T w e n t y S i d e d

If you attempted to visit the site this morning you may have noticed that the thing was very nicely broken. Sometime yesterday this site started putting a “huge load” on the server. The load increased overnight, during the normally low-traffic hours, and by this morning it was pretty much shutting down, along with all the other websites on the same server.

My web host was a very good sport about this, all things considered, although I’m still not clear on where this load was coming from. I wasn’t flooded with newcomers or lots of comments, so the “visitors” were most likely not people. Perhaps an attack, perhaps just some very stupid spammer. It’s hard to tell.

I had this problem a couple of months ago, and then my host went in and blocked huge ranges of IP’s. Most of them from Russia and China. I wasn’t crazy about this solution, since I wasn’t consulted, but it did indeed fix the problem. Over the next few weeks I’d get emails from people saying they could reach me at work but not at home, or vice versa. I unblocked some of the IP ranges and the frustrated readers came back. I figured we were all good until it happened again today.

Sigh.

I’m going to leave the IP blocks in place this time. I take no joy in this. I know there are readers out there who won’t be able to get to my site, won’t be able to read this message, and won’t be able to reach me and tell me about the problem. Right now I don’t see any way around it. Someone out there – or more than one person – is pounding away at this site in such a way that they use up more resources than all of my legit visitors combined. The bandwidth costs are unacceptable, my website can’t function, and there is always the risk that my host will ask me to take my business elsewhere. (Note that they have never threatened this, I’m just saying.)

The “attack” – intentional or the result of inept spamming attempts – is particularly pointless since none of it makes it through. Between Akismet, Bad Behavior, and Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, less than one in ten thousand spams make it through the nets, and I’m pretty sure the ones that DO make it through are entered by hand and not automated.

Sorry to all the users who are locked out, not that you can hear me. What a stupid, pointless shame.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

It’s the start of February, and yet right now the people at Columbia pictures know that the movie Hancock will hit theaters on July 2nd, five months from now. Given that the advertising campaign has launched, they have most likely known this for some time. This is no big deal. They always know when their movie will be releasing. Once in a long while you’ll hear about a movie which was delayed in production but for the most part people who make movies know how long it will take before they even start.

So why isn’t this true for videogames? Movies have to cope with larger crews, complex scheduling challenges, and logistics problems in moving the actors, equipment, props, costumes, and crew all over the world. A software developer just needs to get their small group of people into the office every day until the game is done. That’s far simpler, yet they can never reliably predict how long it will take. And when they’re wrong, they’re always guilty of underestimating. Games which don’t come out “late” are usually ones that were allowed to develop “until it’s done”, rather than shooting for a fixed date at the start of a project.

Part of the reason is (and if you’re a longtime reader you probably saw this coming) the constantly evolving world of realtime graphics. Movies sometimes will innovate a little or change technology. New cameras. New special effects. The move to digital. But these advances aren’t very common, are limited in scope, and are probably not rolled out in the middle of a project. In computer games this evolution is constant and effects every part of the production pipeline. Imagine how smooth filming a movie would go if every eighteen months there were all new cameras, all new lights, all new editing tools, all new sound equipment, and new ways of producing special effects. Everyone would be not only struggling to learn to use their own tools, but figuring out how they are affected by the changes everyone else is going through. It would be chaos. And that’s not too different from what game developers seem to be going through.

Exacerbating the problem is that they often do this innovation during development. They are often trying to do production and R&D at the same time. It’s easy to know how long it will take to make something. It’s much harder to know how long it will take to invent something.

But as much as I love to blame problems on the endless process of graphics one-upsmanship, that can’t be the whole reason. Certainly there are games which build on a stable, established platform and end up being delayed anyway.

I keep expecting videogames to grow out of this, but there’s no end in sight. If anything, games are more notoriously and regularly late now than they were in the 90’s. Maybe this isn’t just a problem with videogames. Maybe this sort of thing is just pandemic within the software industry in general.

I don’t really mind that games are delayed – I’m not the sort to pick up games on release day – but I do wonder why it happens so often.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.