As far as return codes and what not, I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing. This is a DirectX bug. And I've tried it on my computers running Win95 and Win98 (original versions of each). I'm curious as to if they've fixed it in DX6 or 7 though, which I don't have.

Rock

quote:
it isn't done till its perfect

I think you have 3DRealms and id software confused!

Well, I've become out of touch with id since I'm not a fan of FPSers or Quake (Doom rocked though!). I know their creed USED to be 'it isn't done till its done'. id and Lucas Arts were the last 'good' developers, and I know Lucas Arts has buggy games now. I guess the days of solid software and programming are finished.

As a gamer (not as a developer), I've practically abandoned the PC , since contrary to what seems to be popular opion, I think bugs are UNACCEPTABLE. I'll buy MAYBE 2 PC games a year. I'm a console boy now, but the scariest thing is that even console games are becoming buggier. There is just no excuse for that besides just plain not caring. From the Atari 2600 to the Super Nes, I only saw 1, maybe 2 bugs out of all the games I played. Already just in the 32bit consoles, I've seen probably 10 buggy games. No excuse.

Rock

Rock, I think the reason games are becoming more buggy is that they are becoming more complex. This is not an excuse, it's an explanation. PC games are required to run on thousands of different hardware and software configurations, so there are bound to be a few bugs that show up without the developers even knowing about it. It's the nature of the beast.

As far as console games, you're right, bugs are very sad, because the game only needs to run on one type of hardware, maybe support a few extra joysticks (specs known during development), but that's it. Bugs in software are easier to fix than bugs in hardware, so in theory there should be none (that the user can see!), but it doesn't always work out that way in real life..

I understand that the software is generally becoming much more complex, but if modularized, and unit tested (which admitedly few programmers do), the pieces themselves are not complex at all.

This is how I look at it. PCs are very diversified, and as such there will be hardware and configuration bugs. I can somewhat accept that (or at least blame the hardware company and not the app programmers). So initially users were confronted with these bugs, and were told, rightly so, that these are not app bugs, and don't blame us game programmers.

Then something terrible started to happen. Software bugs, not related at all to hardware drivers, started to creep in, because I think developers saw that users were willing to download new drivers, so why not get them to download patches as well. This is what I have issue with. Many bugs nowadays are bugs in the software, which the programmer has full responsibility for. I've read quite a few articles about how QA tells the dev team about specific known bugs, but the software is released anyway.

To our defense, I like to think that its more the publishers/management that force us to release bad programs, rather than us developers not caring, but maybe I'm being idealistic. I understand hardware bugs, and I understand that, because of the the complexities of the software, there will be occasional (read: very infrequent) unknown bugs that get into software. But clearly there are countless examples of software that has KNOWN bugs in THEIR code, and the # of these are growing rapidly.

To defend the console programmers (very slightly), they have the same type of bugs as the software bugs I've described above for the PC. Unfortunately, they can't use the 'patch crutch' that the PC market uses, so they HAVE to be more diligent than their PC counterparts. At this point it is becoming questionable whether they are or not, but either way it is a sad state.

Rock