Observations on Editing

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As a member of our diverse group of loyal fans of Conan Exiles I have been noticing a trend of errors in the editing of files which has led to various different issues. As someone who has been playing Funcom games for 16 years now since the release of Age of Conan I truly wish to see the best possible product from m beloved series of games, as I know that you do as well. It is with that in mind that I propose these questions, not to make any sort of accusations but simply in a hope that I might engage you to reflect upon them and discuss internally if, perhaps, there might be a better system that can be implemented to achieve the highest quality results that I have no doubt you are already striving for.

To go along with these questions I will also present a couple examples of this trend that I have noticed, though it is not limited to these examples, as well as an anecdote from my own previous experience. I wish only for Conan Exiles to improve and become the best possible version of itself that it possibly can going forward. So I will simply ask the following:

  1. Do any of the current members of the team in charge of editing the files have first hand knowledge of the way in which Conan Exiles unique version of UE4 was build? Alternatively do any of the people who lead these members have said knowledge?
  2. Are there adequate backup and redundancy systems in place to restore a previous version of a file that has been edited should a file be edited incorrectly?
  3. Are there proper checks in place to ensure that errors in the editing phase are caught early enough to be resolved? Alternatively are there proper checks in place to ensure that these errors are caught in the testing phase early enough to be resolved?

I am fully aware that these questions cannot be discussed with the community and so I am not actually looking for you to answer them directly. Any acknowledgement that you have read this message and are looking at the trend, or even asking for further examples, would be more than enough for me to know that you are taking things seriously. As for the examples I have mentions I shall list them below.

The first example I would like to point out is that of the Arcane Curio Cabinet and the Arcane Bookcase. Both of these items were released at the beginning of the Age of Sorcery Chapter 1 with an inventory capacity of 200 slots. When these items were corrected to their actual inventory capacity (40 slots each) it was rather apparent that this error was one of simple math. The wrong number was entered into the wrong line thus the massive capacity which never shoudl have existed (after all these items were meant to be cosmetic). Each item had 5 slots across and were supposed to have 8 rows down (58=40) which would equal 40 inventory slots, but an error was made and 40 was entered in teh line where 8 should have been (540=200).

The second example I would like to point out is that of the recent fall damage reduction. As explained in the following post: (Fall damage has been "nerfed" into oblivion? Why?), it has become noticed that players have become capable of falling from incredible heights while taking very little damage, while other players (some of whom have the same feats/perks) take huge amounts of damage and die upon impact. According to that post there was an error in the editing process that led to players who were in clans to have their fall damaged reduced, multiplied by the friendly fire multiplier, while solo players would instead take full fall damage. This explained the earlier results posted by other uses (and gave some users a fun new mini game to try out).

As for my own anecdote, I walked into my department one morning and when I logged into my computer I immediately noticed that the share drive for my department was missing. It was not that I suddenly did nto have access to it, it was just gone. Even though I had to get my team started up for the day I first contacted the appropriate people to get them started on working on the issue, and because of the appropriate procedures we had in place and the backups we had, they were able to restore the share drive. I was only required to upload the data from the last hour of the previous night to catch the files up to where they ought to have been when I arrived that morning. Properly identifying an error and quickly addressing it while having appropriate procedures as well as backup files saved us a massive amount of work. Potentially years worth of data could have been wiped out due to a simple error.

I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this. I am hopeful that you will be encouraged to review my thoughts and incorporate them in a manner that would bolster your methods of performance.

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I have also observed these and have had similar concerns.

Another similar example since AoH release or hotfix: “Bit-Yakin’s Seal”.

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@Eradicati0nn (on youtube) did an interview with some of the Devs last week that may cover some of your queries and thoughts.
The game has certainly evolved enormously from what it was when 1.0 launched. It certainly has a lot more stuff than the basic ‘smack it till it stops moving’ and ‘pillage everything’ it it started out as. Catering to all those changes, whilst keeping economical, will be an enormous challenge these years later (see Bazaar).

