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WC Release Quality and Linux Server Status


coldino

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WC Release Quality and Linux Server Status

This is a rant about WC's release processes and quality control. Although it focuses on the Linux server releases it is clearly symptomatic of WC's development and release practises in general.


The Linux server build seems to have gone through a roller-coaster since the release of Genesis. Here's a quick summary of the recent changes in Steam:


At first it was missing a lot of necessary files - code libraries, configs (and all of PrimitivePlus, but who uses that ?).
Then it was missing slightly less necessary files.
Then it got PrimitivePlus back.
Then someone clearly took an interest! They cleared it up, added the missing files, pulled out the mp4s and oggs that should never have been there and even fixed capitalisation that would cause problems on Linux. Even added version.txt back! Huzzah!

But having it work was clearly unintentional as they soon broke it again. The latest update (as of this post) includes the changes you would expect from the patch notes, but also completely undoes the previous important fixes. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

This brings us to the inescapable conclusion that WC is cobbling together releases by hand with no processes in place to avoid such errors.

Please, please WC, invest in full build and release automation.
Your humans are fallible and are messing it up while under pressure, but this is expected of humans and not their fault. The software world has worked hard to remove humans from the loop during important and tedious processes like build and release, to the point where this is a very widely solved problem. This is sort of process is fundamental to modern software dev and being in the games industry is no excuse.

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