Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

To paraphrase a smart guy named Jake Smith:

“The act of moving files from Point A to Point B, where Point B is your live environment, is a process that merits being QA’ed all on its own. Twice.”

Downsides:

• If you’ve set up your environments in a way where this is as hands-off, just-push-a-button as it can possibly be, this can still result in an hour or four of extra time spent for every single update.
• Maintaining a dedicated environment in which to do this redundantly costs money in hardware, and in people’s time, in perpetuity.
• Those hours are frequently very boring for everyone involved.
• It’s very seldom that anything actually goes wrong.
• The temptation to skip doing it can be unbearable when you’ve promised that your game will be available at a certain time. Especially when you easily can do the math in your head and know that doing this will push you past that time. No one wants to disappoint their customers by being late.

Upside:

• This doesn’t happen.

I have no idea if this is actually what happened in this situation, but this is another one of those pieces of information that I’d like to make sure I never forget about.

My sympathies to the folks on both sides of it here. Good luck in getting it all worked out.

- Scott

…multiple times since moving to California. More in LA and Orange County than here in San Diego.

From: http://www.rinkworks.com/said/tourism.shtml

• Him: “Well, welcome Samantha. You’re from Minnesota, right?”
• Me: “No, Wisconsin.”
• Him: “So you’re from…Chicago?”
• Me: “No, sir, that is in Illinois.”
• Him: “Oh, and you’re from Michigan!”
• Me: “No, sir, Wisconsin.”
• Him: “Well, why didn’t you say so earlier?”
• Me: “I don’t know, sir.”
• Him: “So there’s a lot of cheese there right?”
• Me: “Some, sir.”
• Him: “And y’all’s football team is the Cubs, right?”
• Me: “No sir, that’s Illinois.”
• Him: “Vikings?”
• Me: “No. That’s Minnesota.”
• Him: “But I thought you’re from Minnesota.”
• Me: “No sir, I’m from Wisconsin.”
• Him: “Oh…so you don’t have a football team there!”
• Me: “No sir, the Green Bay Packers are very popular there.”
• Him: “But that’s a Michigan team.”
• Me: “No sir, Green Bay is in Wisconsin.”
• Him: “But I thought you were from Illinois.”
• Me: “No sir, Wisconsin.”
• Him: “Oh. So you just have hockey there, huh?”
• Me: “Not any professional teams, sir.”
• Him: “Well, I thought the Stars were from up there.”
• Me: “From Minnesota sir, but now they play for Dallas.”
• Him: “Do they really? I didn’t know that.”
• Me: “Yes, sir, they do.”
• Him: “Well, anyway. Welcome, Samantha from Michigan.”
• Me: “Wisconsin.”

Other than the part about people calling me Samantha. Knock on wood, but so far that one’s never happened.

It’s nice to see I’m not alone. Happy thanksgiving.

(and go Pack! …who won already…so..er…went Pack!)

- Scott

Josh has a good summary up of how the morning went.  A couple entitlement snags being worked out, a patcher having one wrong file for an hour caused a boat to disappear, and extremely heavy patch load for the first couple hours.

In terms of the game itself?  Amazingly uneventful.  Everything passed on the first try.

And then there were thousands of Sarnaks running around.

I got to play quite a bit tonight and enjoyed every second of it.

I’ll take that as a win.

…than watching files go from place to place.

Watching files not go from place to place.

(While an anonymous associate producer invents a new verb conjugation form, hereafter to be referred to as “rhetorical emo subjunctive abstract.”)

The only thing that’s more fun than a launch day is the day before launch day.

It’s tense, but in a good way. It’s going out tomorrow, there’s no doubting that. The launch is a concrete event of its own, marked by an unmoving (and unmovable) point on a time line, and the clock ticks between now and then can get louder and louder in your own head if you let them.

No pressure.

There are huge flurries of activity. Then if you’re lucky like we are this time, there are occasional pauses. Then flurries again.

At this point, people are still getting useful work done. Some are scouring boards for things we’ve missed. Others are on beta chatting with testers, or possessing people’s pets and running off with them. Others are working on upcoming live events or tweaks for the first hotfix. (At least one of us is scribbling down random thoughts between emails, IMs, and people wandering in and out of his office.) Yet others are experimenting with changes for the future.

But everyone’s united in looking forward to tomorrow.

