Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ucbvax!hplabs!well!ewhac From: ewhac@well.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: More Electronic Arts Bashing... Message-ID: <3526@well.UUCP> Date: Fri, 10-Jul-87 02:48:52 EDT Article-I.D.: well.3526 Posted: Fri Jul 10 02:48:52 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 08:57:41 EDT Reply-To: ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) Distribution: na Organization: The CIA. Third-world Governments Destabilized While-U-Wait. Lines: 105 [ Note this this is not necessarily restricted to EA ] This is *not* a CP flame, but a flame on other aspects of EA business practices and the quality of their published products. I bought DPaint ][ (unprotected). I got it home, and loaded it. Now, I have the noisy flavor of drive, so I can hear everything that's going on. I thought the disk was thrashing an awful lot for an unprotected program. So I pulled out my sooper-dooper nifty disk utility, 'fm' (it's on Fish Disk #36), and looked at the sector allocation. The disk was *horribly* fragmented, and the DPaint executable occupied sectors all over the surface of the disk. "This won't do at all," I said, and formatted a new disk. I then entered a CLI and said, "copy df0: df1: all". My working copy of DPaint now has a *much* cleaner organization, and the head thrashes minimally when loading. This point of all this is that it is *no trouble at all* to have someone in EA's production department perform this maneuver before submitting a disk to the duplicators. I personally take some degree of pride in my work, and if I had a major commercial product on the shelves, I would see to it that this was done. Otherwise, I would whine about it to my publisher until they A) did something about it, or B) felt guilty. More DPaint bashing: The copy of the DPaint art disk I received had a brush file on it called "building". I loaded it, and on the screen appeared an image that looked nothing like a building. "Oh well," I thought, "what they call it is their own business I guess." Then one day, I was using a friend's copy of DPaint, and just for ducks, decided to load the "building" brush to see if it was the same. I got a different image from mine, and this one looked like a building. Doesn't someone at EA check these things? DVideo Bashing: I don't own this, but I've seen it in operation. I know, for example, that the thing is *permanently* fixed in dual-playfield mode, and you can only get eight colors per playfield. One day, EA shows up at a FAUG meeting, hawking its new, upgraded-for-1.2 wares. The were showing off DVideo. I asked, "Is it still restricted to eight colors?" And the marketroid responded, "Well, because you have two 8-color playfields on the screen at once, you actually can have up to 16 colors." That's funny; I only use *four* bitplanes when I write a program needing sixteen colors.... SkyFox Bashing: Boot up SkyFox. Listen to the coverpage music. All of it. About two-thirds of the way through the music, one of the music voices runs away from the others and gets about four beats ahead, making it sound terrible. Again, this is something that could *easily* have been detected if EA had a respectable Quality Assurance department. The music bug still exists in SkyFox to this day. Archon Bashing: Why do I have to unplug my mouse to play Archon by myself? Surely, Jon Freeman could have used the mouse to move pieces around. But he chose instead to force the use of a joystick on port one. Someone in EA should have mentioned this to him. Marble Madness Bashing (probably beaten to death, but...): Why is the screen left-justified? Why isn't it centered? Why wasn't the font from the coin-op version used? Since the game boots by double-clicking on a WorkBench icon, it seems logical that it should be possible to return to the WorkBench, but that's not the case. Why isn't there a high-score screen? Why doesn't my final score from a given game stay on the screen longer? General EA Bashing: EA claims to offer to its artists a state-of- the-art program development system. This means an Amiga with a CSA Turbo rack with the Manx compiler, right? *Wrong!* It means an IBM-AT with the Lattice cross-compiler. Without getting into compiler wars, I do not consider this to be a state-of-the-art development system. First, you're not developing native, so you have very little feeling for the machine you're writing code for. By using the machine all the time for everything, you get up-close-and-personal knowledge of what will guru the machine, and what won't. You get to know how the machine behaves, and how to write a product that will obey all the rules. By developing on the AT, you're divorced from the Amiga, and just think of it as "The Target Machine." This is not a good mindset to have when writing commercial applications. Second, debugging is not as thorough as it should be. Suppose I write an application native. I run it. It seems to work okay. I exit. It seems to exit cleanly. "Great," thinks I, and I start up some other program. The machine crashes. Obviously I mashed something, and start looking for the problem. Now, suppose I cross-develop an application. I download (or, in the case from an IBM to an Amiga, upload) the program to the Amiga. I run it. I seems to work okay. I exit. It seems to exit cleanly. "Fine," says I, and I move to another task on the IBM. Meanwhile, my application has mashed something in the Amiga, but *because I don't use it for everything, I'LL NEVER KNOW ABOUT IT.* Needless to say, any bug which makes the machine guru will, if developing native, make that bug get squashed that much faster. EA should seriously examine these issues. It could well be the root cause of a lot of the, shall we say, "fluff" in their products. I could think of other things, but it's getting late. If anyone sees any blatant flaws in my logic, corrections would be appreciated. _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape ihnp4!ptsfa -\ \_ -_ Bike shrunk by popular demand, dual ---> !{well,unicom}!ewhac O----^o But it's still the only way to fly. hplabs / (pronounced "AE-wack") "Work FOR? I don't work FOR anybody! I'm just having fun." -- The Doctor