Quote:
Originally Posted by Malachi  I don't think many quite grasp just how dysfunctional their operations are. |
Very much so.
Just as a tiny example, I - foolishly - went to a meeting about Havok 4 recently. I had noticed some bizarre functionality with flight enhancers, which were causing people to drift upwards (as anyone who has ever written one will know, these things add in an upwards force to counteract the downwards force that is applied to anyone flying above a certain point).
I asked about this and was told that it would be fixed in the next release. "Oh good," was my response, "can you tell us what actually caused it? It could be causing something else after all."
/me taps fingers. "Well, it must have been one of X, Y and Z functions or behaviours... or perhaps there was another one involved which we don't know about. What did you change to fix this?"
/me taps fingers. "Doesn't anyone _know_?"
But then, they don't. It is not a huge secret. The people working hard to fix the current spaghetti are not the people who wrote it, and, clever and capable as they are (and they _are_, certainly, very clever, very capable) they don't have an overall knowledge of how
SL works, and there is apparently no internal documentation that could help them. So, things break randomly on each release without anyone knowing why. Each fix back to getting things working properly as they were takes a certain amount of time, and the fixes may break things as well.
At some point we will reach the stage where new updates break so many things that the fixes take so long and break so many other things which then need fixing which breaks....