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Comment by newobj | Hacker News Reader

Wow. The forum is full of so many really smart people. And the Bethesda developers are so stupid. Maybe all the people in the forum should start a company and acquire the rights to develop Elder Scrolls VI. /sarcasm

Most likely explanation: PC port was crashing, they disabled optimizations, it stopped crashing. Been there, done that. Drop dead release date approaching, no time to find the root cause. Maybe the PC game already crashes enough that the people who pick up this patch don't notice that it's crashing more now.

Dunno. The forum thread just makes my head spin with naivete. As a former game developer, I'm reminded why I could only ever read forums with one squinted eye open, head turned to the side.

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Inlining getters should not cause crazy stability bugs.

I'm also a former game developer and I see both sides of it.

To be honest one thing that I think is true is it's probably not some hacker's fault - the marketing and politics BS that goes on with respect to choice and support of platform when making AAA games is really horrible sometimes.

throw new BathwaterException(new Baby()) ?

No no no. Always throw by value, and catch by reference. Like this:

  throw BathwaterException(Baby());

Wait, we are talking about C++ programming, right? ;)

Even if you assume the compiler is perfect and only making semantically valid transformations, changing performance characteristics often changes your odds of hitting race conditions.

One interesting thing is that in a previous Bethesda game, Morrowind, converting the FPU instructions to SSE instructions actually alleviated most of the game crashes...

http://timeslip.users.sourceforge.net/exeopt.html

+1, Went onto this thread to say exactly this. Enabling global optimizations has a lot of far-reaching consequences, especially for games where optimizations can change numerical results and result in nightmarish to debug glitches

And nowadays you can throw in multithreading problems into the mix.

Optimizations off in the release build would be one thing, but it's like this in the latest patch. Over a month of being out and 4+ patches and still needing? optimizations disabled does point to a bit of incompetence.

We game developers look forward to seeing your magnum opus. Be sure to let us know how your discussions regarding optimizations and ship dates go with your publisher.

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