It makes sense that programmers think things will be easier than normal, because in the realm of programming a simple task that has to be done 10,000 times can be done instantly as long as you know all the parameters of how it has to be done. That can be set up in 2 lines of code, over the course of about 8 seconds of work. When you're asking a programmer for an assessment of difficulty you're asking them to guess how quickly they can write a poem that perfectly encapsulates this set of five concepts. Poems can sometimes encapsulate all five concepts in just one haiku! And sometimes it'll take a sonnet. And sometimes an epic. But they won't know which one until they start writing, and they are NOT incentivized to highball their guess.
Programming at it's core is essentially about creating complex behavior given simple tools. If you've ever seen a 'programming language', you might naively think "wow, these people are truly working from the ground up", but the truth is that those languages are already several layers of interpretation and complication. In a manner of speaking, computers are nothing more than giant mazes for electricity, and everything is built up from there. Even things we take for granted, like simply displaying an image on a monitor, go through indecipherable conversions and end up being absurdly complicated, if you were to look at it from beginning to end. So it's no wonder that programmers are taught from the beginning how to reduce problems to their simplest terms, try to develop a solution based on those, and then adapt from there. This is obviously not without it's downsides though, complex problems do not always have simple solutions, and it can be almost impossible to avoid pitfalls when you need to zoom out and account for the whole picture, especially when 90% of the picture is unfinished and is just a rough outline of how you might want it to look a year from now. That is all to say, computers are complicated, but programming is usually rendered pretty simple, getting from A to B in a predictable amount of time is really really hard to gauge.
@@rileystrom8530 "Even things we take for granted, like simply displaying an image on a monitor, go through indecipherable conversions and end up being absurdly complicated, if you were to look at it from beginning to end." Sorry, that is not true. It *can* be absurdly complicated, but in doesn't have to be. Displaying an image to monitor, is writing the colour data into very specific memory, that's it. Just copy paste from one place to another, nothing more. There are a few things one needs to watch out for, like what order the data is actually read in by the monitor and the processor respectively. Nowadays, you don't actually write to that memory yourself anymore, but tell the Operating system to do it (for security reasons, you don't want programs to be to able to access the physical memory directly, but have the OS handle it). If the data is compressed, we need to decompress it first, but that isn't complicated either. Now, if we add hardware acceleration (GPU) to the mix, then it becomes, to a degree, "indecipherable". But not because it is complex, but because the GPU manufacturers do not les us know what is actually going on. The mathematics behind it aren't really all that complicated, just hard to visualize because it involves 4d matrix math. A lot of the time, stuff becomes indecipherable, because the person writing it doesn't really understand what they are doing, or are clinging to concepts that allow programmers to make the problems easier to understand for humans, but actually harder to work on for computers. The solutions become convoluted, and overcomplicated because of the propagation of bad, but quick (and thus more profitable) programming practices. Most of which solve problems that that approach causes in the first place. A lot of programmers that get taught nowadays don't even have a basic understanding on how a computer actually works, how the OS bridges communications between software and hardware nor why, and more importantly *when*, we do the things the way we do them. Don't get me wrong, writing simple code is very, very hard, because one needs to not only understand the problem, but also the tools at ones disposal as well as how a computer works well. But it also takes more time and more experience than writing complex, convoluted code. Which means, it's more expensive, less profitable and thus the suits don't care about the issues that will arise from not doing it. Companies don't care about quality, but profitability. And while the details of how a computer works are complicated, as in, what circuits are used, why and how they exactly work on the electronics level. The concepts themselves are very simple and it's inexcusable for any programmer to not understand those.
I only really disagree that he misunderstands. I think he is aware of all of this and choosing to feign outrage for content. I don't believe he's really mad, I think the character he plays on TH-cam is mad and he is leaning into it as a result of increased viewership.
BS. I decided to watch the video talked about. Narcs problem seems to be 100% valid. Its about lying. Nobody has a problem with a dev team talking about their plans, and showcasing what they want the final product to look like. Everyone rightfully should have an issue with the developers lying about what is ready and what exists. You straight up have a snippet of the devs talking how this is the current state of the desert showcasing bullshots. "but its an alpha", yes, and they are selling it as open development. There is nothing open about being lied too. If people had their expectations set correctly nobody would have issues with this kind of dev. But guess what, that would probably hurt their bottom line, since people would be less willing to spend 250$ to enter an alpha. And the developers starting to shut down discussion of their game when it would portray it in a negative light? Also not a good look. So no idea if FriendlyGothDude is intentionally misrepresenting the facts, or if he just skimmed trough the video and did not pay attention.
