The camera is now completely borked in the latest build, 8164. Zoom is completely non-functional (home, end, arrow keys, mouse wheel, etc.) and the top down camera now defaults to what looks like over-the -shoulder.
Both bugs have been reported separately.
//Below is a rant. Read at your own peril
Does Beamdog expect us to do all of the QA for them? How hard would it have been for the developer to fire up a game and verify that their camera change didnât blow up?!?
Iâm very sorry to say this, but I find such sloppiness highly unprofessional. I have managed development organizations for many years and so can say with authority âdonât waste your user testing cycles with basic QA!â The value in user testing i.e. beta testing, is that end-users will use (mis-use & abuse) your application in ways that developers and QA canât or at least have a hard time imagining. I found both bugs in less than 30 seconds upon loading a savegame. Instead of playing through modules or building new ones and discovering new bugs, instead I have to work around a blindingly obvious bug and get hacked off about it. For a product thatâs supposed to launch in a week or two, this is an absolutely huge opportunity cost! BD should be encouraging us to heads down play and build for hours on end instead of forcing us to perform entry-level QA on sloppy amateur bugs! If I was Trent, Iâd find the offender developer and force him or her to fix & test this bug immediately and issue a new build ASAP.
This kind of sloppiness discourages me from playing or building NWN: EE until after it is released. And judging by the reactions on this forum and the BD forum, I know Iâm not alone. Yet this is precisely the opposite of the purpose and value of beta testing.
Meaglyn, somehow I knew youâd be the first to respond!
Cough Bullcrap Cough
I taught Agile Software Development professionally (2008-2016) and can dismiss the claims of QA is dead as being absolutely wrong! An Agile developer checks their work instead of blindly releasing it for user testing. In Extreme Programming (XP) which is what the Scrum Alliance is now calling âScrum Developmentâ, the developer writes tests and doesnât release the code until it passes all tests. QA will spend their time doing exploratory testing. The promise of automated testing is that it frees up QA from doing manual entry-level regression testing. Agile has never meant âdump untested code on end-users.â
#1 Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. #7 Working software is the primary measure of progress. #9 Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
Beamdog may claim to follow an Agile process, but I can assure you that they are not succeeding in doing so. There are many, many, articles and a few books on Agile QA.
Now having said all that, I realize of course Meaglyn that what you are really saying is a lot of teams are dismissing QA as being outdated and old-fashioned and that youâre disagreeing with that sentiment. (At least I hope that youâre disagreeing with it! )
This was brought up and discussed elsewhere (sans rant, even) and while Iâm obviously not qualified to comment on the whole of it, seemed in part a difference between previous behavior and spec, ie mistaken for âworking as intendedâ. It was âfixedâ - or at least had a test version that matched expected behavior - before this thread even hit the vault.
If itâs any kind of counter - should the developer who is supposed to be rolled in their own excrement (or whatever?) is by chance the same one that made placeables not drop when clicked in the toolset, this threadâs rants cannot possibly match the overwhelming gratitude some of us will have for this
The lower ranks of the UK armed forces have a saying for guards - âIf it moves, hit it. If it doesnât move, hit until it does.â which can be easily paraphrased for software development as âIf it has a flaw, fix and test it. If it doesnât, test it until you find the flawâ.
As this is an open forum, meaning anyone regardless of age, there are standards of language use that must be maintained. I was trying to keep this light but you obviously donât want that. Please edit the offending word from your post.
I did, the first time, while you were posting the second time. I was just saying that they donât mean the same thing in this context, so it was not actually a reasonable substitute.
It was not my intention to break your rules, which I have read and simply interpreted differently until corrected.
And for the final insult, the voices on the re-run of the stream are/(were if they fix it) around 30 seconds out of sync meaning that it looked like trents voice was coming out of phils mouth and vice versa.
iâm really sorry to hear your frustration about this issue.
Just wanted to let you know that the issue is:
related to drive-mode camera, which was tested but clearly not enough,
and is already fixed for the next patch (and so is the camera-on-floor problem).
As a workaround, you can use top-down or chase meanwhile which will not lock you into exactly 6m distance away from the player character. As the matter presents itself, drive mode was never meant to be freely adjustable; it was always intended to be locked at a fixed distance from the player character. The camera changes brought that âintendedâ behaviour out and was not regress-tested against 1.69/8162. This is clearly behaviour we need to revert to, and is as said above, already scheduled.
To be fair to Beamdog, you are on the development / head start / testing branch of NWN:EE. Things will break and itâs bleeding edge, I feel they have been very clear about that.
If you arenât ok with that, then wait till March and just follow the release branch.
)
It served a purpose!