modification of it in order to have that version in history. esp for a gaming company, you’re probably making a lot of asset changes too --> space fills up quickly. so it’s not completely unreasonable to replace rather than back up esp for stuff you know you won’t go back to using.

and solution to “space filling up quickly” isn’t simply “buy more drives” because when you clone the repo to continue working on it from another machine or another directory or whatever, you’ll have to copy the entire history (which will be massive with binary files in there). and if you clone only the latest push without the history or without much of the history, you’re basically acting like it’s been dumped anyways.

Shield Generator isn’t Vanilla…

what can you expect from multi billionaire small indie company ?

1 Like

Why would you write all these words about a subject you clearly know nothing about, this isn’t how version control works in software development, well maybe it is for an amateur student who noone taught Git to yet?

1 Like

There is versioning for binary files, it’s a little slow in Git’s system (LFS) but in Perforce or PlasticSCM you can version hundreds of gigabytess of game files quickly.

You are talking about problems that a little indie guy in his bedroom would have when he’s on a tight budget and looking at free version control solutions, not Blizzard, of all companies. They are more than capable of version controlling terrabytes of Overwatch binary files in house, if they wanted to.

2 Likes

TIL

tbf, it’s not like many companies in general will need as much asset versioning as a gaming company would to need a versioning tool capable of that and can get by with a corporate github/gitlab/bitbucket/etc. but fair on your point about blizz being able to afford such a tool.