Narc certainly has held the skeptic position for years on the ashes of creation project and I am more than fine to have critical voices for games developing we want to be good. To summarize a 3 hour video with Narc & asmon. Narc's main concern is the lack of clarity on the state of the game. Developer live streams declared 2+ years ago "this is what were working on" giving the feeling of this is what to expect. Narc feels like he was mislead on the games development and thusly feels he mislead all his viewers into supporting the project too. So @FriendlyGothDude putting all the questionable misleading drama aside; Is it reasonable from your perspective for a video game development team to give virticle slices (believe that's the correct term) of what they hope to make only to be 2 years later and those virticle slices to be hardly implamented?
As a programmer, not in game dev but in web, I can tell you we do not think things are easier then they turn out to be. We usually give estimations to features with a generous margin for error and with solution principles in mind, because we need to manage resources. In principle everything is possible depending on how much money and time you push into it. What can happen is that things or concepts get changed during development, which will no longer work with the architecture you initially planned. So having a road map planed out early on helps to estimate any given feature, because we can keep those other features in mind while developing the architecture. If this is not the case in your work environment, we are not talking about experienced programmers. Of course there will always be errors and changes you can't predict and won't predict. But i think we are talking on different levels of failure here. Sure, you will always first work on systems and the backend, before you implement something to look shiny. But what usually should not happen is that a feature is presented as high fidelity as it has been in AoC and then not delivering at all on it. If you push something like that into an alpha you make it crystal clear to the customer what the current issues are and that this is currently just a proof of concept to test backend processes. Usually end consumers don't understand or appreciate this kind of testing on the customer, so i would never recommend doing this at larger scale unless you previously made clear, that what you showed is just a high fidelity teaser to give an idea of what it could look like and that the alpha will not include such high fidelity since there are still systems being tested. As far as i can remember this did not happen. People expected the high fidelity showcase and got the barebone systems test instead without it being communicated. This should just not happen. With web we for example work on multiple feature branches that are developed on developer machines. If those features are split correctly they come down to only a small amount of work for each feature or subfeature. Those go into review and testing on a staging environment and when they are looked over by QA and not bounced, they go into production. If your programmer did well, they encapsulated their module so it doesn't interferes with existing code. If two different modules use the same utility set or inheritance and thad changed, it should have been either captured by QA or by automated tests if possible. You don't just promisse a feature with a high fidelity showcase, if you don't know that you can deliver. This is then a case of over promise and under deliver. "This is how it works" is not a good excuse, cause this is not how it should work. Steven should stick to what he can show and deliver. We have seen before with hello games what can happen if you do that kind of stuff. At least they delivered on their promisses in the long run.
Just watched stevens interview with asmongold about the drama and watched some references. It seems like the purpose of the alpha 2 was communicated well and what narc showed was not the full picture. It was also nice to hear, that their integration and deployment workflow seem to be up to paar with what i was describing. I still would not recommend doing, what he does with that full transparent development, just because of the hassle, that he has to deal with. But at least it is good to see that the drama that narc started was way overstated. Good on Steven to address the issue.
Yeah, it's weird how such a big studio with 230 employees doesn't have a timeline for their project. I'm a solo developer and I know that you can't give exact deadlines for passion projects, but when I do side projects for clients, I tell them how long it will take and I do it on time because I include unforeseen circumstances in the timeline. Obviously AoC is a business project with so many costs that if they can't give an approximate timeline for their project as a whole and for its individual phases, it sounds like a scam if the money come from clients.
Steven is a shady person who raised his money with some dubious housing related projects and now he wants to grift himself a game that is built for streamers and poopsocks instead of making a good game. He has no idea what he is doing
It is ok that you have versions and different parts etc. but we would not expect that there is no better version of it after two years. It does not have to be the same as it was in the showcase. It is irrelevant how source control works and how they iterate.
@@voxling Worked on myself instead of standing defense for fraudsters and con artists. You should try too, its npot too late to grow a spine and not be a disingenous wretch, never is
@@laszloneumann500 so. Nothing? What are your credentials to accuse others of fraud without any Info? That does not sound like someone who "worked on themselves"
It makes sense that programmers think things will be easier than normal, because in the realm of programming a simple task that has to be done 10,000 times can be done instantly as long as you know all the parameters of how it has to be done. That can be set up in 2 lines of code, over the course of about 8 seconds of work.
