Panduh said:
If DC was really concerned about that he would have made the game in chapters or seasons. That way you dont need to worry about content made 4 years ago messing with more recent stuff. causing bugs. Would fix the need for as you say testing. Regardless of the fact I know any programing. It is common sense that 80/20 is an excuse. Plenty of games have multiple chapters. The game would be finished by now if they had done that.
As a modder of the game, I've looked at almost every line of code in Summertime Saga. There are 1,630 code files, by the way.
I haven't the foggiest clue how your idea would work. Releasing updates in chapters or seasons is no different from adding new scenes or new content any other way. There are 635 scripts in the characters directory, 695 in the locations directory, and 73 in the minigames directory. Those 1,403 files are "content". The other 227 files mostly contain functions that get called by the content scripts.
Adding new content is just adding a script to a new or existing file in characters or locations. Eventually, you want to be able to do something that the core files can't do for you. That will happen regardless of whether you release updates in chapters, seasons, or whatever. Eventually, the core files need a rewrite to be able to continue to add content, regardless of what you call your updates.
If using chapters or seasons somehow magically negated the need to ever work on the core files that underpin the content files, you would be within your rights to say that DC should have made the game in chapters or seasons, but he didn't. Unless you're offering him a time machine, how would that advice be any use to him now? Whatever he should have done that he didn't do, he didn't do it, so a rewrite is needed. That's what's going on. They should haven't built Mexico City on a dry lakebed, but they did. What good does pointing that out now accomplish? The time to avoid that mistake was centuries ago!
I've been programming for most of my life, and I go to industry conferences every year. If there was a way to predict your future needs so that you would never need an extensive code rewrite when your project gets 10x bigger than it was when it started, I'm sure someone would have mentioned it at the conference I was at last week. Instead, we talked about the fact that code rewrites now fail 70% of the time (the figure used to be 50%). Significant code rewrites are an inevitable part of a growing project. Every project manager knows that. You're not a programmer. The fact that you're not qualified to give programming advice is abundantly clear. Maybe find something else to wank to while you're waiting for the Tech Update? I don't know what fetish code shaming feeds, but the rest of us didn't come here to see you get off on ignorant code criticism.
