[Scummvm-devel] Detecting patched games / SCI bug reports

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Mon Aug 16 15:46:49 CEST 2010


Am 16.08.2010 um 15:32 schrieb M. Kiewitz:

> 
>> Fair enough on the fan-games! But I am not sure how you
>> come to the "most of those" conclusion: Looking at random
>> non-assigned SCI bugs, and excluding fan-made ones (and even
>> demos), most of them seem to be uncommented, or have at most
>> comments by the submitter or by somebody who says "me too"
>> :). 
>> 
>> Anyway, here is a more extensive list of examples. Of
>> course, the numbers of bugs that were addressed, or even
>> fixed, is also huge, and the SCI folks are doing a truly
>> heroic task right now. They just could need more helping
>> hands, I'd say.
> 
> The problem with sci is that it's getting more and more complicated to fix tiny things. First you need to find out, if it's really just occuring in ScummVM SCI, you then need to go through sierra sci to find out what's going wrong. If our implementation is really incorrect, you can't fix it immediately. You need to go through all sorts of other interpreter versions just to figure out, when it was changed. Helping hands are nice, but we are now at a state, where it's getting really difficult to fix most of the bugs w/o introducing regressions. For example - just fixing the "I'm melting" sound issue in sq1 required me to go to several "special" places in multiple other games, just to find out how sierra sci behaves in those other cases.

Yeah, game play unit tests would be so nice to have, for all engines in fact. We have some ideas on how to implement that, using the event recorder, but sadly nobody is currently working on that.


> Still getting help on some things like bisecting a known regression would be nice.
> 
> Just to quickly comment on those bugs:

Thanks -- but most of those really would be best placed on the respective tracker items, not here :).

[...]


> that's one of the bugs for walter. Still I don't want to assign those, because i think its extremly impolite, especially because those people are currently on holiday. I wouldn't do that even if they were paid.

Actually, I quite strongly disagree with the idea that this would be impolite :). Rather I consider this a normal and good practice: You assign a bug to person X, with a comment like "hey, X, can you take a look at this?" -- this triggers an email to person X, making them aware of the issue in the first place. Then person X can either address the bug, or de-/re-assign it with a comment like "sorry, don't have time/the game/interest", or so.

It would only be impolite if person X would be forced to work on these things, or if being assigned an open bug report was somehow a negative metric. But it isn't.


Bye,
Max



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