So... How is Taleworlds getting away with this?

Users who are viewing this thread

I like the way you put it here. I was trying to pin down why people praise Warband so much while it was actually really bad without mods, and it took years for those good mods to appear. Bannerlord hasn't got a proper chance to be improved with mods like Warband did because it's still in EA. People love the idea of what Bannerlord could have been, and are disappointed that it falls short on those expectations.
Bannerlord shouldn't need mods to be enjoyable though. They've had plenty of time and resources.

Using mods as an excuse wouldn't fly very well in most other games.
 
- Are you guys able to understand and write an XML file of your own?
Yes?
I'm talking about understanding and creating a new one that works the way you intended it to work (programing).
This follow-up question shows that you don't understand what XML is anyway and how creating one is not related to programming at all.
If yes, than do it better and faster than TaleWorlds without causing conflicting files ("bugs").
Again, you have no idea what you are talking about - I and other people in the community are already doing that even though the codebase is not ours meaning that we don't have control over the other parts of the game which is causing the "bugs" but that being said, even TW is not able to avoid having certain bugs even though that's their codebase + that's their full-time job + they have dedicated QA team.
Also saying "if you can do it then do it" is pathetic unless you are willing to pay a full-time TW developer salary to me. Are you planning to pay for this? I doubt.

I'm guessing you liked the game and you had no prior experience with Warband or any other MB game in-depth. That's fine. You can like Bannerlord of course. You can like Bannerlord even if you spent ages with Warband. That's between you and your enjoyment. But trying to shut people down when they voice their disappointment has no benefit to you. And again, you like the tone or not, OP has valid questions in there. Especially while we know a lot of features that have been promised are either missing or removed because of some lame excuses. You never heard those excuses or missing features? That's fine. It's your "ignorance" about this matter and it's okay to be like that. You don't have to follow every game you buy anyway. But acting as you know it while you don't is weird. If people bought this game by assuming that there will be continuous, great updates and amazing support but now seeing that this is not the case, they have all the right to ask why. Even if they falsely assumed this, they can still ask and get their official answer rather than seeing a random guy bursting with a weird lawyer-ish attitude.
 
Oh, c'mon.
I said it before in other thread, but I will make short recap, of what I said:
Have you any idea how software development works? Especially if you want to allow others to interact directly with your code? For the most part, this is not bashing the keyboard till game appears on your screen, there are many factors involved into creating, sharing and then mantaining the code. TW basically creates an engine and then a game on top of it, not just uses existing parts to combine them into one, they have to think it all through, prepare plan, then code it from the scratch (or incorporate into existing code which often takes much more time), trying not to break any of existing parts (as minor as text display, as they may be difficult to fix if introduced change will interfere with it) and then in case of BL make it also configurable for modders via XMLs or classes in code, in all of that still remembering to apply patterns that help working with code afterwards, probably creating internal documentation and they still have to discuss suggestions and fix bugs, which may not have obvious root cause.
Being in the bugs' topic - fixing them is not that easy as
Code:
if (hero.wantsToDoThing)

{

   Dont();

}
As, you may not know in which part of kilemeters-long code this bug appears, and in what circuumstances (thousands of numbers representing data flying around an application may interfere with each other if not properly isolated), especially if the game is life-sim which has thousands of possible paths of execution, data transfer and maybe some leaks along the way. This is why they need your saves, to not guess-till-u-find-it, but to have test case, then troubleshoot it (sometimes probably by looking at memory records, not actual code). In my work I had case when we were looking for the issue for two weeks at least, but because we weren't able to reproduce the EXACT same bug, we werent able to find it. Only after we accidentaly found it, we were able to get over it in 1 week.
All in all, this is vast amount of code, technology, processes and work to be done to do even minor thing, and then you still have to give your workers vacations, organize their work, and they also have their own life, own issues, and can feel worse, not being able to jump around the code like grasshopper. And this is also easy if you have the same programmers that started the work still working. If you replaced some of them (may it be 30%), that it is where the fun begins - reading someone else's code is also not a easy-to-read fantasy book. If anything it may be Lord of the Rings, written in elven language, by not-so-smart dwarf.

And why are mods that incorporate "too complicated" things, that BL doesn't? There is a small possiblility (90%), that modders use more hackish techniques in coding their mods, which they do not intent to allow others to build on, than the TW which has to have as-broad-as-possible compatibility with anything that modders throw into the game (because TW obviously does know that WB's main strength were the mods - this is why they are making plain game, to allow it for best mod-branching possible) and make official tools to manage all that (if you even tackled modding, you noticed, that there is whole program dedicated to edit scenes and assets - something that can take years on its own to create in good manner).

Yes, I was triggered. Not the first, nor the last time.
I agree with everything here even if I would explain it differently. Also, that was one of the funniest code snippets ever :smile: Also your description of reading someone else'e code. That is another reason why your code has to be tested well, so that when you change something you can immediately find out what you just broke. I actually started working on several projects easily thanks to high (around 100%) coverage. Documentation and comments also help in this. I doubt TW do any of these.
 
