Game design, software design and Christmas present wrapping all have this one thing in common: Sure they can be done without preparation and come out magically good, but if you sit down and evaluate and think and re-evaluate before implementing anything, the end result usually suffers from less errors and involves (in many cases much)less work.
Mr. Carmack is at the point in his career where he can afford to spend as much time as he wants working and reworking design decisions during implementation, but most comapnies do not have id Software's ressources.
RPGs tend to depend on lengthy design docs and they tend to ship nearly bug free. Bioware's Baldur's Gate series combined shipped less patches than Quake3 alone.
Could this lack of proper documentation and design be the reason that software project and games *cough* are so often late and/or bug ridden?
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Funny, that's how I'd act towards rednecks if I were just as stupid as you.
Drop the table and embrace the inode.
It's bad enough they screwed us with the '\', we're now going to be stuck with a XML compatible filesystem for hackers to play with.
If only XP pro weren't so SWEET! :)
Game design, software design and Christmas present wrapping all have this one thing in common: Sure they can be done without preparation and come out magically good, but if you sit down and evaluate and think and re-evaluate before implementing anything, the end result usually suffers from less errors and involves (in many cases much)less work. Mr. Carmack is at the point in his career where he can afford to spend as much time as he wants working and reworking design decisions during implementation, but most comapnies do not have id Software's ressources. RPGs tend to depend on lengthy design docs and they tend to ship nearly bug free. Bioware's Baldur's Gate series combined shipped less patches than Quake3 alone. Could this lack of proper documentation and design be the reason that software project and games *cough* are so often late and/or bug ridden?