I've worked in several environments now, with all kinds of tools. My best friend since I was 5 is a programmer, that I've worked closely with on several projects. Occassionally he has to design tools for a project, and he sometimes ask me what kind of requirements I have for that tool. He meets the ones that he deems feasible. If you've worked in game development, you know how that goes.
I understand that in some ways, it's not much different with a larger studio.
A menu item in one of these tools that doesn't do a damned thing gets left behind, forgotten. Known crash bugs are ignored on lesser used features. There's more important things to deal with. And the public is never going to see these tools, right? Just the devs, who are used to working with buggy tools. And these are means to an end. We just need these to push this game out the door.
So. That's the standard mentality, in a nutshell. I'm not necessarily accusing any specific developer of this, so don't take it that way. It's the nature of the development schedules, and deadlines.
But if you've suddenly released a genre king... and it's been that way for OVER a decade now. And you've got a rabid fanbase, who you've now released these half-crippled development tools to. So that they can use it too, and make more content, thereby making the game more popular still.
This makes great marketing sense. You kill two birds with one stone. You make alot of your market happy, you even expand it some, and hey, you're doing everyone a favor by releasing the tools. You didn't have to. It's a great favor, 'o benevolent dictators of gaming.
On the other hand...
You're doing some of your most vocal proponents a disservice by not making sure that the tools we are using to produce more content for your game actually work as intended. These folks are the best advertising and community building assets you have. You are only helping yourselves here, in all foreseeable cases by doing this. You're giving your own devs less headaches, and you're making it easier for the modders by treating the tools the same as you'd QA the game.
I'm probably preaching to the choir here. All I'm asking; the stuff that's obviously broken, get it fixed. There's several things that the community has considered bugs for years, and aren't, that still haven't been properly addressed either. And maybe put up a bug tracker? We all use the wikis now. Give us a bug reporting service as well so we can cull some of the crap out for you. This is all easy stuff.
And one more thing. For the love of pete. If you're going to do a MAJOR upgrade to the Tools, to support different engine versions, or whatever, give us a choice of it. Don't make us upgrade to it. Or have it warn us! Don't have it automatically update! The amount of times I've almost cried because I thought I couldn't get my project to run that I'd already put months of work into, just because of a stupid automatic update. And yes, I know I can disable that, but then I'd never know about an update. There's no notes on the tools stating they've been updated.
I feel like I've had all these arguments with members of the community already. It's annoying, because it's the same ones over and over. I've figured out how to fix most of these things myself, but not without plenty of blood, sweat, and programming. And that's a leg up I have over alot of the folks I talk with. I have training in this, where alot of these kids don't. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to see more works done by these younger folk, that will show me up. But as all of these tools and operating systems and development environments get more complex and arcane, I have no idea how they'll be able to keep up. I got in on the ground floor, and I'm barely keeping up sometimes.
How's someone that starts so much later going to figure any of the nuances out? I mention a batch script, and get blank stares. I used to have to compile everything from command prompt.
Kids these days. ;)
- Didn't intend to rant, and haven't slept yet. But I certainly do feel better now. Peace.
