You were just being salty by calling people randomly 'You don't understand anything about Software Engineering'.
I am pretty sure I did it
arbitrarily. I react poorly to people who try to argue with professionals, about their profession. Whenever someone starts argueing with me about SE, I immediately assume they are also engineers and try to discuss the issue accordingly. But when it becomes obvious that they are trying to teach me about engineering without an engineering background, well... That's when I react poorly. And if you wonder how I can be sure if someone has (at least proper) engineering background, please keep reading...
The thing is, you don't have to follow SE/SD principles if you are doing something as a black-box.
I want to unsee this
It is wrong for a multitude of reasons. I hope you rethink it some other time. But I will only correct "black-box" -> "closed source." The former only has meaning in the context of Testing.
Only reason why we are able to criticize TW is that we are able to see it's source code right now ( somewhat part of it's source at least ).
This might be true for some. But if you look at my post from
pretty much a year ago (soon after the game released, without seeing a single line of code), you will find that I had already complained about Testing and QA issues, and had inferred that TW does not follow SE principles adequately. I also mentioned there that it is quite unlikely for TW to deliver the game within a year, and how they are likely caught up in the infamous 20:80 trap. As SE consultant and having led multiple SE teams (and depts.) in the past; being able to see these things comes with the territory.
Do you think other games have flawless codebases?
No, I think I already mentioned on this thread that these issues affect most gaming studios.
Even if you are developing a simple REST API, things can go out of hand super quickly if you are switching teams every now and then and if your codebase is 8 years old. And REST API's are usually basic CRUD operations.
I swear I am not trying to be an *******, but I just have to correct something out of topic here. What you mean to say by "REST API" here is actually "HTTP API." RESTfulness is a property of a system, not an API. I know lots of people misuse the term this way, but you can do a quick Google search to see what I mean.
They shaped the situation based on their needs. I'm, obviously, not comparing TW's mess with genius designs in Quake or Doom but you can guess where I'm getting at. Lower your expectation in terms of clean code while looking at the game's code.
Let us not confuse genius coding solutions with adherence to engineering principles. Being a coding star does not absolve anyone's work from being principled and well-tested. Indeed, the opposite is true; i.e. principled and well-tested work makes a coding star.
Also, you have to consider the position TW was and still in. Turkey isn't the rising star of Game Development. Especially if you consider first M&B's Turkey back in those days, you can clearly see why "being a game developer" was equivalent to being a garbage collector or similar.
I have to somewhat disagree. I remember my first job was located at ODTU Technokent, right next to (you guessed it) TW studios; and how we envied people working there for doing something so much fun and awesome. Back in those days you would not get a place at Technokent without some promising project. So, I don't really think it was seen as "garbage" work.
Apart from the nitpicking, I think we both see similar problems. Where we diverge is our idea about how strictly and under which circumstances engineering principles should be followed. I say it applies everywhere, under any circumstance, regardless of whether your source is open or not (this last point should have been obvious.) To be perfectly honest with you, I would not hire an engineer who said "testing can be optional" during an interview. My advice to you is to never say such a thing if you interview with European or American companies.
I know how Ipek and Armagan created this out of thin air with nothing but sheer will and hard-f*ing-work, and we cheered them on all the way. For us, they were the pioneers we looked up to; and M&B was something to be proud of. I loved past M&B games, I love Bannerlord and I am sure I will love next thing that they produce. But none of these matter as engineering is not subject to sentiment. If TW employed some principled approach from the very beginning, we would already have a much better game released by now.