Chocobo during Queue - "Difficult"

[Gesser]

Someone with coding knowledge tell me...

Is it really that hard to keep your Companion flagged as a party member & simply cause an automated disband/reform when you accept a queue?

I don't understand the difficulty as it seemed he was saying they're trying to figure out how to best go about it.

Just add a "solo queue" checkbox to the DF, permitting you to queue solo whilst in a party.

This could also apply to partying with friends while putting in that solo low-level roulette queue.

[Malamasala]

It is not so much coding knowledge, as you need to know what their current code does.

As with paint, you can always paint yourself into a corner and it becomes much more difficult to do something. But it is never impossible.

[ArashiDaigon]

I can see this being difficult.

Let's think currently the coding allows it as a party member to allow you to gain xp, and your chocobo to gain xp, while targeting and fighting for you reacting to you.
Plus you have the timer of the chocobo that is dwindling. Now the timer portion I can see they could use the same coding for that as they do when mounting, or in the major cities. However, the portion I think that's difficult is how would it be able to differentiate between a PC in the party and the Chocobo, since the chocobo's names can be created by the character as well. Also to prevent the coding from the chocobo to accidentally appear in the dungeon as well or cause a 5th/6th person to come in. Now let's take into consideration for the "pre made" parties. Don't forget they may use chocobos as well, so doing the coding to include those party members chocobos. While it may appear easy, there is many moving parts and some little tiny things we forget.

[Vahlnir]

I don't know a thing about coding so I can't really judge one way or another. He did say though that he has to prioritize certain things and this seems to be near the bottom of the barrel at this time while they are getting out important fixes and content. To me that's pretty understandable.

[Rjain]

Is it really that hard to keep your Companion flagged as a party member & simply cause an automated disband/reform when you accept a queue?

I don't understand the difficulty as it seemed he was saying they're trying to figure out how to best go about it.

Yes.

The game isn't coded in a one page QBASIC script or something. You can't just go in and change a line and poof.

People always assume their ideas are easy to implement but it's not often the case. They had to completely trash the old version just to get some of the most basic features added to the game.

[Enepttastic]

No, I wouldn't consider it difficult(as in hard to do), at all. Time consuming, perhaps, but that's going to be due to the lack of common sense shown when developing to begin with.

[Themis]

No, I wouldn't consider it difficult(as in hard to do), at all. Time consuming, perhaps, but that's going to be due to the lack of common sense shown when developing to begin with.

If you think that, you should apply to work for SE.

It's not hard to do, if you design the system to work that way in the first place. You have to remember that the party system, the companion system and the duty finder system are 3 different systems, and interfacing effectively between them isn't a simple "just do it" task. Can it be done? Of course. But unless you have even the smallest idea of what their design decisions and their code base is like, don't assume you know better than they do. They aren't incompetent, and solutions don't fall out of the sky.

But evidently, the way it has been design doesn't allow for a simple change by adding in a couple of variables. The reason they don't want to just start hacking away at the code is because it would detract time away from other, more important areas of the game, like new content. Considering how many people seem to complain that there's nothing to do, this seems like a bad choice.

[Alacor]

It's not hard to do, if you design the system to work that way in the first place. You have to remember that the party system, the companion system and the duty finder system are 3 different systems, and interfacing effectively between them isn't a simple "just do it" task.

Exactly. I don't know how they do things in game development studios when it comes to programming, but I'd imagine they have multiple people working on multiple systems when building the game. That means integrating features that interact with multiple systems requires complete knowledge of how each involved system works, otherwise something could go horribly wrong that you never even thought could/would happen. So when you see odd bugs in games that seemingly make no sense as to why it would happen, just remember most things are working in tandem with something else.

[Yukiko]

i think the problem they have is the messed up code:
Lets say they have to deal with local variables, but they need global variables now because DF cluster wise...

[Enepttastic]

<snip>

Note that I said it would be time-consuming to do it now, since there was a distinct lack of common sense when developing the companion system. Being able to queue while one's chocobo is out is something that should have come up during the design phase and either decided for/against. Two out of three possibilities(didn't come up, decided against) show poor usage of common sense during the design phase, similar to how chocobos weren't originally able to be ridden while summoned.

As for it "evidently" not allowing for a fix, there's no proof of that. Merely proof that, as of the moment, it's considered enough of a non-issue to warrant spending the man-power to either figure out a solution or to code it in.

Admittedly, I'd have to have a first-hand look at the logic behind the coding before I could say, for a fact, how time-consuming it would be to implement, but considering that in just a couple of minutes, I have several different ideas(many utilizing logic that's ALREADY EXISTING in the game) so no, I don't believe for a fact that it would be difficult at all, merely time consuming and the fault for that lays directly upon those involved in the design process.

To be clear, this does not make them bad programmers, it's something that happens all the time especially on evolving projects like MMOs. Imagine you are building a Car, and you build a Ferarri sports car, then someone comes in and says "Ok, now make it seat 5 people." It's impossible. Yes you can make a car seat 5 people, but you can't make that car seat 5 people.

Except that programming does allow for going back and tweaking previous work to facilitate the new concepts. While not impossible, it's a little harder to do changes like that for physical items without making previous work wasted. That said, I'm going to repeat this: I doubt this is a problem the programmers caused, the issue was created during the design phase for chocobo companions and should have been considered/planned for then.

Yes let's do this and Game breaking bugs gets introduced me.

So, updates as normal then eh?