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a developer changes jobs every 3-5 years because that’s the easiest and best way to secure a better position and more money (a little IT wisdom from my experience). conan is older and the initial development started well before the EA release. from that I would conclude that none of the original engine developers are still working on conan or even work at funcom. but that’s not important. there are people working on the engine and they’re not stupid. the smart objects on which the settlement feature is based, regardless of how well they currently work, were ported back from a much more recent version of the unreal ungine to the engine that conan exiles uses. you don’t just do that quickly if you don’t know anything about it. you don’t need the developer who initially worked on the engine for that. neither as an employee nor as a supervisor.

i think the complexity of such a project is somewhat underestimated and the possibilities of automatic and manual testing are completely overestimated.

a little anecdote from software development: the fact that a bug is known does not mean that it will prevent a release. releases often have a very specific date or at least a range for which the release is internally scheduled. this date can only be prevented by an absolute blocker bug. simple bugs, as annoying as you may find them as a player, are usually no reason to postpone a release. if every bug, no matter how small, prevented the release, then you would never make a release, because there are always bugs. i think this point is important to understand.

and of course funcom has version management and backups. actually, the insinuation that it doesn’t is a cheek and i have no idea what this question is aimed at. complete rollbacks of a release? do you really think it’s that easy? i press a button and i’m back at age of war - chapter 4? that’s another sign that the complexity of the project is completely underestimated here.

I don’t think you have the slightest idea of ​​what can go wrong with a rollback. the probability that less will work afterwards than before is gigantic. from my own experience, I can only say that there are points where things can only go in one direction: forward. going back is simply not an option, or rather, going back would only be an option if you go to great lengths to make every change completely backwards compatible and with the option of a rollback. that’s double or triple the effort that nobody can or wants to put in.

to give a concrete example: what would happen if you rolled back Age of Heroes? the crafting stations would show the old thrall slot again. ok that would work. all the crafter thralls that you had already placed in the world would simply disappear. the thrall items you had before would be gone. they were in the game.db before Age of Heroes and Funcom can only roll them back for the official servers. private servers can choose how they want to annoy their players. either all the placed thralls would be gone or everything that you collected and built in the meantime would be gone. these are just the obvious things that come to mind. I can’t say what else has changed under the hood that would simply blow up with a rollback. small optimization or bugfix change to the building system? poof, whole buildings would blow up after the rollback


someone simply forgot to overwrite the default value of 200 for the inventory size. yes, that’s annoying and could have been found out with a simple test and maybe they did, but that’s just the kind of bug that would never prevent a release. It’s also definitely not a bug that gets the highest priority. If you only have a limited number of developers, you have to prioritize tasks.

and if the disappearance of your share had been caused by a much more far-reaching problem, then I guarantee that no one would have taken care of your share. even in such cases, there is a prioritization. so you were lucky that there was nothing more important at the time.

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No one has suggested that they were.

And this isn’t about the living settlement system either (hence why neither of the examples I have listed included that). Therefore I am unsure what your point here is?

Again, you are simply not understanding the question what so ever. The question ask “Early enough to be resolved”, not “can it be resolved even if it means pushing the release date back”. Those are two entirely different things altogether. Your entire answer is based upon the question which was never asked, and would be unreasonable to ask.

Then you should have ended here and asked for clarification rather than write paragraphs about assumptions.

I assure you I am not suggesting to roll back a release. That is already far to long in the processes. I am talking about while the update is being worked on, but is not yet in its final state (and I am not talking about the entire update either, but individual files). Sometimes it can simply be easier to go back to the main file and apply the correct changes rather than attempt to fix the error that had been made, thus having adequate backups and redundancy’s in place would be vital.

Yes, no one suggested that any delay in a release should have been made. I honestly do not understand where you are getting this idea from. However, what is being asked is:

If there were proper checks in place during the editing phase or even the testing phase this could have easily been caught and fixed well before the release. Even before the public test release.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Nothing more important than years worth of files and data for an entire department containing information that is vital for our client? Yeah, so lucky!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Look, you clearly have some reason to feel like this post in some way or other an attack against you. I truly have absolutely no idea why. :woman_shrugging: I do not know you, I did not write to you and I am fairly certain that you do not work for funcom, who I was not attacking in any way shape or form either. If you do not understand the post, then please just ask for clarification rather than make assumptions, because you have made some wild ones here and I truly do not understand where you are even getting them from. But there was nothing in my post that was meant to be offensive in any way so I am honestly confused by your reaction. So please, if you do not understand something then just ask me. :grin:

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then I misunderstood everything
 I can live with that. I’m just wondering what the point of this post was then?

the introduction suggests bad work and lots of mistakes on funcom’s side. the questions suggest incompetence in various positions, starting with the engine developers, the general setup of the development environment and up to QA. the whole thing is then “supported” with relatively simple anecdotes and embellished with a personal, relatively irrelevant anecdote.

that’s how I get it
 and how was it really meant?

edit: the entire comment is a raised finger from the first to the last sentence (that’s the way I read it
 sorry). If that’s not what it’s supposed to be, then I’d be really interested to know what the intention was.

it’s a public forum and you write to all the registered users of this forum
 that’s how it works :man_shrugging:

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Yes, we all know how a forum works. We also know how cherry picking works.

