jamesfinlayson

Yep, very very true. Unfortunately some of the places I've been at more recently have believed that mock servers are the best way to do end to end testing. It was a battle I couldn't win, but no one was willing to see that testing critical UI flows against something that spits back canned JSON could hardly be considered thorough testing.

Writing automated end-to-end tests? Those are very often best done by those writing the software

This so much - but most of the places I've worked at have insisted that manual testers with zero programming experience should build and maintain the test frameworks. Talk about trying to push a square peg into a round hole. Granted some of the testers have embraced it and not done a terrible job but by and large most of the testers have had no idea and done very little.

"good enough unit tests"

Good enough end to end tests then maybe.

I worked in a team with no QAs for a while - testing was done by developers and there were a lot end to end tests. It worked pretty well - I think a couple of small bugs got through, but whether a QA would have found the issues is debatable. It was for an internal system too so the cost of a defect was low anyway. I've also worked a company with no QAs in some pretty core teams and they had almost no defects either.

Currently working on some legacy stuff with no proper end to end tests and I'm very grateful for competent testers right now.

Layer on the merge conflicts resulting from this fun scenario...

I am friendly with a project manager at work - he's overseeing a fairly big modernisation project with lots of stakeholders, lots of moving parts, lots of direct reports, and while he seems to have a lot of long lunches, he makes sure that no one working on the project is blocked - he'll do everything he needs to to unblock people - regular meetings to hear about blockers, chase down approvers, just tell his direct reports to do something without approval (as long as it's not something bad) and he'll deal with the consequences. But most people are not this dedicated unfortunately.

Oh did it? I remember using K-9 on my Android phone years ago and being pretty happy with it.

I'm glad it's not just me - I do game modding in my spare time and I figured out how to use Hammer to make maps - it took a day or two but I figured it out.

I wanted to make some models too but when I downloaded Blender and looked at a tutorial to create a cube and I just thought... why is this so complicated? It looks easier now (I was probably looking at doing it close to 20 years ago) but back then it seemed crazy that there was a long tutorial just to create a cube.

I played with a simpler modelling program called Anim8or (https://www.anim8or.com/) and it was quite nice to use though - I could create shapes and drag the vertices and it all seemed quite intuitive.

I'm not sure if it is possible in either game... GoldSource had a VGUI surface system (like a flat in-game surface that could have OpenGL-like commands run on it but apparently it wasn't fully implemented), and I'm not sure about Source, but newer versions have more advanced UI frameworks that might make it possible, though none which are available to modders.

On the other hand, once multiple separate implementations are already in widespread use, there's immense value in working out a least common denominator of language features and standard library APIs that work everywhere

Yeah this was what I thought. I remember Valve Software wrote a paper about cross platform development and said it was useful compiling with Visual C++ and gcc to shake out any iffy syntax that worked in one but not the other. Of course with performance-critical code and code that needs to run on consoles as well there will always be platform-specific stuff, but if you can get 99% of the code working across multiple compilers that's pretty good.

It's incredible how much traction the completely fabricated anti-data center propaganda has gotten

Agreed - here in Australia one of the big TV networks was heavily advertising a story last week about the big bad data centres coming to suburbia. You can be critical of Australia's local governments all you want, but at least in the big cities, no one is going without water or power for any appreciable amount of time due to data centres or anything else.

Rightly or wrongly, you'll probably want to be local to have any chance of winning.

Similarly, a friend who works in engineering went to tender to a country council. Working for a big city firm they had no expectation of getting the job because they were up against a company from another nearby country town. Got to try and tender in case the shoe-in company really blows it, but no expectation of actually getting the job.

I'd believe it. In Australia, gun silencers (home made or otherwise) are absolutely illegal. In New Zealand no such limitations. A family member went to New Zealand maybe 15 years ago to somewhere suburban and found a few guys shooting animals in the distance - using silencers (I assume to not make too much noise for anyone nearby).

it's based on the media company providing a service...forever? People in this thread are saying customers should get refunds and I disagree - customers should get video files!

Very much agree. And while Steam could disappear tomorrow, all of the games that have been delisted are still downloadable if you bought them (I think The Movies was one of the early ones - delisted in 2007 maybe, but you can still download it if you bought it back then).

Is it really the ability to download them all in perpetuity? Google Music (RIP) gave you five downloads or something like that and I thought that was on par with Apple Music at least.

That sounds pretty corrupt.

I live in Australia and Australia is not New Zealand... but this sounds exactly like what would happen in rural Australia - people in small towns still do handshake deals because you know and trust most people in town.

Not related to business deals but a family member was flying rurally in Australia maybe 15 years ago and joked about stabbing the pilot with a 4cm nail file. The airport security guy had a good laugh too.

Same thing happened to me - got stuck on some old Braintree flow and ended up on what was essentially a sales call to switch to some other thing.

Very much less than a AAA game at least. The other day I had a 10GB update for Apex Legends.

No idea, or at least I haven't looked into it. I just manually sync to my drives.

I don't know if an explanation was ever given but I assume their pirated content scanning algorithm inadvertently dropped a file size check and their other checks passed.

JREs haven't been a thing in like a decade I thought.

Yep, I remember a couple of years ago Google Drive started flagging 1 byte files as pirated content - shortly after I bought a 6TB hard-drive and two 5TB portable hard-drives.

My progress in getting everything off Google Drive and OneDrive has slowed due to real life but all the important stuff is backed up offline now.

From my experience the CLI works but is not well documented.

Yep, none of my current team-mates test their work especially thoroughly... so now we have even more bugs being found in testing in production. Not a net win.

7 years ago my biggest bottle-neck was waiting for a tester to test my code. Fast forward to now, my biggest bottle-neck is waiting for a tester, and my team-mates using AI to generate mega-patches that they don't bother testing is just making it worse.

Yep, seen a data-centre move happen at work (from a distance - I wasn't effected). For a business with cross-data centre redundancy and no allowable down-time for core business, it was at least a year-long project I think. All for a data-centre in the same city.

I agree - maybe some modern game engines have unit tests for stuff like their physics engine and their "standard library" code (optimised data structures, maths utilities, string utilities etc) but as others have said, testing sound and vision is hard, and something that hasn't been mentioned is all the different flags in a game engine - testing even a sensible subset of all the different sound and rendering variables would be a huge undertaking.

I thought it was kind of commoditised these days - there's an Unreal asset store I think? Probably one for Unity as well.

Gosh, I don't think any game engines have particularly good test suites at all. GoldSource and Source are the only ones that I have any real experience with and neither seems to have anything (Source may have a handful of things but nothing approaching baseline let alone comprehensive).

I have no idea how game devs handle big refactors other than lots of manual testing.

I vaguely remember being told to put assignments in a drop box (like a mail box on campus) in the mid 2000s at least, and I'm sure it wasn't a new concept then.