(At least that’s what I think “More items in update 41? I will f—ing cut you,” means. I could have misunderstood him.)

Regardless, it seems that EQ2 and ROK are on the minds of a few others folks too.

If you’re looking for EQ2-related ways to pass the time between now and launch, here are a few suggestions…

• Brandon Reinhardt had some very nice things to say about EQ2, wrapped up in a thoughtful analysis about the state of the game and some of the things we’re doing well. If you’re ever up this way, sir, I owe you a drink. Glad you think we’re doing good work up here.

• Her royal Cuppiness, the ultimate MMO dilettante, likes to give EQ2 some love from time to time.

• Ogrebear has some seriously nice looking Kunark beta spoilage.

• The folks at the shiny, new Massively have been doing their part and then some in getting the word out. Furniture? Giveaways? Video? Love for EQ2Traders? Birthday wishes? Beta Tour? They pretty much have it all.

• The inimitable Kendricke chimes in with his take on why right now is a great time to pick up EQ2.

• The equally inimitable (in an entirely different way) Winwin talks about her time poking around the beta, kicking its tires, then painting them pink.

• Yet more Kunark anticipation over in the direction of The Server Is Down…

• Darren of The Common Sense Gamer talking about something that I talked about, so now the cycle of my talking about his talking about my talking is complete. (I do apologize for any tears in the time-space continuum that may occur as a result of my pressing Publish.)

• Our own unique humorist Coyote has his take on the night before launch.

• If general gameplay is more your thing, over at The Lost Souls, George has a new article up about aggro management in EQ2.

• …and a bunch of other folks blogging about their own anticipation.

If you’re looking forward to Kunark too, know that you’re in good company.

See you tomorrow morning.

One of our internal patcher boxes exploded magnificently last night, so I have a few minutes to write while it gets replaced.

Since Rise of Kunark is the only thing that’s been on my brain for the past few weeks, it’s time for an exception to “I won’t talk much about work…”

The expansion’s almost out the door. I’m really happy about this one.

The end of this dev cycle has had more unpredictable events than anything I think I’ve ever worked on. Wildfires, internal server death, and another internal software explosion last week. All surprise hurdles, all cleaned up well. It’s really a testament to everyone’s dedication that it’s going as amazingly as it is.

The beta NDA came down late last week. We took a little longer than usual to do so this time, and there were the standard predictions of both doom and gloom. The reason for the delay was pretty simple - For Kunark, I wanted the beta’s open issue count to be lower than any of our previous released products before the NDA came down. We blew past that mark to a record low count of open issues, then we opened the NDA.

Based on the tone of the comments about the expansion’s quality, that seems to have been the right call. MMOs being a long term venture, I’d rather we have an overall smaller number of comments living on the Internet forever and have them be more positive, as opposed to a deluge of the new standard “It Has Potential But Will It Be Done In Time?!”

Besides, it has LOLvargs.

Last week was also EQ2’s third birthday. There really was cake.

IGN has a new EQ2 restrospective video up, in which you can see a real, live developer cry.

I don’t feel bad about pointing that out, because she did this to my office on Halloween. Although I have to hand it to her - If there’s anyone who could make packing peanuts cute, it would be Tracy, our resident fae.

We give out 90 days Veteran Reward credit for each expansion that a person owns. That means that the day Kunark launches, it’ll be time for the 4 Year Veteran Rewards already. We also announced what those look like.

Rise of Kunark is also going to be on the cover of Massive Online Gamer this month.  That’s sweet.

Let’s see, what else is going on… We’re also in the middle of our last pre-launch Race to Kunark bonus XP sunday, which a large pile of folks have been taking advantage of.

I did an interview that appears to be the very definition of “tl;dr” with Michael at MMOGNation last week. Reading a transcript of an hour long phone call is an illuminating experience. Some people have an innate talent for speaking in brief, cogent sentences. I am not one of those people. (I pace around the room, gesturing wildly, while speaking what appears to be entire chapters.)

There are a number of more features coming up this week that we talked about in the most recent SOE Podcast (#25), but with all the attention on Kunark sometimes these equally cool things get overlooked.