And since you clearly have no intention of engaging in good faith here I would respectfully ask you to please no longer continue to do so.

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uh
 caught or why don’t you want to answer my question? I have already admitted that I misinterpreted your intention and would like to understand the reason for this topic.

edit: but if you don’t want to then I’ll just leave my interpretation as it is
 for everyone who reads here even though they’re not allowed to


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This is an interesting situation because people tend to think if a modder can catch a bug and quickly fix it in their mod, then why can’t Funcom? Well as Testerle can confirm with a decent amount of experience, a modder can pick what they work on and when they do so at their leisure. A developer cannot. If they know a container has too many slots because they forgot to adjust the default value in a data table, its sounds simple to open that up and just type it in. But they’re not working on that at that moment, they’re working on something else.

And this shouldn’t be construed as making excuses for them. Its merely explaining how these simple easy to fix issues get to live. But I would also point out that do we want more work being done on small things such as container sizes, or work being done on larger things that can actually adversely affect gameplay?

I remember working on a mod for a server a few years ago, and it wasn’t terribly uncommon for me to have similar errors pop up that I just didn’t see. I had a few moving parts and about a dozen datatables (nothing as big as some other modders handle and they have my respect in keeping all that in order) to juggle around. So when a minor bug got pushed to live I had to contact the server admins and let them know that a fix would be coming. It wasn’t as simple as just pushing out the mod fixes as that would cause a mismatch of users subbed to the Steam Workshop and the server which required a reboot to install mod updates.

So I’d coordinate with the server to when the best possible time would be to push the update so they could perform the restart. They would make the decision based on how far reaching the bug was, and based on how many users were online. If it could wait a day, it would wait. If it was something bad, then they would do it right then.

Normal mods by most authors have similar things they go through. If an update is critical, they’ll push it out immediately. If not they may wait out of a courtesy (though they are under no obligation to do so, each mod authors does updates as they see fit).

Funcom with updates of that nature have to consider the platforms their game is released on. Console updates are far more trickier than Steam updates (I’m not familiar with Epic Game Store, though I assume its similar to Steam). I think they are allowed a sort of quick certification for major problems, but I don’t know how frequently they can do that, or the cost associated with it. I assume that if they call emergency certification too often, it will turn into a boy cried wolf situation or get prohibitively expensive to do.

If they had the logistics for it, I’d like for PC to get updates as soon as they could and then push the most stable versions to consoles. They used to do this. But I suspect that it wasn’t sustainable for whatever reason.

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I truly appreciate your reply here. Yes I understand that if the error is caught too late (take into account the example of the container, after the people working on those files have moved onto another part of the project) then it may already be to late. That is why the question that I ask in my original post stated “early enough to be resolved” as not all issues will be caught early enough. And yes, the container issue is not nearly as important as the other example that I listed (the one that seems to get ignored) which has more of an impact on the game than mere storage capacity.

As far as the issue you bring up patches and certifications is absolutely valid, especially for consoles. I do not know why that is the case for them, but it is a known factor and is certainly can cause some delays in seemingly minor fixes needing to be delayed until they have some more important fixes ready, or enough fixes ready to warrant the update (hotfix) and the certification process.

I personally think that is a really awesome way for you to approach your mod updates. :grin: That really is top notch service.

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I must point out that the mod existed for the server in question. There was an understanding. That should never (and I don’t think you are suggesting this) be seen as how all mods should be. And I didn’t do all of my mod updates in the past in the same manner. They got updated when it was convenient to do so.

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Oh yes, you did state you were “working on a mod for a server”. So I took that to mean that that specific mod was for that specific server, not just out for general use. I am just complimenting you for your awesome treatment of that mod for that server because, as a mod author, you work on your own time. So I applaud you for taking the extra step for them.

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