Doom-Ed

The only widely reported problem with 3.09 is that the
video playback is choppy. The fix for the modem connections
reduced video playback to 10 fps. Its a one line fix, but
I’ll hold off on another version until a few more things
accumulate.

I am curious what the breakdown of opinion is on the rapid
patch releases. If one of the polling websites would pose
the question, I would apreciate it.

A more liesurely patch release would allow us more testing time, and
some problems (like this cinematic bug) would certainly be killed
before the public saw it, but I definately found a couple things from
the public that no amount of testing on our machines would have found.
Some things only showed up with 48 people playing on our servers for
several hours.

Once again, we really didn’t have a choice this time because of the
server crashers, but we are planning another release in two to three
weeks.

I am happy to produce new versions fairly rapidly, rather than at monthly
intervals, but I know that many people are getting a little irate at
having to download new patches. There is a simple solution — if you
don’t want to be on the bleeding edge, wait a week after a patch is
announced and see how it is working for other people.

What finally helped me get to the bottom of some things was
just getting people with problems we couldn’t reproduce to call
me and let me send them executables by email until I figured out
what was going on. From now on, if you send a detailed problem to me,
include a phone number and times when you can be reached. I’m not tech
support, so you certainly can’t count on a response, but if you have
a nice repeatable case of a problem that is high priority for us that
we can’t reproduce otherwise, your personal help may be usefull.

BTW, does anyone know why Quake 2 became a hacker target? I can keep
fighting attacks, but spending my time there doesn’t help anyones game,
and there are a bunch of things that fundamentally can’t be stopped if
people really set their mind to messing up the servers.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 1997 at 3:11 pm and is filed under John Carmack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.