Bannerlord shouldn't need mods to be enjoyable though. They've had plenty of time and resources.

Using mods as an excuse wouldn't fly very well in most other games.
Enjoyment is subjective, but yeah I agree with you. It would be nice if we didn't have to install a mod to have a reasonable damage formula, but now we're already at this point. I'd rather Taleworlds fix existing issues instead of adding new stuff. Lack of content can be fixed with mods. Internal workings of the engine can't.
 
Bannerlord shouldn't need mods to be enjoyable though. They've had plenty of time and resources.
I guess we may agree that finding a game enjoyable or not is subjective.
I didn't play the game from the beginning so i can't speak about the features on EA release, but from 1.5.6 (version I started with), I found it already enjoyable without any mod. And it keeps improving (slowly for sure).
Using mods as an excuse wouldn't fly very well in most other games.
I may be the only one thinking like that, but as a warband player, one of the things I expect from BL is to be extended with a whole bunch of mods.
This is the only game I bought expecting great mods being added in the coming months and years.
And I find it weird too when I see some people saying that it is the modding community that will flesh out BL... of course they will, it is inherent to M&B series...
 
@mexxico Hi. Sorry to bother you. There's someone here who doubts that you guys at Taleworlds document or even write comments on your codebase. Can you give us a short yes/no answer to this?
 
Well, I enjoyed the early release, 800 hours in 8 months but now I've gone back to Warband. I'll wait and see what happens with Bannerlord but for now Warband is more fun. Not complaining as long as I have Warband to play.
 
@mexxico Hi. Sorry to bother you. There's someone here who doubts that you guys at Taleworlds document or even write comments on your codebase. Can you give us a short yes/no answer to this?
That's not a yes/no question at all. There are always degrees.
A better question would be how old/obsolete is your internal documentation? Or how many lines of code per comment do you average?
 
I agree with everything here even if I would explain it differently. Also, that was one of the funniest code snippets ever :smile: Also your description of reading someone else'e code. That is another reason why your code has to be tested well, so that when you change something you can immediately find out what you just broke. I actually started working on several projects easily thanks to high (around 100%) coverage. Documentation and comments also help in this. I doubt TW do any of these.
tbf almost nobody comments/documents their code properly. what i DO seriously doubt (and what would frankly be an inexcusable omission) is their testing code coverage.
 
That's not a yes/no question at all. There are always degrees.
A better question would be how old/obsolete is your internal documentation? Or how many lines of code per comment do you average?
You don't say. I asked for a simple yes/no answer because genius over there "doubt TW do any of these."
 
tbf almost nobody comments/documents their code properly. what i DO seriously doubt (and what would frankly be an inexcusable omission) is their testing code coverage.
It is very cute if you think they even use "coverage" as a metric in TW :smile: They don't do development testing, there are multiple indicators for this. And yes, this is inexcusable. But be ready for backlash from people who learnt Software Engineering by playing enough video games. I literally had that in this forum, about this very subject :smile:

If the way you code documents itself then certain comments can become redundant, but documentation is a must. Your APIs, for example, should not be inferred from the code, that would in no way be acceptable in the industry. In fact, most teams actually do comment and document their code; however, I also agree with you in that they often fail to do it properly.
 
LOL dude got called out and rightly so. :iamamoron:
idk man he admitted to ban evasion. I'm thinking we should re-ban him just to be safe :wink:

If the way you code documents itself then certain comments can become redundant, but documentation is a must. Your APIs, for example, should not be inferred from the code, that would in no way be acceptable in the industry. In fact, most teams actually do comment and document their code; however, I also agree with you in that they often fail to do it properly.

IMO "self-documenting code" only works if you've also got robust docstrings but at that point is it really self-documenting?
 
IMO "self-documenting code" only works if you've also got robust docstrings but at that point is it really self-documenting?

But you use the latter to describe modules/components as a whole, not necessarily snippets of code. Each patch of code-block should be easy to follow; at least I think this is where @mehmeteking is pointing at.
Also, unless I am confusing the term with something else but arent docstrings similar to javadocs, apiDoc, etc?
 
IMO "self-documenting code" only works if you've also got robust docstrings but at that point is it really self-documenting?
Sorry, I think I failed to put it clearly.

Self-documenting code is a substitute for code comments, not documentation. The latter is a must but docstrings (or Javadoc, etc.) can be used to automatically generate certain documents. I use them often and yes, that is of course not "self-documenting." However, especially with the advent of modern languages there is a tendency to write code in a way that is understandble without need for comments. Perhaps "self-explaining" would be a better name and avoid the confusion :smile:

The people who were arguing against you were professional coders, they said so, and you pretended they weren't. I don't know how you can manage to twist it like this.
Ok, but how certain are we that "professional coder"s understand the principles of software engineering enough to debate them? Last I remember there were "terms" like "automatons" thrown around in the context of testing. Are you kidding me right now? :smile:

I tried to inform people about what engineering dictates and how TW fails to follow it, I got backlash for it from uninformed laymen (professional coder or otherwise.) This is risky business on these forums, hence the warning.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom