briancaulfield wrote:If you guys could give a percentage of progress, where would you say you guys are at? Just curious.
I've thought about how to reply to this and the most honest thing is I'm simply not sure how to give any sort of metric like that. The alpha/beta goals are the best I can do, because... well, what counts?
If each Disc is 50%, I don't know enough about Disc 2 to say. The VOX and movies should be done, but there's a critical bug with the in-game text that precludes me for seeing them for myself. So how far along are we in Disc 2? I don't know. I've played maybe 1-2% of it before it crashed on me, and it took awhile to figure out it was actually the in-game text file causing that.
Does that mean it's only 1-2% done? Not really - like I said, all cinemas and voiceover subtitles should work fine, and we've verified that at least one cinema and one VOX conversation patched as expected. ...So does that mean I can say we're 2/3 done with it, thereby adding about 33% to the total percentage? Well, I guess, but if there's bugs that I haven't found that means one cinema won't work or part of it or something, so I'd have to take a step back as far as that metric.
Plus that critical bug? I think it's a one-off, so if I figure it out, everything should fall into place. But I don't have all the translation materials for Disc 2 yet, either, so it's not really patched.
Disc 1 is almost there, minus summaries and two other bugs. Can I say that one's 49% done? Well, no that's not true either, because we haven't done any of the beta stuff like two graphical changes, telops, and the credits. But Artemio's done work on that.
There is honestly no great way to say how long it takes to go from Alpha -> Beta -> Release. That disc 2 bug came out of the clear blue sky. That motorcycle bug, I can say almost definitively, was from a rush programming job on Konami's part. That, or it was Kung-Fu coding - stuff they did to enhance performance that I'm just not getting. Who'd expect one part - and only one - of the game to act differently from all the rest and never appear again? Especially in something like a shooting scene which worked as expected everywhere else?
Summary:
It's a big project, so it's complicated to give a metric of how done we are. The biggest things to watch for are when we call Discs at Alpha and Beta. Betas are the big ones.
I want to be done hacking this some day, too, so I'd like a metric for when I can rest, arguably, I'd like that percentage count more than you guys would.
I know it's frustrating, and even frequent updates don't quite help without knowing where the end goal is. If we do get a clearer view of it, we'll post about it.