When you're asking a programmer for an assessment of difficulty you're asking them to guess how quickly they can write a poem that perfectly encapsulates this set of five concepts. Poems can sometimes encapsulate all five concepts in just one haiku! And sometimes it'll take a sonnet. And sometimes an epic. But they won't know which one until they start writing, and they are NOT incentivized to highball their guess.
this in itself is rather poetic, and insightful! thanks
Programming at it's core is essentially about creating complex behavior given simple tools. If you've ever seen a 'programming language', you might naively think "wow, these people are truly working from the ground up", but the truth is that those languages are already several layers of interpretation and complication. In a manner of speaking, computers are nothing more than giant mazes for electricity, and everything is built up from there. Even things we take for granted, like simply displaying an image on a monitor, go through indecipherable conversions and end up being absurdly complicated, if you were to look at it from beginning to end. So it's no wonder that programmers are taught from the beginning how to reduce problems to their simplest terms, try to develop a solution based on those, and then adapt from there. This is obviously not without it's downsides though, complex problems do not always have simple solutions, and it can be almost impossible to avoid pitfalls when you need to zoom out and account for the whole picture, especially when 90% of the picture is unfinished and is just a rough outline of how you might want it to look a year from now.
That is all to say, computers are complicated, but programming is usually rendered pretty simple, getting from A to B in a predictable amount of time is really really hard to gauge.
@@rileystrom8530 "Even things we take for granted, like simply displaying an image on a monitor, go through indecipherable conversions and end up being absurdly complicated, if you were to look at it from beginning to end."
Sorry, that is not true.
It *can* be absurdly complicated, but in doesn't have to be.
Displaying an image to monitor, is writing the colour data into very specific memory, that's it. Just copy paste from one place to another, nothing more.
There are a few things one needs to watch out for, like what order the data is actually read in by the monitor and the processor respectively. Nowadays, you don't actually write to that memory yourself anymore, but tell the Operating system to do it (for security reasons, you don't want programs to be to able to access the physical memory directly, but have the OS handle it). If the data is compressed, we need to decompress it first, but that isn't complicated either.
Now, if we add hardware acceleration (GPU) to the mix, then it becomes, to a degree, "indecipherable". But not because it is complex, but because the GPU manufacturers do not les us know what is actually going on. The mathematics behind it aren't really all that complicated, just hard to visualize because it involves 4d matrix math.
A lot of the time, stuff becomes indecipherable, because the person writing it doesn't really understand what they are doing, or are clinging to concepts that allow programmers to make the problems easier to understand for humans, but actually harder to work on for computers. The solutions become convoluted, and overcomplicated because of the propagation of bad, but quick (and thus more profitable) programming practices. Most of which solve problems that that approach causes in the first place.
A lot of programmers that get taught nowadays don't even have a basic understanding on how a computer actually works, how the OS bridges communications between software and hardware nor why, and more importantly *when*, we do the things the way we do them.
Don't get me wrong, writing simple code is very, very hard, because one needs to not only understand the problem, but also the tools at ones disposal as well as how a computer works well. But it also takes more time and more experience than writing complex, convoluted code.
Which means, it's more expensive, less profitable and thus the suits don't care about the issues that will arise from not doing it. Companies don't care about quality, but profitability.
And while the details of how a computer works are complicated, as in, what circuits are used, why and how they exactly work on the electronics level. The concepts themselves are very simple and it's inexcusable for any programmer to not understand those.
You are right with most things and it is clear that Narc has no clue about actual game dev
I enjoyed this explanation of how things are done, you should certainly do more ashes content
ha appreciate that, I'll think about it for sure!
I only really disagree that he misunderstands. I think he is aware of all of this and choosing to feign outrage for content. I don't believe he's really mad, I think the character he plays on TH-cam is mad and he is leaning into it as a result of increased viewership.
BS. I decided to watch the video talked about. Narcs problem seems to be 100% valid. Its about lying. Nobody has a problem with a dev team talking about their plans, and showcasing what they want the final product to look like. Everyone rightfully should have an issue with the developers lying about what is ready and what exists.
You straight up have a snippet of the devs talking how this is the current state of the desert showcasing bullshots.
"but its an alpha", yes, and they are selling it as open development. There is nothing open about being lied too. If people had their expectations set correctly nobody would have issues with this kind of dev. But guess what, that would probably hurt their bottom line, since people would be less willing to spend 250$ to enter an alpha.
And the developers starting to shut down discussion of their game when it would portray it in a negative light? Also not a good look.
So no idea if FriendlyGothDude is intentionally misrepresenting the facts, or if he just skimmed trough the video and did not pay attention.
Narc certainly has held the skeptic position for years on the ashes of creation project and I am more than fine to have critical voices for games developing we want to be good.
To summarize a 3 hour video with Narc & asmon. Narc's main concern is the lack of clarity on the state of the game. Developer live streams declared 2+ years ago "this is what were working on" giving the feeling of this is what to expect. Narc feels like he was mislead on the games development and thusly feels he mislead all his viewers into supporting the project too.