• Some really handy usability improvements to the in-game maps. Zooming, panning, stretching, converting to a minimap…
• The long-awaited revamp to racial abilities, making them into things more people will actually find useful
• A new UI for all of those racial and special class abilities that people gain every couple levels
• Debumping(tm), smoothing, and otherwise improving the feel of the level 20-70 experience progression after all of the feedback from the last cycles.
• The tradeskill UI getting built-in reaction buttons and becoming a lot easier to use in general.
• And more things that I’m forgetting about.

Okay. This post has officially stopped looking like a list of random cool things about this release, and appears to have transitioned into patch notes. Time to stop.

Check that timing out! The internal patcher just returned. Back to work.

The local news came by our humble little studio a few weeks ago to show the rest of San Diego what kind of scary, bizarre things go on at this place where insane people make these things called “MMOs” day in and day out…

Video: http://www.kusi.com/home/10989121.html

I give those guys credit. As far as mainstream news pieces go, this one wasn’t winceworthy in the least and actually showed a few cool things from around here.

Good on ‘em.

There’s an interesting debate going around about designers and scripting.

Those who are good at it like it. People who have cleaned up after those who are bad at it try to keep it out of their projects at all costs.

In other breaking news, the sky is blue, pie is tasty, and the cake is a lie.

For those who want additional context, allow me to take a crack at a definition.

(tr.v.) Scripting:

1. non-programmers writing programs in substandard programming environments

1a. …leading to debugging said programs with tools that would have sucked in the early 1980’s

2. an amazingly powerful and useful prototyping and development tool when wielded in the right hands

3. a painful and frustrating experience for all parties, not entirely unlike having intimate relations with a capascin-coated cheese grater when the wrong hands are forced to wield it

4. a terrible idea that can destroy the future of entire projects by making them infinitely less maintainable and extendable

5. the performance killer that you wish you never met

6. a fantastic idea that can make the difference between getting the project done right and not getting it done at all

7. a tool that people ask for when they don’t know what tools they need to complete a given job

7b. …or aren’t yet sure what the job is in the first place, but are positive they’ll need to be able to do everything

8. a great way of helping your staff grow into becoming better, more creative, more expressive developers

Pick as many as you like. They can all been true. Sometimes even on the same project.

Those results above are a small sample of permutations of answers to the following questions:

1) What project objective(s) are you using it for?

2) Who’s using it?

3) Do they need to use it, or do they have alternatives?

4) Which language is it?

5) In what ways can that language interact with your particular system?

There are far too many dimensions of “Scripting” for it to boil down into a simple good vs. bad argument. I’m busy as hell at work this week, but I’ll try to argue some of them tomorrow, and probably end up disagreeing with myself in the process.

Update of the day:

Still safe here.  Haven’t been evacuated and betting that we’re not going to be.  The Witch Creek fire’s about 5 miles north of here, but blowing west toward the water, not south.

Work remains shut down, since we’re all conserving power and keeping people off the streets.

We’ve got some folks doing remote work, but the events here are playing merry hell with our beta update schedule (entirely on hold) and the remaining dev time for the expansion.  The added stress definitely doesn’t help.

As for the fire, it’s hard to track what we see from here with the reality of what’s going on.  If you were over here without watching the news, you’d think that Sunday was the worst day and that it’s been getting better since.  Exactly the opposite of what’s been happening.

Sunday, we had the smoke blowing this way and the coat of ash-snow on everything.  If you’ve never seen it, picture standing about 30 feet downwind from a campfire.  Same exact smell and effect.  Two days later with the fires expanded, thanks to the wind shift it’s been reasonably calm.

I’ll take that luck.  Here’s hoping it stays that way.

As Craig, Tami, Alan and Raph mentioned, we’ve got some wildfires down here today. There are about 100k acres already gone so far, and everyone’s been asked to stay off the roads and cell phones. A pretty huge swath of neighborhoods have already been evacuated.

At work, SOE games will only be having limited services available until this clears up. To Smed’s credit, he’s never been the kind of guy to fuck around when it comes to the occasional local emergency, always trying to get the word out as early as possible that people should stay home and take care of their families.

As for me, everything’s perfectly all right down this direction. To those who’ve checked in already, thanks for asking.

Some smoke and ash, and a whole lot of wind, but the fires are still far enough north to where there’s no immediate problem.

Have a few friends and pets over, and we’re making the best of it while being glued to the TV.

Any other friends who got booted from their place and need somewhere to hang out a while, you know how to find me.

Be safe, all.