So @FriendlyGothDude putting all the questionable misleading drama aside; Is it reasonable from your perspective for a video game development team to give virticle slices (believe that's the correct term) of what they hope to make only to be 2 years later and those virticle slices to be hardly implamented?
@pewpin1039 when did the lie
As a programmer, not in game dev but in web, I can tell you we do not think things are easier then they turn out to be. We usually give estimations to features with a generous margin for error and with solution principles in mind, because we need to manage resources. In principle everything is possible depending on how much money and time you push into it. What can happen is that things or concepts get changed during development, which will no longer work with the architecture you initially planned. So having a road map planed out early on helps to estimate any given feature, because we can keep those other features in mind while developing the architecture. If this is not the case in your work environment, we are not talking about experienced programmers. Of course there will always be errors and changes you can't predict and won't predict. But i think we are talking on different levels of failure here.
Sure, you will always first work on systems and the backend, before you implement something to look shiny. But what usually should not happen is that a feature is presented as high fidelity as it has been in AoC and then not delivering at all on it. If you push something like that into an alpha you make it crystal clear to the customer what the current issues are and that this is currently just a proof of concept to test backend processes. Usually end consumers don't understand or appreciate this kind of testing on the customer, so i would never recommend doing this at larger scale unless you previously made clear, that what you showed is just a high fidelity teaser to give an idea of what it could look like and that the alpha will not include such high fidelity since there are still systems being tested. As far as i can remember this did not happen. People expected the high fidelity showcase and got the barebone systems test instead without it being communicated. This should just not happen.
With web we for example work on multiple feature branches that are developed on developer machines. If those features are split correctly they come down to only a small amount of work for each feature or subfeature. Those go into review and testing on a staging environment and when they are looked over by QA and not bounced, they go into production. If your programmer did well, they encapsulated their module so it doesn't interferes with existing code. If two different modules use the same utility set or inheritance and thad changed, it should have been either captured by QA or by automated tests if possible. You don't just promisse a feature with a high fidelity showcase, if you don't know that you can deliver. This is then a case of over promise and under deliver. "This is how it works" is not a good excuse, cause this is not how it should work.
Steven should stick to what he can show and deliver. We have seen before with hello games what can happen if you do that kind of stuff. At least they delivered on their promisses in the long run.
Just watched stevens interview with asmongold about the drama and watched some references. It seems like the purpose of the alpha 2 was communicated well and what narc showed was not the full picture. It was also nice to hear, that their integration and deployment workflow seem to be up to paar with what i was describing.
I still would not recommend doing, what he does with that full transparent development, just because of the hassle, that he has to deal with. But at least it is good to see that the drama that narc started was way overstated. Good on Steven to address the issue.
@@jozzetv yeah exactly, can you imagine a PR person asking for more info on your commit notes? lol
So why not steven just say game us 10yrs away from being complete?
Yeah, it's weird how such a big studio with 230 employees doesn't have a timeline for their project. I'm a solo developer and I know that you can't give exact deadlines for passion projects, but when I do side projects for clients, I tell them how long it will take and I do it on time because I include unforeseen circumstances in the timeline. Obviously AoC is a business project with so many costs that if they can't give an approximate timeline for their project as a whole and for its individual phases, it sounds like a scam if the money come from clients.
Steven is a shady person who raised his money with some dubious housing related projects and now he wants to grift himself a game that is built for streamers and poopsocks instead of making a good game. He has no idea what he is doing
To make an open development and expect that the people playing the game do it from a developer point of view is so naive is dumb.
I think the problem is how they monetized the game and what expectation that brings.
It is ok that you have versions and different parts etc. but we would not expect that there is no better version of it after two years. It does not have to be the same as it was in the showcase. It is irrelevant how source control works and how they iterate.
Hi random nobody, what have you worked on?
it was a crypto game for an ai company. Nothing worth mentioning
@@FriendlyGothDude than its a bit of a stretch to call yourself level designer and a lot more understandable why youd stand defense for a fraudster
@@laszloneumann500 so what have you worked on?
@@voxling Worked on myself instead of standing defense for fraudsters and con artists. You should try too, its npot too late to grow a spine and not be a disingenous wretch, never is
@@laszloneumann500 so. Nothing? What are your credentials to accuse others of fraud without any Info? That does not sound like someone who "worked on themselves"
What games have you previously worked on?
A crypto game for an ai company, nothing cool unfortunately
RIP AoC Garbage woke game died before it even released
So why not steven just say game us 10yrs away from being complete?